Genesis 14

The more I read, the more I convince myself that I’m right. I just don’t understand why no one else can see these things, however.

My latest revelation comes from Rosenberg’s book, the First Historical Biography of Abraham. Rosenberg points out that one of the chapters of Genesis is much older than all the other text, perhaps seven centuries older even than J’s text. It’s Genesis 14, known as the Battle of the Kings. The chapter tells of an invasion of Canaan by a group of kings from the North; Lot is taken captive. Abram joins with a second group of kings, and they pursue the captors. Abram leads a group of 318 men who rescue Lot, and recover all the stolen plunder. Upon his return, Abram is offered all the recovered possessions, but he turns that offer down, and accepts only a modest share for his men.

This chapter is dated around 1700 BCE from the place names, which names were no longer in use by the time of Solomon’s court, when J undertook to chronicle the history of the Jews, having been replaced by newer Canaanite names. The kings’ names are apparently the old Sumerian or Akkadian names as well, and not the names used centuries later by the Canaanites. Chapter 14 differs from the rest of Genesis in other ways as well. For instance, God never makes an appearance; this is merely a tale of Abram, his military prowess, and his political relations with his neighbors. The traditional Jewish explanation of this chapter, which clearly stands out from the remainder of Genesis, is that it tells us of the courage and leadership of Abraham. The modern perspective sees it differently. Rosenberg suggests that this chapter reinforces his thesis that Abraham is merely a single historical figure in the continuum of middle eastern history – one among many. Nothing new here according to Rosenberg.

But both of these interpretations are wrong. This tale of Abraham’s military prowess perhaps belongs amid the rest of ancient middle eastern chronicles and mythology, but it really has little to do with the Abraham of Genesis, other than to tell us that Abram was known to his contemporaries. And the supposed ethical lesson that Abram teaches the other kings -- not to accept their spoils, and not to enrich himself as a result of conquest -- may set him apart from his contemporaries, but it does not define him in the same way that his call, or the Akeidah do.

The importance of the story for me is that Genesis 14 contains the first reference to Abram the Ivrit, the other. Abram was already different from his neighbors, and they identified him as so, well before he refused any spoils from the victory. His otherness preceded his participation in this military struggle. And while the military or political story was of interest to his neighbors, or to the Sumerian author of 1700 BCE, no one at the time could figure out exactly why it was that Abram was different. All they knew was that he was different, that he was Ivrit. Seven hundred years later, when J wrote the first chronicle of our people, her departure point was Abram’s difference, his otherness. She could have cared less for this battle.

Part of the difficulty here is the looking forward and looking backward. Abram changes the way we see the world, but his contemporaries are unable to appreciate his originality. It takes seven hundred years, all the generations of Genesis, all the time in Egypt, all the time wandering through the wilderness, and then the time conquering Canaan, and really up to the time of Solomon, before our first author sits down to write about what makes us different, why we are Ivrit, why we are chosen, why we enjoy God’s blessing. When she does that, she looks back through time to recreate Abraham, and to make him and his ideas come alive in her chronicle. And she tells of an Abram who looks into the future, who receives God’s covenant, who is promised that his descendants will be more numerous than the stars. He looks into the future; but he does so through the text of J, who is looking back into the past. As a result, it’s never easy to sort out exactly what happened and when. All we really know is that Abraham, either the character or the man, was present at the origin of our people and our thought. Whether those ideas came to Abraham from God, or whether they came from Abraham inspired divinely, or whether they were, in fact, Abraham’s ideas, attributed to God in an effort to give them credence, they were new ideas, original ideas, and the ideas which forever changed the way that everyone in the west saw the world.