August 2023

On Genesis, Part 27: A Father of Nations

Discussing Genesis chapter 16 we described The Vanity of Ishmael, which shall continue to be manifest as we proceed through these subsequent chapters, and as we hope to discuss later in this commentary on Genesis, it is also manifest in history unto this very day, once his descendants are properly identified in the modern world. In that last presentation, we had postulated that the first aspect of Ishmael’s vanity was that he could never fulfill the role for which Abram and Sarai had believed he would be born, which was to be Abram’s heir, the seed of the promises which Abram had from God. So while the plan for his birth had originally belonged to Sarai, Yahweh God clearly had another plan, as we shall see here in Genesis chapter 17, and here His plan shall finally be fully revealed to Abram and Sarai. This is another example of many in Scripture, that Yahweh provides information to men only on a need-to-know basis, as He sees fit, and in any event, the actions of men fulfill His will whether or not that process can ever be perceived by the men themselves. The prophecies exist only so that men may look back and see that Yahweh is God.

As we proceed here, Ishmael continues to be a subject of Genesis and shall remain in our discussion, and while Hagar had already received a promise of her own, that her seed through the unborn child in her womb would become a great nation, here we shall see that Abraham was destined to be a father of many nations, and Ishmael had no share in that promise or in subsequent related promises. Another aspect of the vanity of Ishmael, the fact that all of his seed would apparently be, or become, bastards, we may not discuss again until later chapters of Genesis, where both his descendants and those of Esau are described in Genesis chapters 25, 28 and 36.

On Genesis, Part 26: The Vanity of Ishmael

As we had discussed while having seen The Victories of Abraham in Genesis chapter 15, Abram was given great promises by Yahweh God, who also made many of those promises while binding Himself alone in an unconditional covenant, which is a sure sign that they shall be fulfilled regardless of the deeds of men. Among these is a promise that his seed would ultimately displace the current inhabitants of the land which he had been promised. Those inhabitants were listed as ten tribes of people, five of which were descended from Canaan, at least in part, which are the Hittites, Amorites, Girgashites, Jebusites, and Canaanites, these last whom, for reasons we have already stated, we would venture to identify more specifically as the Sidonians. The other five tribes were not descended from Canaan, and ostensibly, they were not even descended from Adam through Noah. The origins of two of these tribes are known from Scripture, which are the Kenites and the Rephaim. They are the descendants of Cain, and a particular family of the Nephilim. While the other three are unknown, it cannot be assumed that they are of Noah, since the purpose for the genealogies and the writing of this history in this manner was so that the children of Israel in the time of Moses could know the nature of their enemies and be able to identify them as they come to possess the land which Abram was promised, as opposed to the identification of their surrounding kindred nations who are listed in Genesis chapter 10. For that reason, we must account the Kenizzites, Kadmonites and Perizzites as having been aboriginal, and also related to the ancient Nephilim, as the meanings of some of their names also suggest. That same assertion would also be true of the Zuzims, or “roving creatures” who were mentioned in Genesis chapter 14.

So ostensibly, it is for this reason that Yahweh had instructed the children of Israel to completely eradicate or drive out all of these ten tribes, because, as we have also documented in our presentation on The Vanquished where we discussed these tribes, the Canaanites had a proclivity to practise miscegenation, which is race-mixing, with their neighbors, and these tribes were all dwelling together in Canaan for at least six hundred years until this point where Abram is promised their displacement. So in essence, and regardless of what we may think of Canaan himself, considering the circumstances of his birth, the Canaanites were breaking that same law that Adam and Eve and the children of Adam had transgressed in Genesis chapters 3 and 6, which is not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Their first fathers were given this law by Yahweh God, and they have no real excuse for not keeping it, except that they had forsaken Him at a much earlier time than this.

On Genesis, Part 25: The Vanquished

In our last presentation in this Genesis commentary we had discussed The Victories of Abraham and how, with Yahweh God as his Shield, as we read in the opening verse of this 15th chapter of Genesis, the patriarch was able to overcome the kings of Elam and Mesopotamia, to rescue his nephew Lot and recover his estate, to gain the blessings of Melchizedek the king of Salem, and also to overcome the king of Sodom and dispense of his goods without having profitted from the Sodomites. That in itself should also be an example to us, as Sodom is once again prevalent in our society today. [I know, it is a pun, but it is an appropriate pun.] All of these things were personal victories for Abram, which were made possible only because he had been granted the mercy and favor of Yahweh God.

