God is getting Sarah back home, but Abraham starts making excuses—can we believe any of them or is he just trying to keep himself out of trouble? Abimelech is furious and so are his people when they hear about Abraham’s plan. But what are we supposed to think about all of this? And what do we do when a friend tells us to lie if we want to still be friends?
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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 (Christian Standard Bible) tweaked a little or a lot to make the context and the content more understandable for kids.
So, Abraham and Sarah have gotten themselves into a terrible mess with the Philistine king. He’s a bad dude, but they found out that lying to bad dudes isn’t the answer to their problems. All lying accomplished was giving Abimelech an excuse to kidnap Sarah and to try to make her a wife or part of his harem. This is like what happened to Esther—she was kidnapped and taken to the palace so that King Ahasuerus could have all the pretty girls in his kingdom. Most of them he only ever saw once in his life. I sure wouldn’t want to live in a place like that and I am glad that Jesus changed the world so much! Now that Abimelech knows he was lied to, and why all of his people are suffering, and God has told him to give Sarah back or else, he is angry and asks Abraham why he lied and tricked them. What will Abraham say? And is he telling the truth or is he lying again? Let’s read this week’s verses:
Then Abimelech called Abraham in and said to him, “What have you done to us? What did I ever do to you that you have made me and my kingdom guilty of wife-stealing? You have done things to me that should never be done. There is no excuse for your behavior!” Abimelech also asked Abraham, “What made you do this?” Abraham replied, “I thought, ‘There is absolutely no fear of God in this place—they don’t know right from wrong. They will kill me so they can have my wife.’ Besides, she really is my sister, we have the same dad but different moms, and we got married. So, when God told me to travel here, away from my relatives, I said to her: Show your loyalty to me wherever we go and tell everyone, ‘He’s my brother.’”
Wait a minute, he said what? We weren’t expecting that answer, right? We thought he’d just say, “Dude, sorry, I lied to protect myself—she isn’t really my sister. I just wanted you to think that so you wouldn’t kill me and take her.” But that isn’t what happened at all. Abraham is making the claim that Sarah really is his younger sister and that his father had more than one wife. Can this be true? Or is Abraham just trying to get out of admitting that he lied to Abimelech? Let me tell you a secret. Nobody knows for sure what the truth is. Abraham might still be trying to get out of trouble, so maybe this is another lie. Or maybe Sarah really is his half-sister. Today we’re going to look at what the Bible does and doesn’t say and whether or not we choose to believe what Abraham is telling Abimelech. This whole situation is bad and crazy, but Abraham doesn’t really seem to be sorry. He sure isn’t apologizing even though he has made a big mess for a lot of people. Lying to bad guys like Abimelech to save ourselves doesn’t generally keep them from doing whatever it is they want to do. We talked about that last week. Let’s first talk about how lying worked in ancient honor/shame cultures and why people could actually think it was a good thing to do and why God eventually had to set them straight when Jesus said, “Let your yes be yes and your no mean no” and that anything more than that is from the evil one.
When Abraham lived, the whole world was different from us in how they thought about things. Everyone was more concerned with their reputation than they were with money. Men wanted to be important, and if they were then other people would treat them better than they treated everyone else. And men would compete with each other because the only way for one man to become more important was for someone else to become less important. When they talked about having honor, they weren’t talking about being good people but about being famous, or important, or respected, or clever, or powerful. You could be a total skunk and still have a lot of that sort of honor. Abimelech had a lot of honor among his people and with outsiders because he was a king and he was in charge. In Egypt, no one had more honor than Pharaoh, even when he killed the Hebrew babies. Today, we would say he has no honor because we look at it differently. We think someone is honorable not because they are important but because they are good and honest. That’s a change that Jesus made to the world and when He preached the Sermon on the Mount, everything He was telling them to do and not to do would mean that they couldn’t go out trying to get that kind of honor for themselves! Jesus says that honor in the Kingdom of Heaven isn’t about being important or powerful but about being obedient and loving and humble instead of prideful. But Abraham didn’t know any of that and Abimelech wouldn’t have believed it at all. Goodness, even when Jesus was saying it, all the men would have been shocked. He was telling them to be more like women were supposed to behave in that culture. We tend to read it and shrug and say, “Yeah, whatever,” but the people listening to Jesus would have about fallen over backward. God tried to teach them all this through Moses but they never really understood it.
