Fear No Fear

(All scripture from the World English Bible, ebible.org, all rights reserved)

“Abraham traveled from there toward the land of the South, and lived between Kadesh and Shur. He lived as a foreigner in Gerar. Abraham said about Sarah his wife, “She is my sister.” Abimelech king of Gerar sent, and took Sarah.”
(Genesis 20:1-2)

The devil does not want God’s plans to succeed. He will do everything he can to derail them. Abraham had spent the last twenty-odd years living in Mamre. Now, for reasons we do not know, he left and went into a portion of the Land that he did not feel safe in. Instead of relying on God, and instead of leaving his trust in the Lord, Abraham defaulted back to an ungodly scheme. He used white-ish lies to protect himself by claiming Sarah was his sister only and not his wife. This is HUGE at this point because Sarah was pregnant with Abraham’s child. If she was taken into Abimelech’s household and he slept with her, there would always be a question of who the father was. Worse, any child she had could be claimed by Abimelech and raised in his household. They were on the brink of having God’s plans derailed and doubt forever hovering over His promises.

Sarah was around ninety years old at this time – and still desirable enough Abraham feared for his life. Sarah would need to trust in God to protect her in this circumstance. No one else could. She had been taken out of her husband’s hands and power. But Sarah DID believe in the promises of God (Hebrews 11:11). I believe she kept her focus on that and not where she was or on what could happen to her.

The sage Radak writes: ‘ויסע משם, from Eloney Mamre, the place where he resided most of the time. The Torah fails to mention what prompted Avraham to leave his home in this fashion. It could not have been due to the famine, seeing that at that time no famine is reported as having existed in that region, as opposed to when Yitzchok left his home and went to the land of the Philistines as reported in 26,1. Seeing that in that connection the Torah referred to this famine as being additional to the one in the days of Avraham, and we know that at that time Avraham went to Egypt and did not settle in the region between Kadesh and Shur, we cannot attribute his move to a famine. Perhaps what motivated Avraham was the need to fulfill the commandment by G’d to dwell in all parts of the land of Canaan. The Torah would indicate, obliquely, that the land of the Philistines was included in what G’d had described as “the land of Canaan,” even though the Philistines were distant descendants of Mitzrayim, a grandson of Cham but not directly descended from Canaan. Eventually, the coastal plain inhabited by the Philistines became part of the tribal territory of Yehudah. This may be why the Torah refers to this as ארצה הנגב, the southern region, seeing that Yehudah’s territory is described as the southern part of the country in Joshua chapter15. וישב בין קדש ובין שור, the Torah did not bother to tell us precisely where Avraham settled. Later on, we are told that he settled in Gerar, the capital of the land of the Philistines. The part of the verse mentioning this fact is not related to the earlier part of the verse. Besides, the terms וישב and ויגר are totally different from one another, the former speaking of someone settling down with a view to remaining there for a long period, whereas the term ויגר always reflects the intention of the person described to remain there only for a relatively brief period of time, as for instance in Genesis 37,1 where when Yaakov settled down, the Torah contrasts this with the fact that his father and grandfather could not settle down there permanently but had only sojourned there,מגורי אביו. It is customary for Scripture to employ different words when repeating basically the same message. Perhaps, initially, Avraham had settled in one of the locations in the regions such as באר לחי רואי, subsequently moving to Gerar, seeing that באר לחי רואי was situated between Kadesh and Shur, as we know from Genesis 16,4. ויאמר…אל שרה אשתו, concerning his wife Sarah he told anyone inquiring about her אחותי היא, he told the same to Avimelech who inquired, as we know from verse 5 when the latter referred to Avraham having told him that Sarah was his sister. We find a similar meaning of the word אל in Samuel I 17,49 when the lineויך את הפלשתי אל מצחו, means: “it struck the Philistine on his forehead,” or the line אל ההרים לא אכל in Ezekiel 18,6 where the word אל does not mean “to” but the line means: “if he has not eaten on the mountains.” Avraham said this as soon as he arrived in Gerar, as he had heard that the people of that town were wicked people, as he mentioned to Avimelech in verse 11 where he told him that there was no fear of G’d in that town. A generation later Yitzchok had a similar experience in Gerar. Neither Avraham nor Yitzchok are on record as having made similar comments about the local populations of other towns they visited. As to why Avraham risked going to a town full of wicked people and endangered both himself and his wife, this is something we discussed in 12,12. What is more surprising is the fact that Sarah, so many years after her experience in Egypt, was still so physically attractive that she inspired physical passions among the people who saw her. Clearly, her good looks must have been the result of her regaining her youthful vigour when she became pregnant at the time the angels visited Avraham, and she herself remarked on that phenomenon. The time frame in which the events reported in this chapter occurred must have been immediately after the beginning of her pregnancy, mentioned in 21,1 in the past tense, i.e. וה’ פקד את שרה, “and the Lord had benevolently remembered Sarah (allowing her to become pregnant).’

The sage Rav Hirsch writes: ‘V. 2. As here we see Abraham, in spite of his previous experience, and, later on his son Isaac too, deciding to resort to the same device, we must take it that the manners of the time made it imperative. As we have already remarked above, unmarried virgins must have been much safer amongst the people than married women (a state of affairs which unfortunately is not unknown in our so-called cultured society, where men think twice before seducing an innocent virgin, but have no such compunction for married women I.L.). It seems to have been only princes that just unmarried strangers had reason to fear. And actually it was again only a king that dared to take her, and who later on has no scruples in admitting it.’