Today we are going to introduce the family of Terah and discuss why the Bible is about to change so drastically! The life of Abraham literally changes the world forever, and as we would expect, the story of the Bible is going to change as well. Up until now, we have only been in the introduction—God has been introduced as the Creator, as the Savior, and as the one who has never stopped wanting to fix our drama—and now we get to see Him finally putting His rescue plan into action. This is the last teaching of Torah portion Noach so next week, we will be in Lech Lecha!
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.
(Parents, all Scripture comes from the Miss Tyler Version (MTV) which is the Christian Standard Bible changed a bit to make it easier to understabd, and we will be finishing up Genesis 11 and Torah Portion Noach this week)
After the story of the Tower of Babel, the Bible really changes a lot. So much so that there are books and books and books just written on the first eleven chapters of Genesis! And the truly odd thing is that even though these stories show up a lot in movies and storybooks and even legends, like we saw with Nimrod, they don’t really show up anymore in the Bible. How often do Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the flood, Nimrod, or the Tower of Babel show up in the rest of the Bible? Almost not at all! Adam is only going to have his name mentioned fifteen more times, and most of those are just in genealogies (family trees) or in poetry talking about the “children of Adam” meaning all of us. Eve won’t show up again at all until Paul talks about her to the Corinthians and Timothy, thousands of years later. The Tower of Babel is never mentioned again, and Nimrod only shows up two more times and nothing is specifically said about him, he’s just mentioned like he’s nothing but a street sign on the way to where you really want to go. Even Noah doesn’t show up very much, even though people talk about him all the time? So why is that? Well, the reason is that we have just read the longest introduction to any book in the history of the world.
An introduction is what we call the beginning of something. If you have ever heard someone give a speech, or if you have written an essay, or watched a movie, then there is stuff that happens at the very beginning that ends up being important all the way through. Someone giving a speech in front of an audience is going to tell you, at the very beginning, what they are going to talk about. When I go to a church or to a conference and talk, I will tell everyone right away what they can expect. Of course, I am always talking about the Bible but I might be talking about a certain topic or character and I will tell everyone that right at the start. If you are watching a movie, you can always tell right away if it is a superhero movie or a movie for kids or a scary movie or a serious movie or whatever because of what they do at the very beginning. And all of what was written about Creation, and Adam and Eve, Noah and the Flood, and the Tower of Babel is there to give us a clue as to what the rest of the books of the Bible will be about and especially what the book of Genesis is about. This is a book about God, and it is telling us right away that there is only one God to worship, only one God that made the universe and everything in it, and that He created us not as slaves to help Him out but because He wanted to enjoy spending time with us in the world He created to be perfect for everything we need.
Of course, everything went wrong when God told people to trust that He knows best what is good and evil, and they decided to take a short-cut so they could decide it for themselves. Eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil didn’t tell them what was good because they were surrounded by nothing but good things—instead, it slammed them with a whole lot of knowledge of what was evil and they got scared of God and each other and life got complicated when it should have been pretty easy for them. All of a sudden, their relationship got messed up—not only with each other but also with God. And having them and all their drama in the Garden messed up the Garden so they had to leave and then they had kids who were messed up too. But God’s plans never changed—He never stopped wanting to be with people in His Garden. Even though Cain killed his brother Abel, God didn’t kill Cain. God protected Cain. And when the earth became too dangerous for people to live in anymore because people had become so evil, God protected Noah and his family. And hundreds of years later, when the people decided to build a Tower to the sky, God became very worried about them because He knew that there was nothing they wouldn’t be able to accomplish—and they weren’t ready for that. So, God divided them up. God had to come up with a plan to save us because we aren’t good on our own and we just mess up and make things worse. To do that—to finally put a plan into action that would work—God was going to choose one man and one woman to begin again with so that He could start a new kind of people who would love Him and obey Him and trust Him. But this time, He had to start from scratch with people who didn’t know Him and He had to prove to them that they could trust Him so that things would be different this time. If Jesus was going to happen, God had a lot of work to do and He was going to start out with a man named Abram and a woman named Sarai. Maybe you know them better as Abraham and Sarah. Besides Jesus and Moses, they are the two most famous people who have ever lived. We wouldn’t have Moses, David, or Jesus without them. But who were they and what kind of people were they? Let’s find out.
