Abram has a lot of ups and downs in his walk with God and this week we will be talking about one of the downs. Famine strikes the land of Canaan and Abram takes Sarai and their household down to Egypt where there is plenty of food. There’s a big problem though—Sarai is a very beautiful woman and Abram asks her to promise him something that puts her in a lot of danger.
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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 this week comes from the Christian Standard Bible).
There was a famine in the land, so Abram went down to Egypt to stay there for a while because the famine in the land was severe. (Gen 12:10)
So, if you remember from before my break, Abram, Sarai and Lot and all their people and critters had moved to the Land of Canaan when God told Abram to leave his family and go. God told Abram that He would do amazing things for him—that Abram would become a great nation, and have a great name, and that He would bless Abram and totally be on his side. Wow, those are incredible promises! And when he got to the Land, God gave him a second promise that Abram’s children would inherit the land—which was kind of an oopsie because he brought his nephew Lot along just in case. You see, they were very old and had no children and they probably brought Lot along to be their son, to care for them when they got old. Now, he’s with them and life has gotten a bit awkward—but it is going to get a lot more awkward really quick because the worst thing that could possibly happen to people in the ancient world was going to happen. That terrible thing is called famine and this week we’re going to talk about what that means and why their solution was to go to another country.
In the ancient world, they didn’t have food processing plants or trucks to drive the food far away from where they made it, and so they depended on five things to keep them alive. The first thing they needed was good soil for growing things—if the soil was bad then they would be in real trouble because the plants that we eat are much harder to grow than weeds, which will pretty much grow anywhere. And if you think about it, that’s super strange. Veggies don’t grow in the wild, but weeds do! Vegetables have to get grown on purpose. Weeds don’t need much water but the veggies we need to survive need a whole lot of water. So, the second thing they needed was either to be close to a river or rain. Rivers were usually quite far away and so most people depended on rain to grow the food they needed. No rain means no food and no food means famine. That’s what famine is, when there is something wrong with the land and the rain and crops won’t grow—no veggies, no wheat and barley for bread, no fruit, no nothing. When there is a famine, it means that people starve—they die of hunger. And in the ancient world, they really could only eat what they grew themselves or traded other people to get. But even rain and soil aren’t enough because they also needed a good amount of sunlight but not too much. Too much sun, if the air is dry and windy, will make the plants wither and die. And they also needed people to work the fields and plant and harvest. It would be very difficult for one person to do it all alone and that’s why it was so important to have kids. But there is one more thing that everyone knew was the most important thing of all—they needed help from the gods.
And so, every people group in the ancient world had gods and goddesses who they thought were responsible for the sun and the rain and for crops and for food animals having lots of babies. In the land of Canaan, for example, Abram would have known people who worshiped Ba’al Hadad (the Bible just calls him Ba’al). They thought Ba’al was responsible for sending rain and so he was very important. The Philistines worshiped a god named Dagon, who was an agricultural god—that means that he was responsible for making the wheat and barley grow. In Egypt, they counted on Amun Ra to make sure that the sun came up in the morning and went down at night. They thought he was hauling the sun across the sky in his boat. Have you ever seen an obelisk? Like the Washington Monument? The Egyptians built them so that Ra could rest there at noon time. If you stood in a certain spot, like at a temple, it looked like he was taking a nap up there. Like a siesta! The Babylonians worshiped Tammuz, the shepherd god who made sure all the critters had lots of babies. And the ancient Mesopotamians worshiped Inanna, who they thought kept their food storehouses full. Every group in the ancient world had versions of these gods and goddesses because they really couldn’t imagine that one god could handle everything. That’s something that Yahweh, our God, had a lot of trouble getting them to believe. It’s why the ancient Israelites kept worshiping Ba’al and Asherah and many others—because they were afraid of famine, or starvation, and wanted to make sure that all their bases were covered. So, they worshiped the Lord but they also worshiped the gods and goddesses that the original people in the land said were responsible for a good harvest! And it made the Lord super angry and jealous but He kept loving them anyway—He is just amazing.