Because Abraham didn’t trust outsiders, he didn’t see anything wrong with lying to get his way or to get himself out of trouble. In the ancient world, lying to your family was a terrible thing and tricking your family was even worse but they really didn’t believe that people outside of your family or your people deserved to be told the truth. In fact, they believed that it was clever and even honorable to trick outsiders and shame them. So, Abraham wouldn’t really have seen this as a huge sin the way we do when we read it. I am not making excuses for it and the consequences of what he did are obviously very bad for everyone, but it is important to remember that God needed to start changing the world in big ways and Abraham and his family were just the start of it. God didn’t start out with the one perfect person. Maybe Abraham was better than most or maybe he was the best guy on earth but he was living in a messed up world so his ways of thinking were messed up too. It’s okay to notice that. It isn’t unfair. It isn’t being mean. The Bible wouldn’t mention it if we weren’t supposed to notice. Remember, when we see this stuff, it’s supposed to make us want Jesus even more! And we’re followers of Jesus, not Abraham or Moses or anyone. We’ve already seen that Abraham and Sarah can both sometimes be bad examples—and Noah too, for that matter.
So, when Abimelech asks Abraham why on earth he tricked him like that, Abraham gives four excuses. The first excuse is that Abraham figured there was no fear of God in that city—but what does that even mean? Abraham doesn’t use God’s proper name, Yahweh, and the first clue to that is that it isn’t written as LORD which is in all caps when you see it in the Bible. That’s like code for our God. Sometimes you see “lord” in lower case letters and that was just a title that didn’t always mean God but could mean a king or a stranger or someone you are just being polite to. It all depends on how it is used. But Abraham used the word elohim, which could mean a lot of different things too. Elohim can mean our God, but it can also mean powerful people and it can mean gods in general. There are lots of words like that in the Bible, where they mean many different things depending on how they are used.
So, Abraham might be saying that Abimelech doesn’t fear Abraham’s God, or maybe he is saying that Abimelech doesn’t fear any gods at all. And when they use fear like this, it doesn’t mean like being scared of God in the same way you might be scared of heights or water or mayonnaise or whatever. Fear was more like respect and also not wanting to make them unhappy because of what a god can do. So either way, Abraham is being insulting because he’s saying that Abimelech isn’t smart enough or wise enough to care what the gods are thinking about what he does. Is it true? Well, it’s pretty clear from how Abimelech talked to God in his dream and how he shared the story with his servants later that he really, really does fear not only Abraham’s God but other gods as well. Abimelech may be a king, but he isn’t a god and he knows what gods are capable of. Everyone did. They told stories at night about the mighty and terrible things that their gods did to any humans who made them angry. Do you remember when we talked about the Atrahasis Epic from Babylon? Those gods killed everyone with a flood just for being too noisy when the gods were trying to take a nap. No one wants to make those kinds of gods angry on purpose. Does Abimelech fear and respect our God? Boy howdy, yes, he sure does. He’s scared to death. It’s Abraham who doesn’t seem to be respecting God right now because he didn’t trust God to protect him and Sarah. That’s what we call irony. Irony is when you expect something to happen but the opposite thing happens instead. Like, Abraham being worried that Abimelech doesn’t respect God when he really does. And it’s Abraham who is having trouble trusting God.
The second excuse Abraham gives is that he believes that Abimelech will kill him and take Sarah but what really happened is that Abimelech was the one who really had to worry about being killed. Again, that’s another great example of irony. The third excuse is the one that is the strangest of all because Abraham tells Abimelech that he wasn’t really lying because Sarah really is his sister—they just have different moms but the same dad. And we’re supposed to read that and say, “what the heck? That’s super gross! God said we can’t do anything like that.” Well, one, Abraham didn’t know God until he was seventy-five years old, and he had probably already been married for like fifty years. So, even if God already did give them a rule about that, Abraham wouldn’t have known about it when he got married. Two, Abraham might have been lying to make himself look better even if marrying your own sister seems way worse to us than lying. Oh man, I’d rather have everyone on the planet think of me as a liar before marrying either of my brothers. Just no way. Not even if we had different moms. My brothers have cooties. But Abraham lived in a different time when there was something called endogamous marriage, which we will see a lot in Genesis.
