Parashat Lekh Lekha (Genesis 12–17)

A New, Mysterious Relationship

Genesis 12 brings us to a plot twist in the story we’ve been reading up to now.  I am going to focus on three Hebrew words that point back to last week’s reading and channel this story in a particular direction. But we will start with an unusual bonus word, תרדמה tardemah. More on that in a moment.

Scholars call the first 11 chapters of Genesis “the Primeval History.”  It’s about the beginnings of human life on planet Earth.  Individual characters do appear for brief episodes, but the continuity in the story, the main character with whom God interacts, is the human race as a whole.  For a while – as we read last week – that consisted of just Noah and his family, but soon enough they too once again multiplied and filled the earth.

Now, with the beginning of Genesis 12, we focus in on one character from one family of all those on earth: Abram.  From this point on, there is a more or less continuous story about him and his descendants that goes all the way through Genesis and into the first paragraph of the book of Exodus, where the family changes into the people of Israel, the subject of almost all the rest of the Bible.  In Gen 17:5 Abram’s name will be changed to Abraham, with an extra ה, but for most of this week’s reading, he is still named Abram, and that’s what I will call him.

The way we get into this new story is somewhat abrupt.  Genesis 11 tells the famous story of the tower of Babel and then begins to give the genealogy of Noah's son Shem (the ancestor, parenthetically, of the Shemites or Semites).  When we get down to the tenth generation, we find three brothers: Abram, Nahor, and Haran.  Within ten words, Haran has fathered a son named Lot and then died.  The rest of the family moves to a town that in English is also called Haran.  Careful!  Abram’s brother’s name is spelled with a ה, but the city’s name is spelled with a guttural ח.

All of a sudden at the beginning of Genesis 12 the Lord says to Abram the famous words that give this week’s reading its name: לך לך lekh lekha.  Professor James Kugel once translated this phrase as “Get going!”  I prefer “Get a move on!”  The important thing, the surprising thing, is that Abram just does it.

Now when the family settled in Haran they had been on their way to the land of Canaan.  It's not clear exactly why, nor why they stopped, but Abram may have understood God’s command as telling him to continue that same journey to the land of Canaan – which seems to be correct.  But how he's acquainted with God, and what his experience was when God spoke to him and gave him this command, we don't really know.

Fast forward through multiple harrowing adventures to Genesis 15, and indeed this land of Canaan is promised as a gift to Abram (the future Abraham) and his descendants.  But … why?  This week I intend to explore the question of why God picked him.

If you go to Genesis 15 you'll find out it is one of the eeriest chapters in the Bible.  If someone should decide to film Genesis 15, do not expect it to be released in December for Oscar consideration.  This may be a relationship story, but it is a summer blockbuster, not a romantic comedy.

This chapter is known as the covenant between the pieces (ברית בין הבתרים brit bein ha-betarim), and its centerpiece is a very strange vision that Abram experiences.  The implication of a covenant between the pieces – as described in Jeremiah 34 – is that you split the animal in half and the parties to the covenant walk in between the two pieces of the animal.  The obvious implication is: if either of them breaks the agreement they're going to be split in half in exactly the same way.

Since the other party to the covenant of Genesis 15 is God, he doesn't just sort of stroll along in between the animals.  Here is where the mysterious, even spooky element of the story comes into play.  Abram takes the animals and cuts them in half and a deep sleep falls upon him: not an ordinary sleep, but, as I said at the beginning of the essay, a tardemah.  Those who read the Bible in Hebrew know that this is not the first such sleep in the story.

The other person to whom this has happened so far in our story is Adam.  “The Lord God cast a deep sleep [a tardemah] upon Adam” (Gen 2:21), and performed surgery, removing part of Adam's body – conventionally, his rib – and turning it into a woman, Adam’s mate.

Abram’s experience is quite different but equally life-altering.  When Abram falls into this sleep, he experiences a profound, dark gloom. He hears an unidentified voice declaring that his descendants will be enslaved for 400 years before going free with great wealth.  Then it grows dark, and a smoking oven and a fiery torch appear, moving through the path in between the animals he had cut in two before falling asleep.  V. 18 summarizes what has happened:

On that day YHWH made a covenant with Abram:  “To your offspring, I give this land – from the River of Egypt to the great River Euphrates.”

There is a lot to say about this promise, and the ten nations that are listed after it, and about the chapter as a whole, but we have still not been told:  Why was Abram given this gift?  Here is where the first of the three words that point back to last week’s reading comes into play.

If you were to compare Abram/Abraham and Noah, I think most people would say off of the top of their heads that Abraham was probably the more righteous of them.  But that's not what the Bible says.  The Bible tells us, almost as soon as Noah is introduced into the story, that he was a righteous man (צדיק, tzadik) – something that Abraham is never in fact called.  He argues in favor of the righteous people living in Sodom and Gomorrah, but he himself is not described as righteous.  The one expression that comes close to saying this is in our chapter, in Gen 15:6, where a similar-sounding word, צדקה tzedakah, is ascribed either to Abram or to God, it is not clear which.  (See the comment of Rashbam.)

And now for the next Hebrew word that tells us something more about this story: התהלך hithallekh, grammatically the Hitpa’el form of the very common verb הלך halakh, which means “to walk” or simply “to go,” the same verb that gives us the lekh of Lekh Lekha.  What happens when you put this verb into the Hitpa’el pattern?  You are no longer going anywhere in particular. It is the action of walking that matters, not the destination.

That does not mean it is not significant.  In the Torah, at least, you must be someone special to “walk” in this way. (The one exception is its use in the law of Exod 21:19.)  The first to do it is YHWH, who frightens Adam and Eve when they become aware that God is strolling through the garden in Gen 3:8.  The next is Enoch, who “walked” with God for 500 years (Gen 5:22) and then “was gone” because God took him (Gen 5:24).  The next is Noah.

The same verse that tells us Noah is righteous, Gen 6:9, also tells us that Noah “walked with God,” using this special form of the verb.  Abram is told to do so, in Gen 13:17 in this week’s reading, and others assert that he did so, in Gen 24:40 and 48:15, but the Torah never tells us in so many words that he did so.

Noah, however, was righteous – indeed, perfect (תמים, tamim, our third connector word) and walked with God.  Yet in the last chapter of this week’s reading God must still command Abram: “Walk [hithallekh] before me and be perfect [tamim].”  I ask again, why is this mysterious covenant being made with Abram and not with Noah, when Noah already was what Abram had to be told over and over again to be?

I don’t have a direct line to God’s thoughts, or to those of the creator of this story, but it seems to me that in this third episode of the book of Genesis God has realized that neither creating someone perfect nor picking someone perfect has helped move the plan forward.  Remember what happened immediately after the Flood.  Noah, the perfect, righteous man who walked with God, got drunk and had an interaction with one of his sons that is not really fit for prime time.  You can read all about it in Genesis 9.

Instead, God seems to have decided, “If I'm going to get this experiment to succeed I need to pick somebody I can work with.  If I just nominate someone and sit back and expect them to do what I want, it's not going to happen.”

The Torah never makes clear why God created the world and what God anticipated would happen – yet there is clearly some purpose to it all, something (don’t tell Maimonides I said this) that God wants.  In next week’s reading, Abram, his name changed to Abraham, will go along (but not walk along) with God’s apparent command to sacrifice his son.  Whether or not that is a good thing, the introduction to that story hints that it is part of God’s way to understand this new, and by then long-standing, relationship.