This article is Part 5 of the FAI Publishing series Seeds and Generations, a Biblical survey of the theology of “Seed” and “Generation” throughout redemptive history to the end of the age.
ONCE UNITED, NOW DIVIDED
Five generations had passed since the tongues of mankind were confused at Babel.[1] Garbled communication had acted as a centrifugal force, alienating clan from clan, and pushing them outward from the plain of Shinar. In time, humanity was separated both linguistically and geographically.
As three centuries passed, clans became nations. Linguistic groups became ethnic groups. The fantasy of a united, unstoppable humanity building to the heavens was reduced to the reality of a divided humanity wandering the Earth and competing for land and resources. The Japhethite nations were the most prolific and adventurous, spreading north, west and east across the Asian and European continents. The sons of Ham migrated westward and southward into Arabia, Canaan and Africa. But the offspring of Shem stayed largely within the Biblical heartland, as if anticipating that the next battle in the War of the Two Seeds would unfold there. This was true, except when that battle came, it would not be an epic display of global floods and towers to heaven. Instead, it would be a subtle move, a singular figure, a clandestine incursion into enemy territory. And it would begin with a call for one man to “Go…”
FROM BABYLON TO HEBRON
“Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”[2]
Abram was mourning the death of his father Terah when he received his great commission. Descendants of Shem and his great-grandson Eber,[3] Abram and his wife Sarai were natives of the city of Ur, just south of Babylon, before moving 600 miles (960 km) north with his father and brothers to Haran in modern-day Turkey. It was in Haran that Abram’s father died, and Abram heard the voice of the Lord.
“Go from your kindred and your father’s house to the land I will show you.” Without a destination or the support of his clan, Abram “went, as the Lord had told him”[4] with nothing but the promise that the Lord would “show him” the Land where he should go. And so, Abram struck out, travelling over 1400 miles (2250 km) through modern Turkey and Syria, before arriving at the Oak of Mamre in modern Hebron. It was a dangerous trek into hostile territory, for “at that time, the Canaanites were in the Land.”[5] As a stranger in a strange land, Abram found himself surrounded by the descendants of Ham’s cursed son, Canaan. Nonetheless, Abram pitched his tents there, as a sheep among wolves, and received another revelation from the One who had called him:
“Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, ‘To your offspring I will give this land.’”[6]
The One who walked with Adam in the Garden, who cried out for the blood of Abel, who took Enoch, and who preserved Noah, now “appeared” to Abram to confirm that the meaning of his name was no accident. The “exalted father” would be the progenitor of a blessed Offspring, a Promised Seed,[7] the Champion of a “great nation,” whose very existence would evoke both Divine blessing and cursing for the nations of the Earth. The man Abram responded as his fathers Abel, Enoch, and Noah before him, in the spirit of the Seed of the Woman, when he “built an altar to the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord.”[8]
A FIRE BETWEEN THE PIECES
Soon after his sojourn began in Mamre, in an act of gracious humility, Abram forfeit the fertile plains of the Jordan Valley, deferring to his nephew Lot, and once again received the Word of Promise a second time in greater detail:
“Lift up your eyes and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward, for all the land that you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever. I will make your offspring as the dust of the earth, so that if one can count the dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted. Arise, walk through the length and the breadth of the land, for I will give it to you.”[9]
And again, following an act of courage to rescue his imperiled nephew, Abram stood witness to the consummation of the thrice-made promise, the cutting of an Eternal Covenant, which guaranteed the arrival of the Promised Seed:
“When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces [of the animals]. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, ‘To your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebusites.’’[10]
And so, the Lord staked a cosmic claim in the earthly soil, forever bonding the Seed of Abraham to the Land of Promise. But the inheritance of the Land by Abram’s Seed would require the displacement of the seed of Canaan. By placing Abram in the Land, the Lord was placing enmity between the Seed of the Woman and the seed of the serpent.
The confrontation between Abraham's Seed and the surrounding nations was looming over the horizon. However, little did Abraham know that greatest, age-ending enmity for the Covenant would not come from outside his tents, but from within them.
Gabe Caligiuri is a regular contributor to THE WIRE publication and podcast, as well as an occasional contributor to other FAI digital content on the subjects of history and geopolitics as they relate to the Great Commission. Gabe and his family live in California.
[1] There are five generations between Peleg “in whose days the earth was divided” and Abram, according to Genesis 5:25.
[2] Genesis 12:1-3
[3] Genesis 11:10-26
[4] Genesis 12:4
[5] Genesis 12:6
[6] Genesis 12:7
[7] The Apostle Paul clarifies that the Lord’s promise to Abram was regarding a singular Seed (Galatians 3:16)
[8] Genesis 12:8
[9] Genesis 13:14-17
[10] Genesis 15:17-21