Endogamous marriage is a fancy term for marrying your relatives, and I don’t expect you to remember it. There won’t be a test. And it used to happen a lot in the ancient world. Isaac is going to marry his cousin, and so will Jacob. And actually, so will Jacob’s brother Esau when he marries one of Ishmael’s daughters. Remember how I told you that they didn’t see anything wrong with tricking people from other nations? Well, they really believed that only close family could really be trusted and so marrying a cousin just made sense to them, and it really protected the women because it was much harder to divorce your cousin than someone else’s daughter from town or another town. Marrying close relatives meant that family land stayed in the family and if a disaster happened, the whole family would still take care of you. Marrying relatives meant that you could automatically trust your husband or wife because both of you would want to behave yourselves and protect the family reputation. But yeah, we don’t do that anymore because when God gave the children of Israel the laws at Mt Sinai, He told them they couldn’t marry relatives anymore. Of course, we know better today why that is a super terrible idea because babies can be born with terrible problems when their parents are related. Yay for science!
And so, if that is true that they were half-brother and sister, then they might not have seen anything wrong with it, but we have to wonder if Abraham was actually telling the truth or not. After all, when Abraham’s family is introduced at the end of chapter 11, we are told that Abraham’s father Terah had three sons named Abram, Nahor and Haran. And when their wives are mentioned, Milcah and Sarah, there is nothing said about Sarah being Terah’s daughter or Abraham’s sister. So, I have to tell you, I don’t think Abraham is being honest and as we will see next week, Abimelech doesn’t believe Abraham either. The truth is there is no way we can know for sure. And now Abraham is going to say the worst thing of all.
The fourth excuse, according to Abraham, is as soon as they left Haran to follow God, Abraham told Sarah to tell everyone that she was his sister. So, this wasn’t Abraham just freaking out and telling a lie and Sarah going along with it—this was their plan all the time. So, I guess Abimelech wasn’t supposed to take it personally since they were lying to everyone. Not just twice, but every time they met people. Wow. For twenty-four years. Unless Abraham made that up too. Never thought about that until just now. Was Sarah taken as someone else’s wife only twice or are those the only two times Moses wrote about? No matter how we look at it, this whole situation is just one big mess and Abraham was more afraid of men than of God. Abimelech was more afraid of God than of men. It really doesn’t seem like Abimelech is scared of men at all because he’s going around kidnapping old ladies. It’s not how it should have been but dang, that’s the way it was. And maybe we think that God should find someone else because his wife has been taken twice and what if that happened to someone we knew? What if it happened to your mom and it was all your dad’s fault? Boy your mom would be super angry and no one would like your dad at all. Of course, Abraham and Sarah are very old so maybe it is better to think of your grandpa and grandma. But God chose Abraham and that’s that. You know what? Probably no one else would have been any better because they didn’t have anyone telling them what is right. It’s hard to not be totally irritated with Abraham but just like Abimelech, he probably doesn’t see anything wrong with what he has been doing. For some odd reason, God isn’t even yelling at him. God is very patient. Even when we don’t want Him to be! I bet Sarah was angry, and especially if she was already pregnant with Isaac. I would be super scared and angry. It’s a good thing to remember that these stories are about real people and we can even put ourselves in their place and ask, “How would I feel?” and “What could I have done?” But we also have to remember that we are living in a world that has been changed by Jesus so really, we can’t even imagine what those guys were thinking about and what made sense to them that seems crazy to us.
And the really bad thing is this–Abraham told his wife that loyalty to him looked like lying. That’s the same thing as saying, “If you love me, you will tell this lie.” That would make it really hard to say no to him. Have you ever had a friend tell you to lie if you are really their friend? Or keep a secret that you shouldn’t have to keep because it is dangerous? That can be super hard to say no to. We feel guilty when a friend wants us to lie because we know lying is wrong, but we don’t want to lose our friend. It can be really hard to know what to do when that happens. That’s why you need adults in your life who can be trusted with important stuff like this. Sometimes, just talking about this kind of problem with someone who can see things more clearly makes us feel a whole lot better. It’s easy to be more worried about losing a friend than we are about not doing the right thing. Now, if your friend tells you, “Hey, I have a bully coming after me—if you see them tell them I went the other way,” that’s one thing but if your friend tells you, “I’ve been invited to a big party at Susan’s house on Saturday night. Her parents are going out of town. If you are really my friend, say that I am sleeping over at your house.” Oooh, that’s a really bad lie and a bad idea too. Parents need to know where their kids are and especially at night. You may not agree now but when you are a parent, you will definitely agree.
