Well, I was planning on doing a teaching on patience but that isn’t going so well lately so I decided that this was the perfect time to do a lesson on hospitality because that’s mostly what Genesis 18 and 19 are about! Just like Honor and Shame and Covenants, once you understand the rules of ancient hospitality, you will know it when you see it and it makes the Bible a lot more interesting. So, until I get a lot more patient, we’re back to studying Genesis and beginning Torah Portion Vayera—which starts in chapter 18 and goes all the way to the end of chapter 22.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s 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, where I usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the CSB tweaked a little or a lot to make the context and the content more understandable for kids.
What would you do in a world with no planes, trains or automobiles and no hotel chains and restaurants? How would you get from place to place while staying safe? Wild animals and bandits and the weather made traveling dangerous! This is going to be a huge theme in Genesis 18 and 19, which is why we are switching away from our Being like Jesus series for the next two chapters of Genesis. Last week, I talked about hospitality a little bit for our talk about kindness but hospitality—which is taking care of travelers who are away from home—is so much bigger than that. Parents, I will have a two-part teaching for you on my other radio show where we are going to really expand what I am teaching today so you can understand what parts of the Bible are and aren’t talking about hospitality and travel, and which parts are, along with the very strict rules about how families had to work in the ancient near eastern world. The kids you are teaching might have questions that I can’t answer here and so one of my most important jobs in teaching them is to make sure you are equipped too! So, look for those later this week and next week for older teens and grownups.
Traveling in the ancient world was actually considered to be really strange. Most people never did it. They weren’t taking vacations or anything like that. The people who were traveling would have been considered to be really strange too. And suspicious. And even dangerous! Unless you were a merchant, which is a person who travels from place to place buying and selling things, people just really weren’t sure whether or not they should trust people who were on the move. Merchants could be really exciting—bringing cloth and spices and pottery from far away—because there weren’t any supermarkets. Usually, people could only get the things that other people in the community made or what they made themselves. Communities that had access to clay would make their own local pottery and some were a lot better at it than others. One of the ways that archaeologists learn about ancient people is by looking at the pottery that they dig up in ancient ruins. That shows us who ancient people were in contact with and how far the products from one city would travel. The clay from one area is going to be an entirely different color than the clay from other countries. Baskets could be very different as well, and cloth too, depending on what they had to make it from. There are different kinds of sheep, goats, and plants that went into making cloth—and also the kinds of dyes used would be unique to an area. Purple and blue dyes, especially, and some reds, were very rare and difficult to make. Merchants are the main way those things would get from here to there or from nearby to hundreds of miles away.
But other kinds of travelers were very suspicious. In the spring, travelers could be spies who were scouting out your land before a king declared war on you. That was when the heavy rains finally stopped falling and the roads dried out and there was fresh barley and wheat for the soldiers to steal as they took over your country. If a large group with women and children and older people came through, it was probably a group that was migrating—which means moving their home from one place to another. Here in America, native groups (which means the people who were originally here) would travel around during different seasons of the year so that they could hunt and plant crops. That’s a very smart way to stay alive in a world where you have to live in different ways in different seasons to make the best life possible for your family. In Bible times, people would mostly migrate from one area to another because of famine, which we’ve talked about before. If you remember, famine is when the land stops making enough food to live in—maybe because of rain or locusts or more heat or cold than usual. Famine is why Abraham and Sarah went down to Egypt—where they rarely ever had famines. Sometimes, travelers were messengers for kings and other leaders. If one king wanted to talk to another king, it wasn’t like they could make a phone call or text them, right? They had to send someone with a message and so those messengers were very important and highly trusted. There were usually two of them just to make sure that the message got delivered correctly because if they got it wrong then there could be a terrible war!
