Our last teaching in Genesis 20. Abimelech finally does what he should have done in the first place if he wanted to marry Sarah, and he finds himself in the unpleasant position of having to reward someone who lied to him so that Abraham will pray for him and his household. Although this would have made sense to Abimelech, what are we supposed to think about it?
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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.
Today, we’ll be finishing up Genesis 20—a very short chapter with only eighteen verses in it. Of course, Jesus’s Bible never had any chapters or verses. Those didn’t start being added until about six hundred years ago. They were a really good idea because without them it is really hard to find stuff and especially in the really long books like Isaiah and Jeremiah, but people just made decisions about where the chapters and verses should begin and end and they didn’t always make the best choices but usually they did a good job. Oh, okay, gotta tell you a funny story about a hoax from the 1800’s. A hoax is when someone tries to trick people with something that isn’t true and some hoaxes are really hard to prove false. But this one was obvious right away because the person didn’t know very much about the life of Jesus. He wrote something we call the Archko Volume, which claimed to be made up of a bunch of documents the guy found in the Vatican library in Rome. Not only isn’t that a public library, but almost no one can get into it. He told everyone that he had and made up a big, long story about it that ended up not being true—but the easiest way to tell that this was all a big lie is that he had stories about people who lived at the time of Jesus quoting from the Bible. And that’s not a problem but he had them using chapters and verses when they wouldn’t exist for another 1400 years. It’s easy to find out that information now on the internet, but he had no way of knowing. That’s why, when we see Jesus and his disciples quoting from the Hebrew Bible, they don’t give chapters and verses because there weren’t any. Anyway, that has nothing to do with this week’s lesson but I just think it’s cool. There are always people out there trying to make money by tricking other people, and especially when it comes to the Bible! And that’s very sad. And, of course, this whole chapter is about Abraham tricking King Abimelech of the Philistines.
So, Abimelech was angry about Abraham and Sarah lying to him and he had Abraham brought to him and yelled at him and asked him why he did it. Abraham made a bunch of excuses—will Abimelech accept his explanation? Does he have a choice? God told Abimelech in a dream that he not only had to give Sarah back but he also had to get Abraham to pray for himself and his people because they were sick after taking Sarah. Remember that Abimelech didn’t give Abraham anything in return for Sarah—he just took her. In those days, when a man wanted a wife, he had to negotiate with her family—which means he had to make a deal to pay for her and agree to whatever her family wanted. People didn’t meet and fall in love and all that. The man didn’t propose to the woman, he went to their family and got permission and he traded animals and money for her. Sometimes, she had a choice to say yes or no and sometimes she didn’t. We will see that happen with Rebecca, who had a choice, and Leah and Rachel, who didn’t. Those rules were the same no matter where someone lived in the ancient Near Eastern world—from Egypt to Israel to Babylon.
Does that surprise you? That ancient Israel did a lot of things exactly the same way as the pagan nations did? There are no people on earth who are totally unique. We do things the way our ancestors did, just because that’s normal for us, and the way our neighbors do things, for the same reason. I mean, why do we celebrate birthdays? Or Mother’s Day? Or whatever else? Generally, we don’t even think about why. It’s just normal in our culture. If we lived somewhere else, then something else would be normal. Not everything that pagan nations did (people who didn’t worship our God) was wrong, most of it just boiled down to what was normal for them—like paying a woman’s father so you can have her as your wife. It’s strange to us now but they would have seen our way of doing things as very weird. The Bible doesn’t tell us that one way is right and the other way is wrong, it just tells us the story of what did happen when that was part of their normal. When Jesus lived, things were a bit different in some ways and really different in a lot of ways than they were in the time of Abraham. The Bible describes what happened, and not always what should have happened. We’ve seen a lot of things that were normal up to this point, but shouldn’t have been. God wasn’t changing things because He liked what they were doing, right?
Let’s look at a good example of what shouldn’t have happened, and what shouldn’t even have been legal, as we finish up with Genesis 20. Remember—Sarah was kidnapped by Abimelech after Sarah and Abraham had lied about who she was and said that she wasn’t married and now because they all did what was wrong, there’s a great big mess.
After Abraham told him why they had lied, Abimelech took flocks of sheep and goats, and herds of cattle, and male and female slaves, gave them to Abraham, and returned his wife Sarah to him. Abimelech said, “Look, my land is before you. Settle down and live wherever you want.” And then Abimelech said to Sarah, “Look, I am giving your brother one thousand pieces of silver. This will prove to absolutely everyone that nothing wrong happened to you while you were living with me. This is proof that you are innocent.” Then Abraham prayed to God, and God healed Abimelech, his wife, and his female slaves so that they could have babies again because God wasn’t letting anyone have babies as long as they were keeping Sarah.
