After the Flood, we begin Act II of this drama. Humankind seemed to be redeveloping similar to the development following Eve’s son Seth, absent the fallen angels mucking around with mortal women. Families split up and moved on. Man tried to play god by building the tower. God intervened by confusing their languages. Humankind, at least the male segment, continued to be inclined toward evil. Nothing much changed.
Then we get the report that God called this 75 year old fellow with no children and a barren wife from the Euphrates region and told him to go to what is now Israel. In our Bible, this occurred 367 years after the Flood. Was God up to something new here, or was God simply selecting another spear carrier like Enoch and Noah. God says to this fellow, Abram, “I will make of you a great nation” (Gen. 12:4). Well, this is certainly new. To this point, God had shown no interest in anything we might call a ‘nation.’ But apparently God planned to create a whole people from one common blood source, one common ancestor. God told Abram, “‘Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.’ Then the Lord said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be’ “(Gen. 15:5).
Why then would God pick a childless aging man with a barren aging wife? How does one build a whole people from these two? Sure, Abram was a man of strength physically and morally (see Gen. 14; 13-24). But God needed more. God wanted a man who had what Enoch and Noah had….the capacity to live in faith. Pastors like to preach about Abraham’s faith in his willingness to sacrifice Isaac (Gen. 22). But the first example of Abram’s faith occurred when God told Abram the impossible would happen…. descendants as numerous as the stars…. “And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” (Gen. 15:5-6)
And so commences the 2,000 year saga of God and God’s people Israel as recorded in the Old Testament. In reading and studying this immense story, one tends to focus on the characters and events in this drama revealing every human strength and weakness. But perhaps we might step back and try to embrace the grand sweep of what God was doing in this part of God’s creation for two thousand laps of earth’s orbit around the sun. It seems to me that God was trying a new experiment with humankind. Remember, God accepted the fact that the heart of humankind was inclined toward evil from youth (Gen. 8:21). So, I’m suggesting that God planned to work with one segment of humankind created from one male ancestor in the hopes of creating over time a disinclination toward evil replaced with the inclination toward God’s Ways through the path of righteousness (faith). After all, God’s great wish for us is to be Holy, like God (Lev. 19:).
This plan did not start auspiciously. God rejected Hagar’s Ishmael in favor of Isaac and Rebekah’s Esau in favor of Jacob. It seemed like a repeat of Noah’s two sons rejected in favor of Shem. How could God build a whole people with one son per generation. Then we see that God accepted all twelve sons of Jacob, including four from female slaves.1 All males were given the mark of the extended family, circumcision. And as planned, these twelve ended up as a slave colony in Egypt for four hundred years, procreating into a population of over 600,000 men.2 They divided themselves into what became the 12 tribes of Israel.3
God now had a population large enough to become a nation and humble enough (as slaves for 400 years) to respond positively to direction from God. We might think of this period as Scene 1. God was now prepared to act with one mighty intervention to bring this people out of slavery and into God’s embrace. God would give them God’s Law, teach them God’s Ways, and deliver them to the land God promised to Abraham. Next week we’ll discuss how all this worked out for God, God’s steadfastness notwithstanding.
- Significantly, perhaps, the four women were all from Haran near the Euphrates, and Jacob’s two wives were of his mother’s and grandfather’s family (Rebekah and Abraham). See Gen. 29:12.
- Ex. 12:37. The math actually works. Women bore many children to share the work. If one assumes 8 children from one male during a 50 year span and that half the children born are male, then multiply Jacob’s twelve sons by 8 and then multiply the product by 4, seven times. The result is 1,572,864, a number sufficient to produce 600,000 adult males.
- The census taken by the twelve tribes in the desert of the males twenty years and older, excluding the Levites, totaled 603,550. Num. 1:45.