Before Hagar gave birth to Ishmael, a major event that would have gargantuan consequences took place. The Lord entered into a covenant with Abraham and He formalized it in typical Middle Eastern fashion. What do I mean by that? Well, according to the procedures of those times, an animal was sacrificed, chopped up into two […]

Abraham is back in Canaan after his brief stay in Egypt but he needs to move on. Why? Because he needs to find new pasturelands for his flock of animals. He gathers his clan and eventually settles in a fertile desert oasis called Beersheba. Understand that at this point in time, Sarah still had not […]

“A man who had escaped came and reported this to Abram the Hebrew. Now Abram was living near the great trees of Mamre the Amorite, a brother of Eshkoland Aner, all of whom were allied with Abram.”-Genesis 14:13 Did you know the first time we encounter the word “Hebrew” is in Genesis 14:13 (copied above)? […]

After peaceful old Abraham returned to the land of Canaan, he suddenly found himself having to take up the mantle of a warrior leader. What happened was that several city-state rulers descended from an area east of Canaan and decided to wage war against five Canaanite kings in the region where Abraham was living. Now […]

Compared to the Fertile Crescent from where Abraham hailed, life was rough in the land of Canaan. Why? Because being able to survive was directly connected to the soil. This means everything depended on the rainfall which sometimes came and sometimes didn’t. Minus the rain, there could be no crops or land that could be […]