Since Abimelech committed the unforgivable crime of kidnapping someone else’s wife, even though he thought she was single, he had to make restitution to Abraham and that’s a very important word in the Bible. Restitution is what God commands us to do when we harm people in certain ways—we have to make it up to them somehow. Restitution isn’t just saying sorry. Restitution means making things right again, or as right as possible. Someone who stole a sheep had to pay back four sheep! I mean, dang, that’s a lot of sheep and you sure wouldn’t want to steal one if you had to give that many back. What would happen if Abimelech had to give Abraham four more wives?? Remember that in the ancient world, and we have talked about this so many times, stealing from someone was an attack. You weren’t just taking stuff, you were taking stuff from somebody and to make it right you not only had to give that thing back but give them even more. If you stole someone’s sheep, then you were making them look bad because they weren’t watching their flocks carefully enough or maybe they hurt you or your shepherds to get the sheep and shamed you. If you trick someone out of money or whatever, then you are making them look foolish and embarrassing them and making them angry. Giving them the stuff back and having to give them a lot more, gives them their pride back and their reputation. No one wanted to be taken advantage of and walked all over, and so people who stole things didn’t just go to jail. I mean, there really weren’t jails the way we think of them. You had to make things right or you got sold into slavery to the person you stole from, for six whole years. Yikes. When Joseph was in jail, he was really in an Egyptian jail where prisoners were kept. When Paul was in jail two thousand years later, he was sometimes in an actual jail but usually he was in a house he was renting, under house arrest where he couldn’t leave until somebody made a decision about what to do with him. Jesus wasn’t in jail either, because the Jews didn’t have jails. If a person sinned badly enough, they heard his case and made a decision and that was that.
Of course, the really disturbing thing about this whole situation is that Abimelech saw absolutely nothing wrong with kidnapping a woman who isn’t married and that is super messed up. Abimelech needs Jesus for sure. But Abimelech knows what has to be done in a situation like this—he isn’t going to give Abraham four more wives but he does have to pay Abraham back for Sarah—way more than he would have if he had tried to marry her the way things should have been done in those days. Instead of a certain number of sheep or a cow or a slave, Abimelech gave Abraham whole flocks and herds—and that is a lot of critters. And not only that—and that’s a lot—but Abimelech did something very surprising. Abimelech told Abraham that he could settle down and live wherever he wants in their land. That means that Abraham will belong there and won’t just be passing through. Abraham will have a home there with the Philistines even though he isn’t becoming a Philistine. This gives him another home base—like the one he has with his friend Mamre to the north in Hebron. This is going to become very important to remember, that Abraham has two homes now, even though he lives in tents and not in a house like Lot—one in Hebron and another in Beersheva. I will put a map in the transcript so you can see where those places are. It makes the Bible easier to understand and more interesting when you know where everything is.
Abimelech knows that he has to make Abraham happy—really happy. Really, he’s giving Abraham everything he possibly can. He’s giving Abraham everything that’s worth anything in his world. If Abraham doesn’t pray for him, then they are all in big trouble. As Philistines, they are far from their homeland on the island of Crete, and if they can’t have children, they are going to get old and die out or someday another people group will just come in and kill them all and take their stuff. People weren’t very nice before Jesus, let me tell you. And the only way to protect yourself was to be bigger and stronger and for that they needed to have kids—and a lot of them. They had lots of gods but none of them was like ours, who would protect them and provide for them without their needing to go around killing and stealing and making slaves out of the people they take over. They were still back in the “be fruitful and multiply” stage of creation, something we never hear outside of the book of Genesis. Now, Jesus tells us to go out and be fruitful and multiply by telling the world about Him. But they didn’t know about Him and so they got bigger by having more babies. I like the way things are now a lot better. The world is full of people, and those people need to know about Jesus.