But I will say one thing about Abram—we never see him worshiping anyone but the Lord. Not ever. he’s going to make a lot of mistakes and sometimes he won’t trust God like he should, but he never goes to any other god for help. So, remember, we don’t have to be perfect in order to follow God and to be loyal to Him. But we can’t let anyone else get in the way and that’s what happens when we worship other gods trying to get what only God can give us, right? Okay then. Back to Abram and the famine. What do you do when there is no food growing and there are no supermarkets? When even your animals have nothing to eat—and you have a lot of animals and a lot of people with you. Remember that Abram and Sarai and Lot not only had a lot of critters, but they were traveling with a lot of slaves. Of course, slavery is awful and praise God it is illegal now but in those days Abram would have seen it as his absolute responsibility to make sure that they could all eat as members of his household. Yes, they were slaves and so they didn’t have a lot of rights but this wasn’t like slavery in America, okay? They were usually cared for and valuable to the entire group and they all worked together to survive. They weren’t treated as well as free people but they were still part of the family who all depended on each other. They were Abram’s responsibility, and so when the food stopped growing, for whatever reason, Abram had to think very carefully about what to do.
Now, here is the really weird thing—the last time we were talking about Abram, he was traveling from the north of Canaan all the way to the south and he built altars to God in the north, in Shechem, and then traveled south to Bethel, where he built another altar and called on the Lord. So, Abram worshiped God at those places and honored Him by building altars as landmarks. So far, so good. But then, something odd happens and he travels to the very south of Canaan, to the Negev, which is called a desert but I don’t want you to think of endless sand dunes because it isn’t that kind of desert. The Negev has sand, yes, but also a lot of rocks and canyons, as well as craters and valleys with very steep rock walls. For some reason, the Bible doesn’t say that Abram built an altar here—even though there were a ton of rocks he could have used. And in the very next verse, we find out there is a famine in the land! I wonder why we don’t hear about Abram calling on the Lord here because this seems like a very good time—when you are in a desert and there is absolutely no food to be had. It seems like this would have been a good time for Abram to ask God what he was supposed to do—and maybe he did and it just doesn’t mention it but Abram leaves the land of Canaan, that God promised to give to his descendants, and heads south to Egypt, where he has never been before! Was that okay with God? Is that what God wanted them to do? And why would Abram want to go there in the first place?
The last question is an easy one to answer because Egypt was known as one of the breadbaskets of the ancient world. Because of the Nile river, Egypt almost never suffered from famine and because of that, they were the most powerful nation in the entire world during the lifetime of Abram. The Babylonians? The Assyrians? The Canaanites? Pfft! They were all just nothing compared to Egypt. Have you seen pictures of the Pyramids? And the Temples they built? They could build things and we still have no idea how they did it. And they had really impressive medicine and doctors. They could even remove cataracts from people’s eyes! Eye surgery! Are you even kidding me?? They also knew how to preserve dead bodies for just about forever. And their art is still some of the most beautiful in all the world. Egypt was where people went when they had nowhere else to go and wanted to survive—but they had to be pretty desperate because Egypt’s armies were the most powerful in the world and they made slaves out of people whom they conquered in war. And they got tribute from all the countries around them as a bribe not to go out and kill them. So, they would have been swimming in gold and sugarcane and all kinds of jewels because Africa has a lot of jewels, beautiful cloth, and remember that later they made papyrus which everyone wanted. Egypt was rich and they didn’t get that way by being nice. Still, I suppose that if you think you are going to starve, you might figure you have nothing to lose by going there. Ang going back to Egypt for help will happen many times in the Bible.
Abram and Sarai aren’t the only people in the Bible who would run to Egypt when things got tough. Jacob and his sons would go there to survive the seven-year famine, but that would be because God sent them there. However, they didn’t go back to Canaan once the famine was over and they ended up being enslaved and treated very badly. God had to rescue them, and once He got them free, He told them a lot of times not to go to Egypt for help ever again. But they did ask Egypt for help, and paid them for help whenever times got tough and they weren’t willing to trust God. King Solomon, he really messed up and married the daughter of the Pharaoh of Egypt. And that was a terrible thing to do because he ended up marrying a lot of other foreign women too and he built them temples for the gods they worshiped! Can you believe it? We have to be really careful whom we go to for help and we have to make sure that we always talk to God when we are in trouble and to trust Him. Now, maybe God would have told them to go to Egypt anyway—it says that there wasn’t just a famine but a severe famine! But when God sends us into a situation, He prepares the way for us, and things tend to go a whole lot better. When we go somewhere without talking to Him about it, then we tend to get into trouble. Like Abram, he’s about to get into a whole lot of trouble. But remember, Abram doesn’t totally trust God yet and he doesn’t totally believe all these promises either.