The Bible is full of people who are what grownups call “bywords” which is a really strange word for someone who, when you hear their name, you automatically think of a whole lot of stuff that is either good or bad. If you have studied American History, and you hear the name Benedict Arnold, you think of a traitor. He was a hero during the Revolutionary War against the British but he later betrayed the American army for 10,000 pounds (that’s British money) and a place in their army. And now when someone changes sides in a fight or does something to hurt their friends, they get called “Benedict Arnold.” Most people have no idea what actually happened, but his name means something bad now to everyone who hears it. In the Bible, when the name Adam pops up, we are supposed to remember that we are sinful and stubborn and don’t do what God wants all the time. When the name of Eve gets mentioned, we remember how easy it is for someone evil to lie to us and get us to do bad things and especially when we want something we shouldn’t have. When Noah’s name gets mentioned, we think about how hard He worked to build that ark and how much he trusted God. When the Tower of Babel gets mentioned—oh wait, it never gets mentioned again. Never mind! And when Nimrod gets mentioned, we unfortunately think of all the legends people wrote about him after the Bible that actually have nothing to do with what happened at all! How about Job? We think of how faithful and patient Job was even when things were terrible and the same thing with Daniel. When we think of Jonah, we think of that big fish and how he didn’t want the people of Ninevah to be saved. Their names have become bywords for other things—sometimes good and sometimes bad.
But other than using some of those names to remind us of what kinds of things these people did that we should remember (so that we will or will not do the same things), all the names we have been learning about—Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, and Noah–pretty much disappear from the Bible. And in chapter 11, it’s like none of it ever happened and Moses begins to tell us an entirely new story, starting with Noah’s son Shem and his family tree. I am not going to name all of those names because they are really hard to say and besides, we don’t even know anything about them—until we get to a man named Terah son of Nahor. And maybe you’ve never heard his name either, but his son was named Abram, and I know you have heard of Abram! Or maybe you know him by Abraham, but at this point of the story he is still called Abram. If you do read this chapter, something very weird happens between Shem and Abram. Moses tells us that Shem lived to be 600 years old but by the time Abraham died, people weren’t living that long at all. Nowhere near that long as we will see. What the heck happened? No clue. Doesn’t really matter. I suppose if it was important then it would tell us. What is important is that after the scattering of the world at the Tower of Babel, after the flood, after the exile out of the Garden—God is going to stop dealing with the whole world and He is going to do something new and different. And it isn’t the first time that God has chosen just one or two people out of all the people in the world to begin again with, but this time God is going to do something to change the world forever, even though it will take almost two thousand years after Abraham is born. God knew that to create the kind of world He wants, one filled with people who love Him and trust Him and want to love others as themselves, that He had to start with one special person and to build that person into a family and then a tribe and then a nation and then to use Abraham’s family to teach the entire world about Him. How will He do that? That’s the rest of the story! No really, that actually is what the rest of the Bible is all about!
In some ways, it’s like everything we have learned so far was just there to set the stage for the real action. Beginning with the life of Abraham, God’s special plan to save all of us is going to be put into action, even if it will be hard to see it a lot of the time. To fix what Adam and Eve broke, God is going to create someone who will never sin, who will never disobey, who will never try to do things His own way. Of course, you all know that means God is going to create Jesus, but Moses and the children of Israel in the wilderness have no idea yet exactly how God is going to fix things. Right now, they are just glad to not be slaves anymore and are enjoying hearing the amazing stories of their ancestors. But if we believe that their ancestors always worshiped God, we are in for a big surprise!
Terah, one of the many descendants of Noah’s son Shem, lived in a place called Ur of the Chaldeans in Mesopotamia. He had three sons—Abram, Nahor, and Haran—but Haran died in Mesopotamia. What do we know about Terah? Well, from Joshua 24:2, we know that Terah was an idol worshiper (which means he served other gods) and so Abram probably was too. His whole family probably worshiped idols because that was what he grew up knowing about and seeing as normal. It’s really not much different than you being a Christian because that’s what your family is. We also know that Abram’s brother Nahor worshiped idols because his wicked son Laban did too. And I am going to tell you that there are many “what if” stories about Abram and so it can be confusing about what the Bible actually says and what it doesn’t say at all. Some stories say that Abram learned about God from Shem, who was still alive but other stories say that Shem became someone called Melchizedek who we will see in a few chapters—but just understand the Bible doesn’t say either of those things. Remember that the Bible teaches us about God and doesn’t fill us in on all or even most of the details when it comes to the people in the stories. What do we know about Abram? Not much at this point but that is going to change as Abram gets to know God.