Not only does Abimelech give Abraham all the critters and slaves, but he specifically gives a thousand pieces of silver to Abraham. Do you know how much money that is??? That’s over ten thousand dollars today but back then it was way more because they didn’t have nearly as much silver. And now, Abimelech is going to talk to Sarah for the first time as he gives Abraham the silver—but what is the silver for? Well, in Hebrew it sounds different than it does in English—Abimelech says, “this is a covering of eyes for you.” What? What does that even mean? Okay, imagine a situation where you get accused of something you didn’t do in front of a lot of people. Maybe you got accused of stealing in the store, and the store security guard took you away and you were totally embarrassed but when they looked in your backpack, they didn’t find anything because you are actually innocent. Let’s say that no one who saw you arrested left the store, and they announced over the loudspeakers, “Okay, the young person you saw get arrested didn’t steal anything, so pretend like you never saw them get arrested. They didn’t do anything wrong.” Well, that’s what “covering of eyes” meant—it was telling everyone that they didn’t see what they thought they saw. It means that Sarah wasn’t ever made Abimelech’s wife and so she can be returned to her husband Abraham without any drama. She’s still his wife. He didn’t send her away or divorce her or anything like that. Sarah is exactly who she was before she was ever kidnapped, okay?
But that isn’t all Abimelech says. He says, “I am giving this to your brother.” Now, isn’t that a strange thing to say? And we don’t know exactly what he means by it. Maybe he means it seriously because he believes that they are brother and sister so it might have sounded like, “I am giving this to your brother who is also your husband, I see now that I assumed you were just his sister when I took you, so—you know, my bad.” Or maybe he isn’t believing the story about them being brother and sister and he is irritated at Sarah for having lied to him, which would have sounded like, “I am giving this to your “brother,” which is a nice scam and worked out really great for you two, right?” Or maybe he is giving Abraham the side-eye since he knows that Abraham told her to say that, “I am giving this to your “brother” so that everyone knows that you are innocent.” The Bible doesn’t have a lot of explanation as to what people are thinking and so maybe this was serious and maybe it was snarky but we do know he was really angry. My guess is that Abimelech doesn’t believe they are brother and sister and neither do I. But like I said last time, we just don’t know for sure. I am quite certain that if God hadn’t told Abimelech that he needed to get Abraham to pray for him, then Abimelech would have just killed them both and taken all their stuff. Abimelech was scammed and it cost him a lot, but then, there is no excuse for kidnapping someone who is probably older than your grandma. He was a bad dude and bad things happened to him, but that doesn’t mean that Abraham and Sarah were right to lie to him. They just still don’t trust God enough yet to protect them so that Isaac can be born.
Abraham takes the loot and prays to God for Abimelech so that God will heal him and his entire family so that they can start having babies again. We don’t know exactly what was wrong with everyone but whatever it was must have been pretty bad if absolutely no one could have babies. Abraham didn’t heal them, God healed them. We never see Abraham working miracles—Abraham is a prophet because he speaks to God and God hears him. So far, we have seen Abraham talk to God about Ishmael, the son he loves, and the people of Sodom. Abraham wanted God to give them special favor—to choose Ishmael to be his heir and inherit all his stuff, and to be merciful with the people of Sodom if there are even just ten good people there. That’s a really big privilege, to speak and to have God listening. Sometimes, we just don’t want to pray but not everyone has God paying attention to them. When we accept Jesus as our King and we give our loyalty and lives to Him and His Kingdom, Jesus says that God hears our prayers. Not because we are prophets but because we are His children. He listens to us just like He listened to Abraham—and Abraham understood that being able to talk to God meant that he could make a difference in what God was going to do and whom He might help. And that goes for us too. When we talk to God about things, He hears what we want. Even if no one else is praying about that thing, we are, and that’s amazing. God doesn’t always do what we want because He isn’t a vending machine where we put a few coins in and get whatever we want, but He cares what we think and cares about what we want and need.
Abimelech was a king, and Abraham didn’t even have a permanent home but when Abraham talked, God was listening. God didn’t always like what Abraham had to say and God told him no quite a bit, or to wait, or whatever, but God was paying attention. Abimelech could talk all day and God was probably just ignoring him until the day he kidnapped Sarah. It didn’t matter that Abimelech was a king because someone who has a relationship with God has more than a king will ever have. Abimelech felt like he was innocent and had done nothing wrong, whereas Abraham had lied. Abimelech lost a lot of critters and money and Abraham got all the critters and money. Abimelech lost Sarah and Abraham got her back. In a lot of ways, it seems wrong, doesn’t it? Abraham got rewarded for doing the wrong thing. Kinda. In the next chapter, we’ll see that Abraham’s bad reputation is going to cause some problems with Abimelech and later, with Isaac and Sarah too. No one ever totally gets away with everything. Abraham is God’s choice, not because he is perfect or his family is perfect because his family is going to be really messed up for quite a few generations. Good things happen to Abraham because God has things He needs to do through Abraham’s family—because God promised. Not because Abraham deserves all these critters and stuff. If Abraham had just trusted God, then twice Sarah wouldn’t have been taken and two kings wouldn’t have been angry with him and two nations wouldn’t have had to deal with plagues and sickness.
