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| The happy couple on their road trip west of Eden. |
This is a story that starts
with temptation. However, since it was
God who was doing the tempting, no one generally speaks ill of it. The temptation was this: “Abram, get out of
town and I’ll give you a nation that no one will ever speak ill of without
suffering for having done so, and that no one will do harm to without suffering
for it.” Since it’s always a good idea
to listen to someone who claims that God told him to get a crowd of people
together and head out into the desert, Abram had no trouble getting a nice
crowd around him. And at age 75, he was
in the prime of his life, all set to wander around the desert.
The destination was Canaan,
which was to be the land of the Israelites.
The Israelites would be the true inheritors of this land, because no one
else was living there. Except the
Canaanites. At this time, though, the
Israelites were still the Hebrews, ready to take the promised land by kicking
out whoever was already living there, thus establishing a custom for this part
of the world that would last for all its remaining history. (This custom caught on in North America later
on, as well.)
But instead of leading the
Hebrews to Canaan, Abram led them to Egypt for some reason. Egypt was a trickier place, because there
were more Egyptians there than there were Canaanites in Canaan, so there was no
driving them out of it. The Egyptians
were scary to Abram, who decided that his wife was so hot, the Egyptians would
take one look at her, kill Abram and let her live. This, as we know, is the way people in every
other country but our own have always conducted themselves, the barbarians.
“It’s safer, dear,” said
Abram, “if we tell everyone you’re my sister instead.” Of course the Egyptians really did go nuts
over Mrs. Abram and dragged her to the Pharaoh’s court as soon as they saw her,
and married her to the Pharaoh, whose practice of marrying all the attractive
women who set foot in his country was severely crippling the Egyptian tourism
industry. But he was no skinflint: since
Mrs. Abram was such a fine piece of flesh, Abram was showered with livestock in
payment.
This transaction was followed
by a plague on the Pharaoh’s family. The
problem was that God didn’t approve of apparent polygamy, and since God and all
other gods rolled that way in those days: the Pharaoh had no trouble figuring
this out. He summoned Abram back to the
palace, angry about the lie Abram used to chisel the Pharaoh out of all that
livestock, and insisted that Abram take the missus back. In the end, Abram got to keep his wife and
all the livestock. The moral is that
although Abram’s accepting payment for something that he couldn’t sell was
wrong, just like the Pharaoh’s polygamy, two wrongs indeed make a right.
Abram was now rich with money
and animals, so he and the Hebrews, aware of how tense things were with the
Pharaoh, figured they should get the flock out of there and finally got on
their way to Canaan. Abram and his
nephew Lot decided they needed to split the group up, since they had too many
people and too much livestock to manage in Canaan. There was plenty of land, but the problem was
that there were too many Canaanites on it, and some group called the
Perizzites, as well. Back then, this
land seemed to have too many groups of people trying to claim it, which is why
there was so much more strife back then, as opposed to Israel and Palestine
today.
Lot decided to take off and
make good in the city. The nearest city
was called Sodom, which was famous for an activity that didn’t have a name back
then, and which I won’t go into here, because after all, this is a religious text. Once Lot moved his people to the city (an act
known as Sodomization,) God spoke to Abram again and told him he could have the
rest of the land, and that it would belong to his descendents, and so the
ownership of this land was decided forever.
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