Let’s read about how Moses introduces Abram at the very end of Genesis 11: These are the family records of Terah. Terah was the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran, and Haran was the father of Lot. Haran died back where they came from, in Ur of the Chaldeans, when his father Terah was still alive. Abram and Nahor both got married: Abram’s wife was named Sarai, and Nahor’s wife was named Milcah. She was the daughter of Haran, the father of both Milcah and Iscah. Sarai, Abram’s wife, couldn’t have any babies. Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot (Haran’s son), and his daughter-in-law Sarai, his son Abram’s wife, and the whole family set out from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to the land of Canaan. But when they came to Haran, they settled there instead. Terah lived 205 years and died in Haran.
So, this family did something really strange–and we aren’t quite sure why. They had been in the land which would one day be called Babylon, but sometime after Haran died, they all picked up and left. That wasn’t what people did in those days. In fact, it wasn’t really until just a few hundred years ago that it became more common for people to leave where they grew up in order to make a new life somewhere else. To leave your home meant that you were leaving most of your family behind, your parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins and all the people who kept you safe from the people who weren’t part of your family. Those people were all called a clan. A clan is made up of relatives who take care of each other and have responsibilities to be loyal to one another. Families now are very different than they were in Bible days. Families had land and critters and they stayed put unless they were forced to leave. And because the Bible doesn’t tell us why Terah took his family and left, people wrote a bunch of “what if” stories to explain what they thought might have happened. Maybe they were all running from danger. Maybe there was a famine, which means that there was not enough food for everyone. Maybe there was a flood. Maybe God told Terah to go to Canaan. We just have no idea whatsoever. What we do know is that you had to be very brave to just leave your home without knowing where you are going to. Terah might have heard of the Land of Canaan but He almost certainly had never been there before. He couldn’t look it up on the internet or anything, they were totally heading into the unknown.
So, Terah and his two sons, and their wives, and his grandson Lot and maybe Lot’s mother, left Ur of the Chaldeans. If you look at a map, you might think that they just headed west but if they had done that then they would have died in the desert for sure. Nope, they had to go far to the north, along the great Euphrates River, and then they traveled west until they ended up in a place called Haran. Since that was the name of Terah’s son who had died in Ur, I figure it was probably named after him by his family. But then they stopped. They didn’t go all the way to Canaan. And we have no idea why they didn’t keep going. What we do know, because we find out later in the Bible, is that Nahor stayed there and raised his family—and we will get to meet them much later in Genesis. Some of them we will be glad to meet and others, not so much. They were sure an interesting family, I can definitely say that.
We are also introduced to a woman named Sarai, who is married to Abram. Sarai has a terrible problem—the most terrible problem that any woman could have in those days. She couldn’t have a baby and that meant that she was always going to be in danger. When women couldn’t have babies, people often thought that they were cursed by God because of sin. They weren’t really very clear on the concept of how complicated our bodies are and how many reasons there are why a woman can’t have a baby. I can’t have babies either because I have like three or four different medical problems that just make it impossible, problems that I have had since I was born that aren’t my fault. And we don’t know why Sarai couldn’t have a baby, but we do know that when a woman couldn’t have a baby in those days, that their husbands would usually abandon them and find a new wife who could have babies! And yes, that’s a really mean thing to do. The amazing thing is that Abram never did that. Abram loved Sarai, very much, and was always loyal to her even though not having any children made life very difficult for both of them. It tells us a lot about how loyal Abram was that He didn’t leave her or get himself a new wife.
