Parashat VaYera (Genesis 18–22)

Genesis 12 – The Reprise

Last week’s parashah is called “Lekh Lekha” from the words God said to Abram near the beginning of Genesis 12, לֶךְ־לְךָ֛ ‘Get going’.  As you may know, that's extremely relevant to this week's parashah as well because Genesis 22 begins with God saying exactly those same words, lekh lekha, to Abraham (as he is called by now).

It’s no coincidence.  There is actually a very significant parallel between Gen 12:1 and Gen 22:2, the two verses where this expression occurs.  Both not only include this command by God, they also command Abraham to do something else – and they do it in triple fashion.

Here’s Gen 12:1 again:

YHWH told Abram:  Get going …

• מֵאַרְצְךָ֥ me-artzekha ‘from your country’

• מִמּֽוֹלַדְתְּךָ֖ mi-molad’t’kha ‘from your home’

• מִבֵּ֣ית אָבִ֑יךָ mi-beit avikha ‘from your father’s house’

to the land that I will show you.

(That word moledet comes from the root ילד ‘to give birth’.  In Modern Hebrew means “homeland,” but in Biblical Hebrew it more often means “family.”  I use “home” to combine both meanings.)

Abram, then, is being told to leave three things behind: #1, the country he is living in; #2, his home; and #3, his father's house.  He is also told to “go” to one place: “the land that I will show you.”

Genesis 22, the story about the Akedah or “Binding” of Isaac, has a similar threefold command.  In v. 2, God tells Abraham (as he is by now) to take …

• אֶת־בִּנְךָ֨ et-binkha ‘your son’

• אֶת־יְחִֽידְךָ֤ אֲשֶׁר־אָהַ֙בְתָּ֙ et-yeḥidkha asher ahavta ‘your only one, whom you love’

• אֶת־יִצְחָ֔ק et-yitzḥak ‘Isaac’

and לֶךְ־לְךָ֔ lekh lekha ‘get going’ … [and offer him up]

on one of the mountains that I will tell you.

You might think “take” is followed by four phrases here and not three.  I have lined them up to match the three places Abram must leave “from” (mi- or me-) in Genesis 12 with the three et direct object markers in Genesis 22 to show the pattern.  But one of them is twice as long as the others, seemingly adding a fourth part to the threefold command.  This could be deliberate (and it would match a similar pattern in 21:3 ).  It would copy a pattern we know from other writing in the ancient Near East: the n/n + 1 pattern.  In this pattern, you take (say) three things and add another one to them to make it even more so.

In the Monty Python skit about the Spanish Inquisition, this kind of thing is played for laughs, but in the Bible it can be done very seriously.  For example, Prov 30:18:

Three things are beyond me

Four things I cannot fathom

In this case, 3 + 4 does not mean there are 7 incomprehensible things.  It means a lot of things – three, even four, and perhaps it could be more.  We know that because the unfathomable things are listed in the next verse, not seven of them, but four:

1 the way of an eagle in the sky

2 the way of a snake on a rock

3 the way of a ship in the heart of the sea

4 the way of a man with a maiden

The beginning of the book of Amos is famous for this same pattern: “for three transgressions of Damascus, yea, for four” (Amos 1:3, and the same pattern repeats through the chapter and on into chapter 2).  

In Genesis 22, after naming Abraham's son in three roundabout ways, the third et lands on a fourth name for him that can't be dismissed. Rabbinic tradition reads all four phrases separately, making Abraham declare (as he does not in the biblical text itself) after each phrase that he has no idea who God is talking about.  In the midrash Abraham responds to “your son” by insisting, “I have two!”  “Your only one.”  Abraham says, “Each is his mother’s only son!”  God presses further:  “Whom you love,” to which Abraham responds, “I love them both!”

“Isaac” – and Abraham cannot respond. God has already told him to give up his first son, and now he is being told to give up his second.

Then God says the words that preceded the command in Genesis 12: lekh lekha.

I said last week that those words mean something like “Get a move on” or “Get going!”  They're followed in our text by instructions about where to go (“to the land of Moriah,” worth a column in itself one day) and what to do there (“offer him up”), followed by yet another link to Genesis 12: “on one of the mountains that I will tell you.”

The result, then, is that there are three separate things that link the beginning of Genesis 12 and the beginning of Genesis 22:

• lekh lekha – 1-2-3 – “I will show you”

• 1-2-3 – lekh lekha – “I will tell you”

Perhaps “get going” is not the right translation here for lekh lekha after all; perhaps it should be “keep going.”  That may even be the correct translation in Genesis 12, since at the end of Genesis 11 Abram's father Terah was already bringing the family west.  Abram’s brother Nahor apparently did not come along, but according to Gen 11:31, Terah brought Abram, his wife Sarai, and his nephew Lot out of Ur of the Chaldeans on the way to the land of Canaan.

When they get to Haran (not the same name as Abram’s late brother Haran; see last week’s column), instead of continuing to Canaan, for unknown reasons they stop and settle there.  Eventually, Terah dies.  Nonetheless, when YHWH tells Abram to “go to the land that I will show you,” it may well be that Abram heard the words lekh lekha to mean not “get going” but “keep going” – “keep going, finish your father's journey.”

This parallel instruction at the beginning of Genesis 22 – apparently, to offer Isaac as a human sacrifice – is surely not something that Terah had set out to do.  But if Abram heard lekh lekha in Genesis 12 as “keep going,” he may also have understand this matching command from God in the same way:  Keep going on the path that you have been following and on the journey that you and your father set out on all those years ago.

Now we must ask:  If lekh lekha means “keep going,” was Abram chosen just because he was headed for Canaan anyway?  Although he had settled down halfway there, perhaps he was chosen because he was the son of Terah, who had made the original decision to go to Canaan.  This would certainly fit in with the motivation that we discovered in Genesis 15, the story of the “covenant between the pieces,” that God seems to want someone who will raise a family to become a nation that will replace the current inhabitants of Canaan.  If so, then we might also wonder whether Abram was chosen because he was the son of Terah and “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

If – though the Bible doesn’t quite tell us this – God’s original choice was Terah, this test in Genesis 22 may have been a way for God to find out something more about Terah’s son, for whom the command at the beginning of Genesis 12 was perhaps not much of a challenge.

There are a lot of things that Genesis 22 doesn't tell us but one of the things it does tell us, in v. 12, is that God has now identified Abraham is the sort of man who fears God.  Is this what God was looking for all along?  Is this the response that God wanted from Abraham or was it just good enough to assure God that the project could continue?

And there is one more question which will have to remain unanswered for now.  Why was it that Terah decided to move to Canaan?  If we understood that, we might understand more about the mysterious back story that the Torah does not quite provide – the reason this family, of all the families of earth, became the people of Israel.