So Abram departed, as the LORD had spoken unto him; and Lot went with him: and Abram was seventy and five years old when he departed out of Haran.
Abram left because God had told him to. How strange would that be — to be thrown out of town by God? I guess the town wasn’t big enough for both of them!
Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee: 2 And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: 3 And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.
We get to really see God’s good side here. There’s quite a bit of blessing, and not a whole lot of cursing, commanding, and genocide (well, maybe a little cursing). God promises to make Abram a great nation, and this is Biblical proof that the United States was made by God for Abram.
One point that some people miss is that God is promising Abram that his (Abram’s) name will be great, but he neglects to mention that he’ll later be changing Abram’s name.
And the days of Terah were two hundred and five years: and Terah died in Haran.
Miraculously, the nights of Terah were three hundred and ten years.
And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son’s son, and Sarai his daughter in law, his son Abram’s wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there.
Despite how it might sound here, Lot was not Terah’s son Haran’s son’s son, but rather Terah’s son’s son, the confusion arising from the fact that ancient Hebrew didn’t have parenthesis and they were still figuring out commas, making “the son of Haran (his son’s) son” indistinguishable from “the son of haran, his son’s son,” and the word “grandson” was largely derided as “unpoetic.”
But Sarai was barren; she had no child.
This lead directly to the famous scene in which she approached her husband Abram and said, “My husband, I can not give you a son. I’m Sari.”
And Abram and Nahor took them wives: the name of Abram’s wife was Sarai; and the name of Nahor’s wife, Milcah, the daughter of Haran, the father of Milcah, and the father of Iscah.
You have to read this verse carefully to understand it correctly. Abram’s wife was named “Sari,” and Nahor’s wife was named “Milcah, the daughter of Haran, the father of Milcah, and the father of Iscah,” and she insisted on always being addressed by her full name (which is why she pretty much never had anything monogrammed).
And Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity, in Ur of the Chaldees.
This is the first of many Old Testament passages that are secretly prophecies of the life of Jesus (I’ll be pointing out more later). Here, “the land of his nativity” is a reference to Jesus because, even though Jesus wasn’t from Ur he had a nativity (as prophecies here), which we celebrate every year at Christmas.
Now these are the generations of Terah: Terah begat Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran begat Lot.
Haran had only one son, so he named him Lot so that when people asked how many kids he had, he could answer, “A Lot.”
And Terah lived seventy years, and begat Abram, Nahor, and Haran.
All of Terah’s sons had the same number of letters in their names that he did. It was a family tradition. (Not a particularly exciting one, but a tradition never the less.)
And Nahor lived nine and twenty years, and begat Terah: 25 And Nahor lived after he begat Terah an hundred and nineteen years, and begat sons and daughters.
A little bit of trivia for you: It is for Nahor’s son Terah that the plantation in Gone with the Wind was named. He was a very pious child, and it is from him that we get the phrase “holy Terah.”