Why was it such a big deal? Having a baby? Well, in those days they thought about things differently than we do now. People without children had to be very afraid of the future—some of their reasons were superstitious but other reasons were very real. The first reason children were important is because in Abram’s time, they didn’t believe in a world to come or heaven or anything like that. They believed in Sheol, the grave, and it wasn’t a fun place. They believed that if you didn’t have children and grandchildren to remember you and make offerings for you after you were dead, that you would starve and suffer after you died—which is super messed up and very stressful. It’s called ancestor worship but I don’t want you to think that people were worshiping their ancestors the way we worship God—they weren’t singing hymns or anything. In those days, worshiping another god was about taking care of them—feeding them, making sure their idols were washed and oiled and dressed and put to bed at night. That was what they thought about worship, totally different than we do now because our God doesn’t need any of that. For them, sacrifices were about feeding their gods, who would get weak and tired and die and then they would be in huge trouble because it wouldn’t rain, or the sun might never come up again or the crops wouldn’t grow and their critters would stop having babies. That was the world Abraham was brought up in. God was going to have to show Abraham and his children a different way of thinking about worship.
Another big problem with not having children was that there would be no one to care for them when they got too old to care for themselves. Someone could just come and take all their stuff and drive them out of their homes if they had no sons to protect them. There were no police then and that was super scary because bandits could just get away with whatever they wanted if there was no protection from family. The last problem, the one that really scared them, was the thought that their bodies wouldn’t be buried properly—in a cave where animals couldn’t dig them up and eat them and poop them out afterward, or just left lying out somewhere where they would turn to dust and people would walk all over them forever. Those things wouldn’t bother me but it mattered a lot to them. It doesn’t matter if I don’t care what happens to my body after I die—what matters is what they cared about. When we read the Bible, and pay attention to context, it means that we have to read it caring about what they cared about so that we can better understand the decisions they made and why they thought that their way made perfect sense. When we don’t, we can get some pretty nutty ideas about them.
One of the really cool things that archaeologists have found while digging in places like ancient Babylon and Egypt and Nuzi and Mittani and Uruk and Hattusa are examples of their law codes. Law codes tell us how judges ruled when people brought their problems to the city gates. And let me tell you that a lot of their laws were super messed up—but when we read them it really helps us understand the world of Abraham and Sarah, and Isaac and Jacob and their descendants before God gave His own teachings at Mt Sinai. Some of them sound the same but others are very different. In the ancient world, a man could divorce his wife for whatever reason he wanted to but a woman wasn’t allowed to divorce her husband. In fact, in some places, a woman who tried to divorce her husband could be killed. Isn’t that just terrible? In that world, no one would have blamed Abraham for abandoning Sarah because they would see her as cursed or sick for not being able to have a baby. They wouldn’t think that she was a real wife or even a real woman, no matter what else she did. It was a very different world—good thing God decided to set them straight and to begin to fix things, right? But Sarah would have been in big trouble because women weren’t educated and couldn’t get jobs like men could. The ancient world was not safe for women, which we see a lot in the Bible. So, Abraham being so good to Sarah is a really great thing about him. It tells us a lot about his character and his loyalty and his goodness and his kindness.
And so here we are at the very end of Genesis chapter 11 and a new thing is happening. God has chosen someone who seems kinda random. A man who was living in Babylon, and whose family were all idol worshipers and so he probably was too. We don’t have any reason to believe that Abraham even knew who God was. In fact, it is hard to believe he did because who would even teach him? So why did God choose Abraham? Out of all the people in the world, why this old guy with a wife who couldn’t have any babies? I think God chose him because when a man is seventy-five years old and his wife is sixty-five and he needs a kid but she can’t give him one and he is loyal and faithful to her in a world where almost anyone else would have thrown her out—I believe that God saw a man who could be trusted with the beginning of God’s rescue plan for the world. Abraham wasn’t perfect and we will see that he is going to do a lot of messed up stuff, but Abraham must have already had a pretty good heart and God must have known that He could grow Abraham into exactly the kind of man that He could use to make a people who were very different from the rest of the world. Adam couldn’t. Noah couldn’t. But Abraham did.
I love you. I am praying for you. And I hope that you spend some time this week thinking about how God can use you to do amazing things if He knows that you are a loyal person—even if you don’t do everything right all the time. He’s looking for people He can make better, not for people who are already perfect.