Genesis 12: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

The LORD tells Abram to leave his country, his relatives, and his father's house for a land he will be shown, and promises to make him a great nation, to bless him, to make his name great, and that in him all the families of the earth will be blessed. Abram, seventy-five years old, sets out with Sarai, Lot, and all they own and comes into Canaan, where the LORD says he will give the land to Abram's offspring, and Abram builds altars at Sichem and near Bethel. There is a famine, and Abram goes down to Egypt, where he asks Sarai to say she is his sister; she is taken into Pharaoh's house and Abram is treated well and gains livestock and servants. The LORD strikes Pharaoh and his household with great plagues because of Sarai, and Pharaoh questions Abram and has his men send him away with his wife and everything he has.

Claim by Claim

1. 12:1
   • The LORD spoke to Abram.
   • The LORD told Abram to go out from his land.
   • The LORD told Abram to go out from his kindred.
   • The LORD told Abram to go out from his father's house.
   • The LORD told Abram to go to a land that He would show him.
   • The LORD did not name the land at this point.
2. 12:2
   • The LORD said He would make Abram into a great nation.
   • The LORD said He would bless Abram.
   • The LORD said He would make Abram's name great.
   • The LORD told Abram that he would be a blessing.
3. 12:3
   • The LORD said He would bless those who bless Abram.
   • The LORD said He would curse the one who curses Abram.
   • The LORD said that all the families of the ground would be blessed through Abram; the wording can also mean they would bless themselves by him.
4. 12:4
   • Abram went, as the LORD had spoken to him.
   • Lot went with Abram.
   • Abram was seventy-five years old when he left Haran.
5. 12:5
   • Abram took Sarai his wife.
   • Abram took Lot, his brother's son.
   • Abram took all the property they had accumulated.
   • Abram took the persons they had acquired in Haran.
   • They set out to go to the land of Canaan.
   • They arrived in the land of Canaan.
6. 12:6
   • Abram passed through the land as far as the place of Shechem.
   • Abram passed as far as the great tree of Moreh, an oak or terebinth.
   • The Canaanite was in the land at that time.
7. 12:7
   • The LORD appeared to Abram.
   • The LORD said He would give this land to Abram's seed.
   • Abram built an altar there to the LORD.
   • The altar was to the LORD who had appeared to Abram.
8. 12:8
   • Abram moved on from there to the hill country east of Bethel.
   • Abram pitched his tent there.
   • Bethel was to the west of his tent.
   • Ai was to the east of his tent.
   • Abram built an altar there to the LORD.
   • Abram called on the name of the LORD.
9. 12:9
   • Abram set out and kept journeying toward the Negev, the southern region.
10. 12:10
    • There was a famine in the land.
    • Abram went down to Egypt to live there as a resident alien.
    • The famine in the land was severe.
11. 12:11
    • When Abram was about to enter Egypt, he spoke to Sarai his wife.
    • Abram said he knew that Sarai was a woman beautiful in appearance.
12. 12:12
    • Abram said the Egyptians would see Sarai.
    • Abram said the Egyptians would say she was his wife.
    • Abram said they would kill him.
    • Abram said they would let Sarai live.
13. 12:13
    • Abram asked Sarai to say that she was his sister.
    • Abram said this was so that it would go well with him on her account.
    • Abram said this was so that his life would be spared because of her.
14. 12:14
    • Abram came into Egypt.
    • The Egyptians saw the woman.
    • The Egyptians saw that she was very beautiful.
15. 12:15
    • Pharaoh's officials saw her.
    • Pharaoh's officials praised her to Pharaoh.
    • The woman was taken into Pharaoh's house.
16. 12:16
    • Pharaoh treated Abram well for her sake.
    • Abram came to have sheep and goats.
    • Abram came to have cattle.
    • Abram came to have male donkeys.
    • Abram came to have male servants.
    • Abram came to have female servants.
    • Abram came to have female donkeys.
    • Abram came to have camels.
17. 12:17
    • The LORD struck Pharaoh with great plagues.
    • The LORD struck Pharaoh's house with great plagues.
    • The plagues came because of Sarai, Abram's wife.
18. 12:18
    • Pharaoh summoned Abram.
    • Pharaoh asked Abram what he had done to him.
    • Pharaoh asked why Abram had not told him that she was his wife.
19. 12:19
    • Pharaoh asked why Abram had said she was his sister.
    • Pharaoh said that he took her to himself as a wife.
    • Pharaoh told Abram that his wife was there before him.
    • Pharaoh told Abram to take her.
    • Pharaoh told Abram to go.
20. 12:20
    • Pharaoh gave his men orders concerning Abram.
    • They sent Abram away.
    • They sent away Abram's wife.
    • They sent away all that belonged to Abram.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

12:1

"The LORD" in capitals stands in for the personal name of Israel's God, written in Hebrew with four consonants (YHWH). Ancient Jewish practice was to avoid pronouncing it aloud, and English Bibles inherited that by substituting "the LORD." Where the text says "God" instead, a different Hebrew word (Elohim) lies behind it. "Had said" is the King James translators' choice, not a feature of the Hebrew, which simply reads "said." It matters because chapter 11 already has the family leaving Ur for Haran; "had said" makes this command the reason for that earlier move, while the plain Hebrew leaves open that the command came only now, in Haran. Abram is the name he carries until chapter 17, where it is changed to Abraham; his wife Sarai likewise becomes Sarah.

12:2

"Make your name great" means to give someone lasting fame and standing, the same expression used of kings. It is not about a name in the sense of a label. The last clause is grammatically ambiguous in Hebrew: the form can be read as a statement, "and you will be a blessing," or as a command, "and be a blessing."