God has promised Abram that he would become a great nation, and have a great name, and that he would bless him and totally be on his side. And then, as if that wasn’t all enough, He promised Abram a child. For God to keep those promises, He obviously has to keep Abram alive. If Abram dies, that’s the end of that and God will look really bad in the eyes of not only Abram’s household of Sarai, Lot and all the people with them, but also everyone back home in Haran. God will look like the kind of god who can’t protect anyone and who is powerless and breaks his promises. God’s reputation would totally be destroyed, and everyone would be laughing at Abram and the crazy god he thought he was hearing from. People already, I guarantee you, thought he was bonkers to leave his family and their land behind in Haran and to go someplace he had never been before where there is no one to protect him. People didn’t do that. And they also didn’t go off worshiping any gods that their families hadn’t been worshiping for like, forever, and we know from Joshua that Abram’s father was an idol worshiper! His family probably tried to do everything to talk him out of it and figured that he had lost his mind and was maybe even dead already. But even though Abram trusted God enough to go, he still had a long way to go before he trusted God about everything. Egypt was a scary place and he knew it, far worse than the Land of Canaan.
And so, Abram makes a terrible mistake in the very next verse: “When he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife, Sarai, “Look, I know what a beautiful woman you are. When the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife.’ They will kill me but let you live. Please say you’re my sister so it will go well for me because of you, and my life will be spared on your account.” (Gen 12:11-13)
Oh no, this is very bad. Abram doesn’t just not trust God to protect him (and I think that is because Abram didn’t ask God before deciding to bail on living in Canaan), but is actually willing to put his wife in danger because he is so freaked out. And we have to look at this in a balanced way. Yes, Abram is asking Sarai to tell a lie that could get her into huge trouble, but we also have to remember that they have been married for a long time and Abram hasn’t gotten rid of her or divorced her or taken another wife (which was allowed back in those days) even though she couldn’t have babies. So, I don’t want you thinking he is totally awful but he is clearly worried about what will happen to him in Egypt, and if anything happens to him, he knows that the Egyptians will just take everyone and everything he has. In Abram’s world, where he was the patriarch, the head man, who is responsible for everything and everyone, he knows that everyone else’s life depends on him. Everyone would see him as the most important person in the tribe and would see his life as more important than anyone else’s and Abram would see things that way as well. That’s just how everyone thought in those days.
What was the big threat? Wasn’t Sarai like sixty-five years old? Why was Abram worried about other men wanting to marry her so badly that they would be willing to kill him to get her? Well, we have to remember that different cultures think that all sorts of different things are beautiful. Maybe her eyes were a very strange color, or her hair, or maybe her face was shaped in a way that made her look particularly exotic and interesting to other men. Or maybe she really did look very young, we just don’t know. But Abram, one way or another, knew that the Egyptian men would be very interested in her and maybe even interested enough to kill everyone to get her. So, he asked her to tell the Egyptians that she was his sister—that way, worse comes to worse, if they did take her then everyone else would live and the Egyptians would treat them well.
As her brother, if any man wanted to marry Sarai, they would have to pay him a bride price to get her. Now, this will seem really strange but in those days, men bought their wives from her family—from her father or brother or uncle depending on who was alive in her family. How much they would pay for a wife depended on a lot of things. Everyone wanted a wife who was beautiful, from a good family, and who was an honorable woman. They didn’t care about falling in love or anything, and they weren’t going on dates, and they might not even know her, but the two families would make a business deal and the father of the groom (or the groom himself) would give money to the bride’s family and the family of the bride would give her money just in case her husband threw her out later (which happened a lot). And she would then go to live with his family. She might never even see her family again and now she belonged to the new family. His mother could boss her around as much as she wanted and she would just have to put up with it until she was the oldest woman in the house and she could be the boss. Her job was to obey her mother-in-law, or whoever the oldest woman in the family was, and her husband, and to have a lot of babies. That was her place in the family and until she had a baby boy, she was in danger of being tossed out on the street. Scary, eh? These people needed Jesus really bad. Goodness, right now Sarai needs Jesus really bad.
