No. 202
I. In Genesis
In Ur of the Chaldees lived a man named Terah who had three sons and at least one daughter. One day in Ur, God appeared in His glory to one of Terah’s sons, whose name is given to us as Mighty Father (AvRam; Abram).
This may not have been his original name, since at the time God appeared to him he was childless and his wife was barren. It’s not very likely that a childless man would willingly call himself Mighty Father unless God told him to. Whatever the case, God told Abram to leave Ur and move to the land of Canaan. Abram evidently persuaded his father Terah to come along, and the entire clan moved half-way to Canaan, settling in Haran for a while until Terah died.
Now, who were these people? While Bible commentators often know better, many people grow up in the Church thinking that this was just a small family of no great importance. Americans in particular like a “rags to riches” story, and like the thought that Abram was a nobody that God made into a great man. This, however, is not the case. Consider the evidence:
1. Terah’s daughter was named “My Princess”(Sara, Sarai). While we might affectionately call our little girls “princess” today, in the ancient world names were always quite significant. Terah’s daughter was a princess because Terah was high up in the nobility of the Chaldean civilization. He was an important man, a man of means. When he left Ur, we can be sure that he brought a lot of servants with him.
2. Note that Abra(ha)m is called a “prince” in Genesis 23:6 by the Hittites.
3. In Genesis 12:5 we read that Abram left Haran “with all the souls they had won in Haran” and moved to Canaan. In his commentary on Genesis, Umberto Cassuto points out that the verb (often rendered acquired) here is not the verb for getting slaves. It means converts, people who willingly joined Abram’s people. The servants are included in the previous phrase, “all their possessions.”
4. About 2-3 years after moving into Canaan, Abram’s nephew Lot was captured in a war described in Genesis 14. There we read that Abram “mustered his trained men, adopted into his household, three hundred and eighteen and pursued Lot’s captors and defeated them in a battle. If Abram had 318 trained soldiers in his household, how many untrained men, older men, women, and children were part of his household? Likely 2000-3000 people.
5. Shortly after Abram entered the promised land, there was a famine (the first of three in Genesis), and Abram relocated to Egypt to wait it out. Consider now that this Prince Abram, from the mighty Chaldean civilization, is coming into Egypt with 2000-3000 people. Naturally he would present himself at court. Genesis 12:15 says that the princes of the Egyptian court noticed the princess-sister of Abram, Sarai, and praised her to Pharaoh. Pharaoh was naturally motivated to create a marital covenant with this Babylonian prince, especially since his sister was so attractive. Unfortunately for him, he broke the rules and instead of negotiating with Abram which would have enabled Abram to put him o[], he just took Sarai into his house. Afterwards he showered gifts upon Abram, but God cursed him with plagues, and when he realized Sarai was Abram’s wife as well as sister, he had Abram escorted out of Egypt.
All of this is pretty clear from the text itself. Understanding this reality helps explain how it happens that Josephus is certain that Abram was a great astronomer and mathematician, and that he taught this formerly unknown Chaldean wisdom to the Egyptians while he was there. While I suppose this might be true, there is no Biblical evidence for it. (See Josephus, “Antiquities” of the 1:7:2 and 1:8:1 & 2.)
6. Genesis 13:2 says that Abram was very rich in livestock, in silver, and in gold. Have we gotten the point yet? This man was a wealthy prince with a whole nation of people under him, right from the beginning.
To be sure, he lived in tents, but what kinds of tents? Not teepees or wigwams, we can be sure. In fact, if we want to see the kinds of tents the patriarchs lived in we can look at the Tabernacle. These were semi-permanent dwellings. Sockets were laid out on the ground to outline walls, and boards were inserted into them. Poles running along the top of the boards and midway down kept the walls from falling down. Tapestries kept the wind out and formed decorations. It was possible to have as many rooms as you wanted, with tents of skins stretched up over them to keep out the rain.
The patriarchs did not move from place to place, but stayed in one place for many years at a time. They were not nomads and not bedouins.
7. We notice again in Genesis 20 that as soon as Abraham moved to Gerar, the king of Gerar took Sarah into his house. Here again we see the royal house of the Philistines interested in making an alliance with Prince Abraham by marrying his sister. Although this did not work out the way Abimelech had hoped on this occasion, in Genesis 21:22-34 he and the commander of his army come to make a covenant with Abraham and his people. Notice well: Phicol, the commander of the Philistine army, is part of this deal, and that is because Abra¨ham also has an army, as we have seen.
8. All of this was inherited by Isaac. By this time there may well have been 10,000 people in this nation. Abraham gave gifts to his other sons (Gen. 25:6) and what handsome gifts these must have been. All that he had he gave to Isaac (25:5).
9. In Genesis 26:13-14, we read that Isaac became wealthy, and grew more and more wealthy, until he became extremely wealthy; and he had possessions of flocks and possessions of herds and a great household.
Once again we see that these people were not some small group of wandering nomads. Quite the opposite. And once again, Abimelech and his army commander wanted to make a covenant of peace with Isaac and his commanders (26:26™33).
10. All of this was inherited by Jacob (Genesis 27:37, and more importantly 28:3-4), but not right away. Jacob went out alone to seek a wife in Paddan Aram. After much tribulation, Jacob “became exceedingly prosperous and had large flocks and female and male servants and camels and donkeys” (30:43).