12:3

The Hebrew uses two different words where English has "curse." The first means to treat someone as light, small, of no account (to belittle or slight. The second is a stronger, formal word for placing someone under a curse. The line reads more exactly: "the one who slights you, I will put under a curse." "In you all the families of the earth will be blessed" is also ambiguous in Hebrew. The verb form can be passive) others receive blessing through Abram, or reflexive, others will bless themselves by his name, that is, they will say "may God make me like Abram" when pronouncing a blessing. Both readings are grammatically available, and translators have divided over them for centuries.

12:4

Haran is a city in the upper Euphrates region, in what is now southern Turkey, a major stop on the trade routes between Mesopotamia and Canaan. In English it looks identical to the name of Abram's dead brother Haran (chapter 11), but the two are spelled differently in Hebrew and are not connected.

12:5

"The people they had acquired in Haran" translates a phrase that literally reads "the souls they had made." "Soul" in Hebrew means a person or a life, not an immaterial part of someone. The people in question are household dependents (servants and slaves, bought or otherwise attached to the family) who were counted as part of a wealthy man's household along with his livestock. Canaan is the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, roughly modern Israel, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon and southwestern Syria.

12:6

Sichem is the King James spelling, taken from Greek, of the town more usually written Shechem. It sits in the central hill country between two mountains, Ebal and Gerizim, about thirty miles north of Jerusalem. The King James "plain of Moreh" is a mistranslation: the Hebrew word means a great tree, an oak or terebinth, not flat ground. Single large trees served as fixed landmarks and as recognized sites for oracles and legal proceedings; "Moreh" means "teacher" or "one who gives direction," which suggests this particular tree was known as a place where guidance was sought. "The Canaanites were in the land at that time" is an aside from the narrator to the reader, noting who already occupied the territory when Abram arrived. It is written from a standpoint later than the events described.

12:7

"Offspring" translates a Hebrew word meaning seed. Like the English word "descendants," it is a collective: singular in form but referring to a line of people extending forward in time. An altar was a raised platform of earth or unworked stone on which animals and other offerings were burned. Building one at a place marked it as a site where the builder's god had been encountered and could be approached.

12:8

Bethel means "house of God" in Hebrew. The narrator uses the name that the site bore in his own day; according to Genesis 28 the town was called Luz at this period. Hai is the King James spelling of the place elsewhere written Ai. "Called on the name of the LORD" is a set phrase meaning to invoke a god by name in worship, calling out to him, and proclaiming his name publicly at that spot. It does not mean a private prayer.

12:9

"Toward the south" renders a Hebrew word, Negev, which is the proper name of a specific dry region in the far south of Canaan, not a compass direction. Because the Negev lay south of the settled hill country, the word came to be used loosely for "southward" as well, but here it names the territory Abram is heading into: semi-arid grazing land, habitable for herdsmen but not for farming.

12:10

"Went down into Egypt" is standard idiom. Travel from the hill country of Canaan to Egypt is described as going down, and travel from Egypt to Canaan as going up, regardless of compass direction, because of the difference in elevation. The same idiom persists throughout the Bible. To "live there for a while" translates a verb meaning to reside as a resident alien: a foreigner permitted to stay in a country without owning land there, dependent on local protection and without the rights of a native. Egypt, watered by the Nile rather than by rainfall, was the standard refuge when the rains failed in Canaan.

12:12

The danger Abram calculates is specific. A husband is an obstacle to be removed if a powerful man wants his wife; a brother is the male relative you negotiate with and pay for a bride. Calling Sarai his sister is meant to turn Abram from a target into a party to a deal.

12:13

The claim is not simply false. According to Genesis 20:12, where Abram uses the same tactic again, Sarai was his half-sister, daughter of his father but not of his mother. Presenting her as his sister rather than his wife leaves her available for marriage negotiations, in which he would figure as the brother whose consent and payment must be obtained, rather than as a husband who would have to be removed first.

12:15

"Pharaoh" is a title, not a personal name. It comes from an Egyptian phrase meaning "great house," originally referring to the palace and then, by extension, to the king who lived in it. Genesis never gives this king's name. "Taken into Pharaoh's house" means taken into the royal household as a wife or concubine. "House" here means both the palace building and the household as an institution.

12:16

This list is a standard inventory of moveable wealth: livestock and slaves. "Male servants and female servants" translates words for owned slaves, not hired employees. Gifts of this kind passed from a groom's side to the woman's family as the marriage payment, so the transfer marks Pharaoh treating Abram as Sarai's brother and legal representative, exactly as Abram had arranged. The mention of camels is often noted as anachronistic: archaeological evidence for domesticated camels in this region is much later than the period the story describes.

12:17

The Hebrew word behind "plagues" means blows or strikes, and is used elsewhere of afflictions of the skin. The text does not specify what the afflictions were, and "plague" in the modern sense of an epidemic disease is narrower than the word allows.

12:19

"So that I took her to be my wife" reflects a Hebrew clause that is genuinely open. It states that Pharaoh took Sarai as a wife, the formal act of adding a woman to the household, but the narrative says nothing about whether the marriage was consummated, and the King James "I might have taken her" is one translator's attempt to leave that open. The ambiguity is in the text, not in the translation.

12:20

The verb translated "sent him away" can carry the sense of escorting under guard as well as of expelling. Pharaoh assigns men to the job, so the departure is supervised rather than voluntary, Abram leaves Egypt keeping the wealth he had been given.