So, when Abram said, “it will go well for me because of you”, what he is saying is that someone will pay him a lot of money and stuff so that they can have her as a wife. So, not only will he live and not be murdered, but he will also get a lot of stuff in exchange for her. I suppose he thinks that he is making the best of a very bad situation, but it is getting harder to feel sorry for him, right? We always have to remember that this was an entirely different kind of world than we can possibly imagine. Men were important, and women weren’t. Free men were important, and slave men weren’t. You can just imagine how unimportant they would think a slave woman was. Ugh, we’ll see all about that when we talk about poor Hagar later. But we shouldn’t be shocked because there is a reason that God is taking one man and one woman and will be making a brand-new people group who will begin to do things differently. Right now, Abram has been told he will be a dad but God hasn’t even told anyone that Sarai will be a mom.
Maybe Abram thinks that he will be getting a new wife if Sarai gets taken by an Egyptian. There are just so many things we don’t know and what we do know about the people of those times is pretty horrible. We can see why God needs to change things. But you know what? Before God can change the world, He has to change Abram first. It would be unfair of us to expect Abram to be entirely different than all the other men in the world. As it is, it was amazing that he left his family at all to go who the heck knows where! That He doesn’t entirely trust God right now isn’t weird, it’s actually normal. And we all start out like that. God has to teach us to trust Him one day at a time and one year at a time and it is a long process. We always think we trust God until He asks us to do something new and strange and then we are like, “Um, what? No—that’s crazy, I so cannot do that!” But God knows this about us because He created us and He sees what is in our minds and our hearts so He knows what He has to do to get us to trust Him. I remember when He told me I would have a hundred kids and I flipped out. I mean, totally flipped out. And I wanted to stop believing in Him right then and there but instead, I told Him that I could only do that if He completely changed me. And then once He decided He had changed me enough, He gave me kids to teach! I was really relieved. I mean, maybe once day I will actually have a hundred kids to take care of in my own house but I also know that He will change me so that I can handle that. He never yelled at me for not being ready—He knew I wasn’t ready! We can’t really surprise Him like that.
Abram’s world is very violent. You could kill someone and totally get away with it if there wasn’t anyone who was going to try to stop you. Kings could kill anyone they wanted, for any reason, any way they wanted. People thought that the gods had given them the authority, or you might call it permission or power, to do whatever they wanted to the people they ruled over. Here in Egypt, the most powerful nation in the entire world, Abram’s only hope was God—and God didn’t need Abram to lie, or to be willing to sell his wife to a stranger in order to keep His promises. God could keep Abram alive even if he was thrown into a pit of hungry wild animals dressed in a beef steak toga. It’s normal for us to be scared, and to assume the worst possible things, and it is even more normal for us to believe we are alone. But we are never alone as long as God is with us. And God specifically told Abram that He would bless anyone who blessed Abram and would curse anyone who cursed Abram. That was God’s way of saying, “Hey, Abram, I’ve got your back and you don’t have to worry about the details. Just do what I tell you to do and trust me.”
I don’t know about you, but that would be pretty cool if God ever told me that! But as far as we know, God didn’t say anything at all to Sarai, Abram’s wife. What do you think all this has been like for her? With her husband hearing voices and following a strange god into a place where they had never been before and then this god told Abram that he was going to be a dad but didn’t say anything about her being a mom and now it would really look like he was trying to get rid of her, right? Let’s look at what Abram said from Sarai’s perspective, from her point of view, “Look, I know how drop dead gorgeous you are. The Egyptians aren’t blind and when they get a look at you, they’re going to look at me, as your husband, and they are going to say, ‘We can’t just take this guy’s wife, we’re going to have to kill him and make her a widow and then one of us can have her free and clear.’ And that’s just what they do, they’ll murder me where I stand and they will take you and you will end up the wife of the most powerful Egyptian who sees you. So please, I am going to tell them that you are just my sister, and when I do that they are going to be super nice to me and it’s going to be good for me and for the entire household and, look, they are going to take you one way or another so this way you can take one for the team and everyone will be better off.” Oh boy…
I love you, and I am praying for you, and just yikes. Trusting God is better for us and for the people around us!