The last reason for travel, which wasn’t considered to be strange at all, was pilgrimage. Pilgrimage is when people from the same religion all travel to a place so that they can celebrate a festival together. In the ancient world, this usually happened whenever there was new food to be celebrated with. In the spring, the children of Israel celebrated the Passover at the time of the barley harvest, and the Babylonians celebrated the Akitu festival (Akitu literally means “barley cutting”). Then they celebrated Shavuot/Pentecost after the wheat was harvested, and in the fall they had the biggest party of all, called Sukkot or the Festival of Tabernacles, and they celebrated by feasting on the fruit and nuts and meat and all the things they had harvested throughout the summer months. The closer the people came to where the Tabernacle was (or later, the Temple in Jerusalem), the larger the groups traveling got and they would sing special Psalms together as they got closer and closer. That was always the best reason of all to travel!
During the time of Jesus and afterward, His disciples would travel from place to place to teach people about Jesus and how He had finally come to rule over the world as the King of kings and Lord of lords. When they traveled, they depended on something called hospitality—which is what we call it when strangers are taken in and cared for in someone’s home. Of course, during the time of Jesus, the rules about hospitality had changed a lot in some ways and not in others. For example, women were allowed to be hosts in New Testament times but not when Abraham was alive. We know this not only because of the Bible but also because of what we read about from other cultures who lived at the same time. Scholars who study the world of the Bible sometimes say that they were all drinking the same cultural water, which means that they did a lot of things the exact same way no matter what gods they worshiped or what they called themselves. We will see that a lot. Everyone who lived at the same time as Abraham performed animal sacrifices to make their gods happy. Men had absolute power over their own families and that was considered normal. Not even men, really, but the oldest man in the family. You could be seventy years old but if your dad told you to do something, you had to do it because he was in charge of everyone! We see a lot of things change throughout the Bible as God brings them closer and closer to the time of Jesus. But when Abraham was alive, we need to remember that his family had come out of Babylon and worshipped idols. God had a long way to go to get them ready for the Messiah! He had to teach them new ways to live and how to love one another.
We will talk some other time about how hospitality worked in the days of Jesus but right now, we are going to talk about hospitality in the days of Abraham and Lot. For the grownup teachings, we will also be talking about Rahab, Jael, and Abigail and how those situations were very different from the ancient phenomenon of hospitality. Some of what we know actually comes from Bedoiun communities here in the modern world and how they have done things for thousands of years.
Hospitality was sort of an insurance policy in the ancient world. It was actually kind of a religion where everyone knew the rules and followed them no matter who or what they were. You didn’t want to get stuck somewhere, far from home, with no place to spend the night and no food and so even people who didn’t travel all followed the rules of taking strangers into their homes for a set amount of time. Even if they weren’t going to travel, their friends and families might and so taking care of strangers was part of what people did to keep their world from becoming too unpredictable. What we’re going to learn today are the rules for hospitality and what people could and couldn’t do and say.
Now, just imagine you are outside your tent or house four thousand years ago. You look into the distance and see some people walking toward you. Or maybe they are leading a donkey or riding on a camel. What do you do? Well, if you were a woman, it all depended on whether you were married or widowed or whatever. No woman living alone was going to invite strange men into her tent or house because that was something we call a taboo. A taboo is something that people just aren’t allowed to do and wouldn’t even imagine doing. You wouldn’t ever think of marrying a member of your family, right? That’s a very serious taboo in the modern world no matter where you are, pretty much. People get grossed out just thinking about it. That’s how people in the time of Abraham would have thought about a respectable woman opening her tent and letting strangers inside, okay? It was unthinkable. A married woman would go get her husband and a young woman would get her father or uncle or grandfather. If the woman was at a well or another place that belonged to the whole community, she didn’t have to go anywhere because there was nothing wrong about meeting someone at the well because everyone needed to drink, right?
But the men of a community had obligations when there were strangers coming into their living space—their community. And this is where it gets complicated because not all hospitality was about just being nice to strangers—offering hospitality was often a way to find out whether someone was a friend or an enemy, or to make sure they became your friend. But even that wasn’t very easy because there were rules about what you could and couldn’t say and could and couldn’t ask. And if you get confused, don’t worry because as we go through Genesis 18 and 19 starting next week, you will get the hang of it because we are going to see this stuff over and over again. The details will sometimes be a bit different, but they will always fall within most of the rules that everyone in the ancient world agreed on.
