Who Were the Patriarchs? Abraham to Joseph (2 of 15)

Four generations, one promise, and a family that spends most of its time nearly destroying it.

The story does not flatter anyone in it, which is one of the reasons it reads as history rather than propaganda.

What Was the Call of Abram?

A command to leave everything, with a promise attached and no destination given.

Gen 12:1-3. Go from your country, your people, and your father’s household to the land I will show you. Not to a named place. To the land I will show you.

The promise has three parts that everything afterward hangs on. A great nation. A great name. And blessing to all peoples on earth through him.

That third clause is the answer to Babel. Babel was people trying to make a name for themselves and being scattered into nations. Here God makes the name and the scattered nations are the ones to be blessed.

Abram was seventy-five and childless when he was told he would become a nation.

What Was the Abrahamic Covenant?

A promise God bound himself to, in a ceremony where only one party walked.

Gen 15. Abram asks how he can know he will possess the land. God tells him to bring animals, cut them in half, and lay the pieces opposite each other.

That was the form of a covenant ceremony in the ancient Near East. The parties walked between the pieces, invoking the same fate on themselves if they broke the agreement.

Then a deep sleep and darkness fall on Abram, and a smoking firepot with a blazing torch passes between the pieces. God walks. Abram does not.

The obligations are one-directional by design. Whatever the descendants do, the promise does not depend on their performance, and the rest of the Old Testament tests that repeatedly.

Gen 15:6 also sits here: Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness. Paul builds a substantial argument on that verse being before circumcision and before the law.

There is a second life to that sentence worth knowing about. Ps 106 uses the identical phrase of Phinehas, who stopped a plague by killing an Israelite man and a Moabite woman with a spear, and 1 Maccabees quotes the Abraham verse and the Phinehas verse together as a commission to holy violence. By the first century, reckoned as righteousness was a slogan of zeal.

Which makes what Paul does with it a deliberate act. He takes the certifying phrase of the zealot tradition he came out of and reassigns it to the thing Abraham did before he had done anything at all, which was believe.

What Is the Binding of Isaac?

The hardest chapter in Genesis, and it is deliberately hard.

Gen 22. Take your son, your only son, whom you love, and offer him as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.

The phrasing is cruel in its precision. Each clause narrows and each one presses.

Everything about the account emphasises the length of it. Three days of walking. Isaac carrying the wood. Isaac asking where the lamb is, and the answer that God will provide.

The angel stops him at the last moment, a ram is caught in the thicket, and Abraham names the place the Lord will provide.

It should not be smoothed over. God commands something he elsewhere condemns absolutely, and the text does not explain why beyond calling it a test. Hebrews reads Abraham as reasoning that God could raise the dead. That is an interpretation and it is in Scripture, but it does not remove the difficulty.

Who Was Melchizedek?

A priest-king who appears in three verses and then dominates a New Testament argument.

Gen 14:18-20. Abram returns from rescuing Lot, and Melchizedek, king of Salem and priest of God Most High, brings out bread and wine, blesses him, and receives a tenth of everything.

That is the whole appearance. No genealogy, no origin, no death.

Ps 110 then names him again, in the line about a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek, and Heb 7 builds an entire argument on the absence of genealogy: a priesthood not dependent on descent from Levi, older than Levi, and superior since Levi was in Abraham’s body when Abraham paid the tithe.

A three-verse figure carrying that much later weight is unusual and worth its own study.

Was Jacob a Sympathetic Character?

Not particularly, and Genesis does not pretend otherwise.

He buys the birthright from a starving brother. He deceives his blind father with goatskins and stolen clothes. He then spends twenty years with Laban, a man who out-deceives him repeatedly, including swapping brides on the wedding night.

The name Jacob carries the sense of one who grasps the heel, and the text plays on it.

The turning point is Gen 32, the night of wrestling at the Jabbok. He is renamed Israel, which is glossed as striving with God, and he walks away with a permanent limp.

That combination is the point. He gets the blessing and he does not walk right afterward.

Why Does the Joseph Story Take So Much Space?

Because it is the bridge, and because of what it says about providence.

Roughly a quarter of Genesis covers Joseph. Sold by his brothers, enslaved in Egypt, falsely accused, imprisoned, forgotten, and eventually elevated to administer the empire during a famine.

The theological statement comes twice from his own mouth. In Gen 45:5 he tells his brothers that God sent him ahead of them to preserve life. In Gen 50:20 he puts it more sharply: you intended to harm me, but God intended it for good.

Neither statement excuses what they did. Both were true at once, and Genesis says both without resolving the tension.

How Does Genesis End?

With the family in Egypt, prosperous, and a promise about leaving.

Jacob’s household comes down during the famine and settles in Goshen. Jacob blesses his sons, and the blessing on Judah includes the sceptre not departing from him, which becomes a messianic thread.

The last verses have Joseph, dying, telling his brothers that God will surely come to their aid and take them up out of this land, and making them swear to carry his bones with them.

Genesis ends with a coffin in Egypt and an unfulfilled promise. Exodus opens four hundred years later with a new king who does not know Joseph.

Part of a series following the Old Testament timeline.

Sources

The biblical texts cited: Gen 12-50, especially 12:1-3, 14:18-20, 15, 22, 32:22-32, 45:5, and 50:20, along with Ps 110:4, Rom 4, and Heb 7 and 11:19.

N. T. Wright, Paul: A Biography (HarperOne, 2018), chapter 1. Supports the point that Ps 106 applies the reckoned-as-righteousness formula to Phinehas and that 1 Maccabees pairs it with the Abraham verse as a warrant for zeal. Supplied in full.

Where the sourcing stops: the patriarchal dates given on the timeline follow a traditional early chronology, and the dating of this period is debated with a range of positions. The reading of the Gen 15 ceremony as a self-maledictory oath is standard ancient Near Eastern background rather than an explicit claim of the text.

Footnotes

1. That only God passes between the pieces in Genesis 15 is the structural key to the whole covenant. The form invoked a curse on whoever walked. God walks alone, which means he has taken on the consequences of breach on both sides, and the New Testament reads the cross through exactly that arrangement.
2. Genesis is remarkably unflattering about its own founders. Abraham lies about his wife twice. Jacob is a deceiver. Judah’s story in chapter 38 is worse than either. National origin literature does not usually work this way, and the persistence of the unflattering material is itself worth weighing.