When we ask someone to lie so that we won’t get into trouble for something we’ve done or want to do, it almost always means we already know we are wrong. And now we are asking for someone else to do what is wrong too. That’s not what friends do. Friends don’t put friends in hard situations where they have to choose between doing what is wrong and keeping their friend. I am pretty sure that just about every adult can tell you a story about that happening. When I was in the eighth grade, I remember that a high school girl I didn’t know called me and told me she was going to kick my butt—beat me up—over something that someone else had done wrong but she was angry at me. I asked my best friend Tiffany to lie for me if this girl showed up (and we didn’t even know what she looked like which was hilarious and she wasn’t old enough to drive or anything) and say my name was Rebecca or something like that. She didn’t mind doing that, of course. But what if I had said something different, like, “Hey Tiffany, I’ve totally been there for you whenever you have a problem and so you owe me—if that girl comes looking for me, point to Shannon instead and tell her that’s me and then Shannon will get beat up instead of me.” Well, there is so much wrong with that—I don’t even know where to begin. But to protect myself, I am trying to make my friend feel guilty about our friendship to get her to try and make sure someone else gets hurt. And then everyone will hate her if they find out. I would not be a good friend if I did any of that. Really, my being scared of that High School girl was even sillier than Abraham being afraid of being killed. But when we are really scared of something, we aren’t generally thinking straight. After all, Abraham and his fighting men kicked the butts of the four kings in chapter 14, right?
The thing is, if I had gone to someone older, they would have definitely told me that (1) this person has no idea what I look like, (2) they were too young to be able to drive and probably no one would drive them to beat me up, (3) during school hours they were in an entirely different town and before and after school I am at home so where would this beating up nonsense even end up happening, and (4) people who really want to beat someone else up just do it but people who are angry just call you on the phone. I might have still been worried because I am a really tiny person and was even tinier then, but at least I would have someone who wasn’t scared thinking clearer than I was. But, I talked to other kids about it and they weren’t any more intelligent about it than I was. Oh, you want to know what I was doing? I was holding hands with her boyfriend. I didn’t know he had a girlfriend at another school. We didn’t have social media back then and there was no way to figure these things out. I am actually really glad we didn’t have the internet in those days. We had enough drama and you guys have even more now.
Oh man, that makes me think of something really funny. What would Abraham and Sarah’s social media profiles look like? Abraham—99 years old. Born in Ur. One son, Ishmael. Definitely not married to my sister Sarah. Nope, not married. Like long walks in the desert. And Sarah’s would say—89 years old, No kids. Born in Ur. Not married. I just follow my brother around everywhere since I have nothing better to do at my age. And there would be selfies of them with the sheep and goats and cows, and they would belong to groups where they talked about living in tents. And Hagar and Sarah would be making mean posts about each other and Hagar would have a lot of pictures of Abraham with Ishmael with the caption, “It’s so GREAT to be a MOM. #motherhood” and Sarah would post angry emojis. Okay, maybe that wouldn’t be so funny, that would be awful! Abimelech might post, “Some people aren’t very honest! #foreigners” Lot would post, “This is what I get for being the only righteous dude in Sodom. #cavelife.” Noah maybe would post, “Forgot to bring a pooper scooper onto the ark. #stinky.” Adam and Eve would make posts blaming everyone but themselves for being kicked out of the garden #exile #itchyfigleaves #snakehaters. Abel would post, “Great sacrifice this morning. #LoveGod.” And Cain would post, “Veggies need love too. #sheepstink.” Okay, I am done.
I am really grateful there was none of this stuff when I was a kid. I really pray for you guys because in my day, if someone wanted to hurt you, they couldn’t do it online twenty-four hours a day. We all have to be really careful about what we do and don’t say on the internet because we can really hurt people a lot. Abraham didn’t even need the internet to hurt people with the things he said and did. He just told lies that brought plagues and suffering on to other people.
I love you. I am praying for you. Remember that not all friends are really our friends. Sometimes, they are just buddies who pretend to be our friends so that we will do what they want us to do but aren’t ever there when we need them. Lies make things confusing and I hope you have a grownup you can trust to talk to when people want you to lie.