If we want to see a bit of this, consider that Jacob sent as a gift to Esau: “200 she-goats, 20 he-goats, 200 ewes, 20 rams, 30 milking camels and their colts, 40 cows, 10 bulls, 20 jennies and 10 donkeys.” What percentage of his total wealth this was we don’t know, but we do know it was not all Jacob had (33:13).
11. We don’t know when Jacob inherited the family estate from Isaac. Isaac was old and blind, and may have turned everything over to Jacob as soon as Jacob returned. The chronology establishes that Isaac died one year before Joseph stood before Pharaoh, which is ten years before Jacob moved to Egypt (1 + 7 plenty + 2 famine). In Genesis 35:8 we see that Rebekah’s nurse Deborah was part of Jacob’s household when she died, and this is some time before the death of Isaac. For this reason, I think Jacob took over the ancestral inheritance shortly after he returned to Canaan.
12. The chronology establishes that Joseph was born about seven years before Jacob returned, and Dinah was born just before he returned. When Joseph was sold into Egypt, he was seventeen and Dinah was ten. Hence, The incident in Genesis 34 happened after Joseph had disappeared. To that incident we now turn.
13. Jacob and his nation moved to the area near Shechem and bought property in the area. Dinah, the princess of Jacob’s princedom, went out to “visit the daughters of the land.”
This does not mean the ordinary girls. “Of the land” means landowning aristocracy. When “the people of the land” made Jehoahaz king (2 Kings 23:30), this means the aristocracy. See also Genesis 23:7, 12; 2 Kings 11:19-20; 21:24; 23:35; etc.
It is because Dinah was visiting the girls of the aristocracy that she came under the eye of Prince Shechem. If she had been out with country girls, this would not have happened. Princess Dinah, probably about seventeen or so, was well dressed and attractive. Doubtless she visited the other girls more than once and possibly had gotten to know Shechem a little. There’s nothing in the text to indicate that Shechem had his way with her five minutes after seeing her the first time she paid a visit to the court.
At any rate, once this had happened we don’t see Shechem’s father just assuming he can do what he wants with Jacob’s family as if they were poor people. Not at all. Jacob’s clan is powerful, and things have to be put right and done properly.
14. The final piece of evidence, though there’s doubtless more that could be pointed to, is that when Jacob and his people moved to Egypt they were given the “land of Goshen” to dwell in. We don’t know where this was or how large it was, but it was []
We are used to thinking that 70 people went down to Egypt, but it was only 70 from the loins of Jacob. We are not to think that Jacob abandoned all his other people to die in the famine in Canaan. Nor does it make sense to give a whole [] to seventy people. There may have been as many as 20,000 people in Jacob’s princedom at this time. After 215 years, even with massacres, these had become 2,000,000.
II. After Genesis
While the fact that God in the Bible deals mainly with aristocratic wealthy people may offend our modern democratically-informed sensibilities, there is good reason for it. It is a fact that wealthy people have the leisure to learn broadly about the world while poor people barely eking out a living do not. An aristocratic class is schooled in the arts of governance, and while they should have an ear open always to all aspects of society, they do have greater knowledge and expertise, or should. Moreover, wealthy people are able to help the poor and needy.
It is the design and purpose of the Kingdom of God to redeem and then glorify people, making them sons of Abraham in both senses. In the Christian era, the Holy Spirit brings energy into the world and the world grows, so that more and more people become wealthy and can take dominion over life. The average person in Europe and America is wealthier than 99.9% of people in the ancient world ever were.
Hence, the model of the kingdom provided in the Bible is a model of how wealthy and influential people use their wealth and influence.
We see this once again with Moses. The man God raised up to lead the exodus from Egypt was not a poor humble farmer, but a man adopted into the royal house of Egypt and reared as a prince for forty years. Thereafter he married into the royal house of Midian and lived as a prince there for another forty years.
It is apparent when we look at the book of Samuel that both Saul and David came from Well-to-do families. David, after all, was descended from Boaz, one of the wealthiest leaders of Bethlehem. These were educated men used to ruling servants as well as animals.
Job was not only the wealthiest man of the east (Job 1:3), he was also a king with an army (29:25). Evidently he was king of Edom at this time. This is why the destruction of his property and servants was a national disaster, and why his chief advisors, the other three Corners of the nation, came to speak with him about it. “King’s Friend” is a term meaning chief advisor.)
The history of Israel in the Old Testament is that of Kings and other national leaders, not of people movements. We might ask ourselves, Where are the common people in this history?
The answer is: almost nowhere. They occasionally show up, but they are not the heart of the history. The Judges, the Kings, Nehemiah, Daniel, Esther and Mordecai, all these are people in wealthy and powerful positions. If this bothers our modern sensibilities it is we who must change.
Conclusion:
The Bible is not a history of poor people struggling under oppression. Nor does the Bible ever give any example of poor people rising up and overthrowing established order. Deliverance, when it comes, comes from people who are not poor helping those who are. The Bible history is a history of wealthy and royal people, giving us an example of how we are to think and live now that we are all wealthy and royal in Christ as members of His Kingdom Body.