Let’s pretend I am a guy, okay? And not only a man but the head of my own household. That means I probably have a wife and sons and daughters and tents or a stone house and critters and whoever else that works for me as a hired helper or anyone I would own as a slave. Which, you know, we hate but this is how things were back then and sadly they didn’t seem to understand that you can’t love other people if you own them! God had to deal with all this nonsense a little bit at a time or they would have totally freaked out. Same with us and our nonsense, right!? Right! So, I am responsible for a certain amount of area around my home and my community but outside that, I can let people alone. But today, I see some people in the distance and I am wondering if they will come close enough to worry about. Are they messengers traveling from one place to another? Are they spies who want to report back to their king that I would be a good target for killing and stealing away all my stuff? Are they foreigners looking for a new place to live after a war or escaping famine? Do they have animals or not? Are they part of a caravan of merchants who might have things to sell that I need? No way to know for sure but I do know one thing—I want them to be my friends and not my enemies.
Because I am a man in this ancient world, it means that I have a lot of rights as well as responsibilities. I have the right, for example, to go out to meet them and make them temporary members of the community by providing hospitality. If they accept salted food and a place to rest from me, then they aren’t going to be allowed to attack me and my family and my community. It went against the rules that everyone in the ancient world agreed to live by if they attacked their host. They believed that the gods would be furious and society would fall apart. In a world with very few laws, and especially out in the wilderness far away from cities and kings, they had to depend on everyone following certain rules about what was and was not okay. I am sure you have the same kinds of agreements with other kids about what is and isn’t okay to do and say. You may not think about them, but you obey those rules without thinking about them. Most people, for example, won’t cut in line in front of another person because it makes everyone else in line angry. It isn’t against the law to cut in line, we just don’t do it—so it doesn’t have to be a law. No one likes a line-cutter! Or if you are at a potluck, no one is going to take all of one of the dishes of food, they are going to take some and leave the rest for everyone else. It isn’t against the law to just take a whole pie and go sit down with it, but it is against our unwritten rules. Everyone just knows it and does what is right. Hospitality in the world of the Bible was like that.
So, I go out to meet them and say hello and I am super polite and I ask them to stay a while at my home while I bring them some water, and a bit of bread, and let them sit in the shade. Sometimes, people would agree right away but usually they would say something like, “No, I really have to get to where I am going and don’t have time to rest.” They did that so that they didn’t look desperate or like they needed help. That was how they protected their honor, their good reputation—they didn’t want anyone to think they were weak or in trouble—even if they were. It was all part of a game they were playing, and these were the rules for everyone to come out of it looking and feeling good about themselves. At this point, after they said no, I would have to insist that they take a rest from their travels, eat, drink and maybe even stay the night depending on what time of day it was. Now, because I insisted, they can’t say no to me without disrespecting my offer. So, to protect my honor, they have to come join me for food.
Now, all I promised was a bit of bread and water and a bit of rest, right? That’s all I have to give them but I get even more honor with them if I give them much more than that. So, instead of a bit of bread, I serve them fresh unleavened bread made up on the spot, and give them fermented milk and maybe even some wine to drink. If I am really an epic host, I will give them meat, curds (which was like yogurt), or whatever else I have available. I have made the travelers temporary citizens of my community or my camp and they can’t attack me and I can’t attack them. Now, here’s the deal, I don’t know why they are traveling but I am not allowed to ask them either. We can talk but I can’t pry into their personal business. They can bring it up if they want to, but I can’t ask. But, one of the best things about offering hospitality to travelers was receiving news about what was going on out in the world. A traveller can tell you about wars in other places, and famines, and when kings have died and new kings take their place, and all sorts of things. There were no newspapers, phones, radio, or televisions so without visitors, there wasn’t any sort of entertainment from the outside world. Almost no one could read either, and books would have been written on thick clay tablets that were too big and fragile to carry around. Storytelling was how people learned about the world around them and that was an exciting reason why people would be anxious to have travelers visit their homes.