I have seen in my life and in the Bible that there are two sorts of people who are called by God to work in His Kingdom—there are the ones who understand how easy it is to hurt others and those who are more afraid of being hurt. Abraham can bless more people because God is listening, but he can also hurt more people because God has promised to make Him into a mighty nation. And sometimes Abraham uses that to help people but other times, people get hurt when Abraham isn’t thinking about the consequences of lying or being selfish. But, I do give Abraham a lot of credit for getting a lot of things right even though he got some major things wrong. Abraham didn’t have a Bible that he could read to teach him about God and his Kingdom. Jesus hadn’t come and Abraham wasn’t ever given the Holy Spirit to help him out.
We are really blessed to live in the time after Jesus. It makes it a lot easier for us to learn what does and doesn’t please God. That’s why Jesus said something very surprising about John the Baptist. Now, if you don’t know who that is, you aren’t alone. John was actually Jesus’s cousin and he was a lot like Isaac because his parents were very old. The Bible tells us that his parents were blameless—keeping all of God’s commandments but they still didn’t have any kids. And that was a tough way to live because people assumed that the only reason you wouldn’t have any kids is if there was something wrong about what you were doing. Today, we understand that things are way more complicated. Yay science! Jesus even had to tell His own disciples that just because someone was blind, doesn’t mean they had done anything to deserve it. Wouldn’t that be awful? As if it isn’t bad enough for your eyes or legs or ears or whatever not to work, but people are convinced that it’s your fault!
Anyway, God remembered Elizabeth and Zechariah when they were very old and she had a baby and God named him John. The Bible talked about John a long time before he was born. The Bible would say that the greatest prophet and miracle worker in the Hebrew Bible, Elijah, would return. You see, we aren’t really sure if Elijah died or not because God took him away in a golden chariot. It’s a big mystery, like when Enoch was taken away and where on earth did God bury Moses? The Bible is full of things we don’t know and can’t understand, and that’s okay. That’s why there are so many ‘what if’ stories written about the Bible by Christians, Jews, and Muslims too. We like to try to fill in the blanks. But there is one blank we don’t have to fill in. Jesus told us that when John was born, that was when Elijah returned and that his job was to prepare the way for Jesus. Preparing the way means to get everything ready—and especially to get the people excited and ready for their Messiah to come and save them. That doesn’t mean that John knew everything and, in fact, even though he knew that Jesus was the Messiah he was confused by a lot of what Jesus was doing. The great thing about John is that even though he didn’t understand everything, he still did what God had created him to do. That’s pretty special!
But John died before Jesus died and rose from the dead. John died because he was telling two very wicked people that they were…well, very wicked people. John had the Holy Spirit like Elijah and although he never worked any miracles, Jesus called John the greatest man ever born. He was the greatest because it was his job to do the most important thing that had ever been done up to that point—showing everyone that the Messiah, the king of Israel, was coming and baptizing Him so that we could follow Him by being baptized too. He didn’t need to be baptized because He hasn’t ever done anything wrong but He was here to show us the way into the Kingdom of God where He is king and we are totally loyal to Him. John wasn’t baptized that way. He never got to have Jesus as his King. He didn’t get to see Him resurrected and alive again. John didn’t get to see what happened at the first Pentecost after Jesus was alive again when the Holy Spirit came down on everyone and everything started to become new again and people started changing into Kingdom people.
That’s the reason why Jesus said that everyone who gets to be part of His Kingdom is even greater than John. Not that we are better or anything but because we get to live in a world made better by Jesus, and we know things that John never knew because we live after the greatest thing that ever happened, happened. We are so blessed to be alive after Jesus, and it doesn’t mean that life is easy but it is easier because of Him. Even when everything around us is crazy. Imagine if Abraham had lived after Jesus—his story would be much different.
I love you. I am praying for you. I know that life can be awful, scary, and crazy sometimes. That’s the way things are right now and they always have been, but we can always know that without Jesus with us, and His Holy Spirit helping us, it would be a lot worse. Knowing that we have Him and that He is trustworthy even when we aren’t, and good when we are bad, and all that, means that we don’t have to worry about Him and what He will and won’t do. He’s always the same, even when we are bouncing off the walls and acting like gooberheads.