Doing that, Yahweh had once again made several additional promises and an unconditional and one-sided covenant with Abram, where Yahweh had placed all the burden of fulfillment on Himself, while requiring nothing of Abram. This is made evident where it is described that His essence had passed through the pieces of dead sacrificial animals in the manner in which ancient covenants had been made. We had established that this was a binding covenant and described its significance from several ancient sources. The first of these was a letter of official business by an official in the government of ancient Mari in what is now Syria. While the letter itself is difficult to date, Mari is generally said to have flourished from about 2900 to 1759 BC, so the letter probably predates the time of Abram. Then we cited an oath given to be made by soldiers of the ancient Hittite empire, which thrived for several centuries beginning shortly after the time of Abram. Then, after citing a recollection of oaths described in Homer’s Iliad, which recounts events from about the beginning of the 12th century BC, we cited a Hittite treaty which is dated to the 14th century BC, and finally, an event from Scripture which is recorded in Jeremiah chapter 34, which described men of Judah who had bound themselves to an oath in the same manner which Yahweh had done here in Genesis chapter 15. All of these witnesses together serve to prove that our interpretation of this chapter is certain: that the covenant which Yahweh gave to Abram, that his seed which would come from his own loins would become a people as numerous as the stars and ultimately inherit the earth, is absolutely unconditional and shall indeed be fulfilled on those same terms, “as it is written.” When Yahweh instructed Abram to do something, Abram had acted only because he believed that Yahweh would do these things for him, and he was successful in all of his endeavors.

On Genesis, Part 24: The Victories of Abraham

In our last presentation in this commentary on Genesis, we left Abram in The Wild West as the kings of Elam and Mesopotamia had pillaged Sodom and Gomorrah. Where the supposed defenders of those cities were faced with the prospect of battle, we read that “the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled, and fell there [in the valley of Siddim]; and they that remained fled to the mountain.” So in their end, the depraved Sodomites proved to be cowards, and could not stand before the formidable invading armies. There it was also evident, that Sodom and its companion cities were not considered a part of the land of Canaan, but had been subjects of the kings of Mesopotamia, who at this time were themselves subject to the king of Elam, according to the account as it is presented here in Genesis chapter 14. That Elam had subjected the kings of Mesopotamia at this time is apparently something that the secular records have not revealed. However as we also explained, the history of this period in the 19th century BC is incompletely represented in surviving records. The only way in which any of the history of distant antiquity can be known is with the discovery and deciphering of ancient inscriptions.

But even without ancient inscriptions to support any particular event described in the Bible, we hope to have exhibited thus far in our Genesis commentary that the Scripture certainly is reliable, once it is properly correlated with what we can know from the historical and ancient records. Wherever there is ancient history which can be known, the knowledge does not conflict with the words of Scripture, and more often than not, supports Scripture. While the churches have never properly made the necessary correlations, all those who claim that the Bible is not historical are liars. Moses was not a fool writing fairy tales. Rather, he was educated as a prince in Egypt, and his books were respected for 2,000 years, as attested to in the words of Manetho, Hecataeus of Abdera, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo of Cappadocia, Flavius Josephus, and there is no reason to disrespect him today. While critics may find fault in each of those men, they were nevertheless serious scholars and historians of their own time, who were in turn respected by Christian scholars in Europe for many centuries. Attempts to discredit this history are only a couple of centuries old, and they all have one source: the Jewish culture of critique through which Jews have sought to subvert and deconstruct everything of value in European Christian society. But the pompous arrogance and abject ignorance of churchmen over those same centuries have failed to defend Christianity from the constant onslaught of Jewish propaganda, and now all of Christendom is in peril. But of course, the words of Moses are also upheld by Yahshua Christ. So even at the precipice of Sodom and Gomorrah, the substance of the unconditional promises of Yahweh God inform us that until the very end Abram shall remain victorious.