As soon as I invite them into my space and they accept, I have to protect them even if it costs me my own life. And because I am a man in those days, I have absolute power over all the women and children in my family, as well as over my slaves. They have to do whatever I say and I can even kill them if I want to. And this was how things operated in the pagan world for a very long time. God even gave laws that forbade men to act this way because before then, they could pretty much do whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted as long as it was in their own house. The Romans called this paterfamilias. The paterfamilias was the oldest man in a household and he ruled over everyone in his extended family. No matter how old they were! When Jesus was scolding his disciples about how the Gentiles like to be bossy over everyone, this is part of what he was talking about. He was telling His disciples that the people in charge in His Kingdom are the people who serve everyone and not the people who are demanding to be served and especially not the people who hurt others. Jesus gave us the best example because even though He is God, He died for us when He had the ability to kill us. Jesus is our Paterfamilias, our King, Lord, Master, and Savior. Jesus showed everyone a different way of being head of the household and a lot of people didn’t like it at all. Some people like having that kind of power over other people—they did then and they still do now. That’s another reason why Jesus said that we have to come to Him like little children. We have to be different than the world around us. Just because the world tells us that we can do certain things, doesn’t make them right. Jesus told us to never do anything to anyone that we would hate to have done to us. In the ancient world, everyone wanted to be the paterfamilias with all that power but it wasn’t any fun to not be the paterfamilias. That would be super stressful. That’s how the false gods of the nations around Israel acted—whoever was the top god got to do whatever he wanted to the others. And so they strongest gods were often warring against each other even though they were supposed to be family. They all wanted that top spot so that everyone else would have to do whatever they wanted. That’s why Jesus was so strange to the pagans who heard about Him.
And speaking of Jesus, another part of hospitality was either washing the feet of your visitors or having a slave do it or at least giving them water so they could do it themselves. Feet were considered to be the grossest part of the body. Not surprising since they mostly wore sandals and animals would go to the bathroom wherever they happened to be. Feet were the most important part of you to be clean when you went into your tent or home, they were only slightly less gross than your sandals which at least protected your feet from the worst of what you were walking in. At the Tabernacle or Temple, the priests had to have their whole bodies washed but especially their feet because they went barefoot when they were serving God there. That was considered to be God’s house, and so they made sure that they treated it that way. Clean bodies, clean feet, and they gave God the best of everything. The Tabernacle or Temple was considered to be the place where heaven and earth met, and it was like God was visiting that space with His presence. In some ways, God was the host but in other ways, the priests acted like hosts. They were responsible for keeping the fire going on the altar, which was sort of like a huge barbecue grill. And they made offerings every day, like good hosts, to show respect to God. They kept it clean and treated it with respect. They even asked Him questions there.
What about the people who received hospitality? What was their job? Remember that whenever there are social rules that everyone agrees to, everyone has their own part to play. Not only could guests not attack their host or his community, but they also weren’t allowed to ask for anything. The host could give them whatever he wanted, but the guests couldn’t ask for anything or they would be treating the host with disrespect. They were also required to do something nice for the host—giving them some sort of gift of life. Usually, that was a blessing or a prayer that the host and his household would be very prosperous—meaning lots of critters, children, peace, money, or whatever they needed. It was how they said thank you in the ancient world. Sometimes in the Bible, we will see that people can be unhospitable and even dangerous to peaceful visitors and that was considered to be a very terrible crime all throughout Bible times. Jesus even tells His disciples that if a town is inhospitable to them, then they don’t have to bless it when they leave but that they should bless and honor everyone who is good to them, no matter how much or how little they had to offer to them as guests.
I love you. I am praying for you. As we go through the Bible, we need to look for signs of hospitality. Do you remember when Melchizedek came outside his city with bread and wine for Abraham and his men? That’s just the beginning.