Dear Lot,
I don’t know if this will be my only letter to you or if
you will get a second. In this letter I want to focus on your early years With
Abram, how it was for you as a young person being looked after by your uncle,
and being forced to become a migrant as a result of famine.
I know that after Abram had been called and God had
promised to make a great nation from him and his kindred (Gen 12: 1-3) you went
travelling with him. Were you already nomadic or were you based in a settlement
and taken on a journey which forced you in to a different way of life?
It must have been a dangerous journey but I guess you
were reassured to some extent by knowing you had the blessing of God who was
guiding you. I wonder what the worship times were like and whether you were
involved in building the altars, like the one at Moreh and Bethel (Gen 12:6-8).
It seems there was already a oak by which Moreh was known and I wonder if like
in this country places to worship our God were built where other earth based
worship already occurred?
Then the famine came. I guess things must have been so
desperate for you to move out of the lands which you familiar with and felt
safe in and to go to Egypt as aliens. The risks involved must have been huge
and I am sure you would not have undertaken the journey and the hardship which
went with it unless it was the only course of action you saw which would lead
to survival.
How did the Egyptians react to you initially? I am sure
you can’t have been the only people making that journey. Were there lots of
you? What was the situation like? At the moment we are seeing pictures of
desperate people fleeing from various places for a range of reasons. Was it
like that around you? Obviously there was the famine but were other people
fleeing from abuse or war? What were the stories you heard on the road?
It must have been so weird to know that your aunt and
uncle were married but to be told to pretend that your aunt was his sister. I
guess they used that partly because it avoided you using the wrong terms for
them if you had words like auntie and uncle then. I get the feeling from Gen
12:11 that Sarai was a bit of a stunner and that she was not afraid to use that
to the advantage of you all. How did you feel about what was going on? It must
have been quite off putting to see your auntie flirting but at the same time
you benefitted from it and your life must have been a lot more comfortable than
it had been for a while.
What was it like after Pharaoh’s house got the great
plagues? That must have been scary for you all if you didn’t get what was going
on, that feeling of were you going to die next? When and how did Pharaoh find
out? Did someone let it slip?
That all seems a bit of an OTT reaction from God, sending
plagues. Again I hope to some extent this is a tale which has only emerged as a
result of having to explain a natural disaster. This one I find interesting
though because one could look at it as a morality tale. If and it’s a big if
Sarai actually slept with Pharaoh he may have got a sexually transmitted
disease which caused the spread of the plagues. Could the moral of this story
to be to teach the consequences sexual immorality could have on the wider
population and to be careful because you never knew if the person you were
sleeping with or pursuing was telling the truth. It probably wasn’t the reading
at the time but I can see that as a way which might be useful in the society I
live in today.
It seems really wrong to me that Abram and Sarai’s lie
causes the problem but the Egyptians suffered and then had to pay Abram off to
go away. I’m going to be writing to them myself in coming letters but I do
wonder what sort of people they actually were. Yes, they were obviously holy in
some sense because God chose them and used them as he did but to be honest they
also seem to be very much far from perfect and a couple of people who the more
I study in depth the less respect I have for.
It’s interesting that as we move into Gen 13 you guys become
too rich to stay in one place and that you become a migrant again for another
reason, so the land can support and sustain you.
It sounds that as you went off to live your own life away
from your relatives that you were doing quite well and you sought to make a
sensible decision about where to choose.
However, I know that things didn’t go quite to plan and
that you ended up in an area where people were invading one another and taking
hostages and so on. What was it like when you got captured? Gen 14v 13 says
they took you as well as the goods, what was it like being held? Were you a
hostage or were you just waiting to die? Not sure why they didn’t kill you immediately
to be honest. Good job that you managed to get to Abram.
I’m really disturbed about the view of women this story
demonstrates though in Gen 14 v 16 when it says you your goods, women and
people were saved too. Women are people! Was it they were viewed as less than
human only slightly better than animals then? That’s awful, I am thankful that
for all the problems that exist I live in a culture where that view does not
prevail. Yet, I know there are places where that verse would not be shocking
and that presents a whole set of problems about how to engage whilst being
culturally sensitive.
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