After God scatters and disinherits the rebellious people of Babel in Shinar (between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers), he purposes to start a new nation with one who will remain faithful to him, Abram. God calls Abram’s family out of Ur to live in and inherit the land of Canaan. (Genesis 10-11)
There is more than one ancient city in the vicinity of the Tigris and Euphrates named Ur, so scholars debate about which one Genesis refers to. One candidate lies along the Euphrates in the southeast as it approaches the Persian Gulf. Extensive archaeological excavations have revealed a large city with canals, residential and government buildings, and a well-preserved ziggurat. Another, more recently identified candidate lies close to modern Harran, which may make it the most likely of the possibilities.
Any time we put an ancient name on a map, we invite controversy. These are drawn from multiple sources, many of which can be found in our Resources page. All Bible quotations taken and edited for size from NET.
Genesis 11 - Terah became the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran. And Haran became the father of Lot. Haran died in the land of his birth, in Ur of the Chaldeans…
Terah took his son Abram…and…set out from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan. When they came to Haran, they settled there.
Although the route Abram takes into the land is not specified, the locations he first visits suggest his grandson Jacob later follows in Abram’s footsteps, so we borrow from Jacob’s story and the locations of ancient roads to fill in Abram’s detail.
Genesis 12 - Abram took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot… entered the land of Canaan.
Abram traveled through the land as far as the oak tree of Moreh at Shechem.
Abram moves south through the land, stopping at locations that will reappear throughout Israel’s national history. In each place he builds an altar to the Lord near trees, water, or a view of lush vegetation, recalling Eden, where God met with man.
Genesis 12 - Then he moved from there to the hill country east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east.
Abram continually journeyed by stages down to the Negev.
There was a famine in the land, so Abram went down to Egypt
Pharaoh gave his men orders about Abram, and so they expelled him
Abram’s journey to Egypt in a famine prefigures his descendants leaving the land God promised as their inheritance for a foreign land. He meets a foreign woman (the Egyptian Hagar’s name literally means “the foreigner”) who he eventually has a relationship with. Disaster follows. All of these elements return in future stories.
Genesis 13 - Abram went up from Egypt into the Negev
…he journeyed from place to place from the Negev as far as Bethel. He returned to the place where he had pitched his tent at the beginning, between Bethel and Ai.
After his expulsion from Egypt by its ruler, who here fits the pattern of the seed of the serpent, an enemy of God, Abram returns to Bethel, the “house of God".
He and Lot agree to part ways because their flocks are in competition with each other for scarce resources. They view the Jordan River valley from a high place near Bethel. Lot moves down into the valley in the vicinity of the city of Sodom. There are five named cities near Sodom, sometimes called the cities of the plain. Scholars differ on the location of Sodom, some arguing it is to the south of the Dead Sea, others to the north. The northern location makes the most sense with this story, though later ones may cause you to reconsider.
Genesis 13 - Lot looked up and saw the whole region of the Jordan. He noticed that all of it was well watered…like the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt, all the way to Zoar. Lot chose for himself the whole region of the Jordan and traveled toward the east.
After they part, God tells Abram to walk through the land, for he will give it to Abram. Abram travels down to stay near the city of Hebron. As he is living there, a coalition of kings from the vicinity of the Euphrates River sets out on a military campaign to punish treaty violators among peoples to Abram’s east including Sodom, where Lot lives.
Many of the names of the clans the coalition seeks to punish occur only two places in the Bible: here in Genesis 14 and in Deuteronomy 2, where Moses associates them with the powerful, tall Anakites who, in that time, live in Hebron. Deuteronomy appears to group all these peoples under the name Rephaites or Rephaim. As with many of the seed of the serpent figures in the biblical narrative, we do not have a lot of specific detail about them. We are left with the sense though that they are powerful, evil enemies of God’s people. Abram’s and Lot’s descendants drive them out of their lands and settle there.
Interestingly, the path the coalition of kings takes is roughly the same though in the opposite direction of the path the Israelites, Abram’s descendants, will take in Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua as they approach the land of Canaan to occupy it as their inheritance promised through Abram. In Numbers 21, the Israelites encounter Og of Bashan, who Joshua 13 tells us was among the last of the Rephaim, in the same area that the five kings fight the Rephaim in Abram’s day. They also fight the Amorites, the people Abram lives with in Hebron. In Deuteronomy, the Rephaim are enemies, yet here in Genesis, Abram is loosely allied with them.
Genesis 14 - At that time Amraphel king of Shinar, Arioch king of Ellasar, Kedorlaomer king of Elam, and Tidal king of nations went to war against Bera king of Sodom, Birsha king of Gomorrah, Shinab king of Admah, Shemeber king of Zeboyim, and the king of Bela (that is, Zoar). These last five kings joined forces in the Valley of Siddim (that is, the Salt Sea)…Kedorlaomer and the kings who were his allies came and defeated the Rephaites in Ashteroth Karnaim, the Zuzites in Ham, the Emites in Shaveh Kiriathaim, and the Horites in their hill country of Seir, as far as El Paran, which is near the desert. Then they attacked En Mishpat (that is, Kadesh) again, and they conquered all the territory of the Amalekites, as well as the Amorites who were living in Hazezon Tamar.
Then the king of Sodom, the king of Gomorrah, the king of Admah, the king of Zeboyim, and the king of Bela (that is, Zoar) went out and prepared for battle. In the Valley of Siddim they met Kedorlaomer king of Elam, Tidal king of nations, Amraphel king of Shinar, and Arioch king of Ellasar. Four kings fought against five. Now the Valley of Siddim was full of tar pits. When the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled, they fell into them, but some survivors fled to the hills.
Lot’s city Sodom loses the battle, and the coalition of kings takes him captive. We suddenly learn that Abram has a small army of trained men. They chase down the coalition and rescue the captives.
Genesis 14 - …Now Abram was living by the oaks of Mamre the Amorite, the brother of Eshcol and Aner…When Abram heard that his nephew had been taken captive, he mobilized his 318 trained men who had been born in his household, and he pursued the invaders as far as Dan. …He chased them as far as Hobah, which is north of Damascus.
After Abram returned from defeating Kedorlaomer…the king of Sodom went out to meet Abram in the Valley of Shaveh (known as the King’s Valley). Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine.
At the city of Salem, there is a priest-king who serves God, Melchizedek. He comes out to meet Abram, to bless him, and to assure him that God was with him in his rescue of the captives. Abram is now a regional power, recognized by the kings of surrounding cities.
Genesis 15 - the Lord made a covenant with Abram: “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates River— the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, and Jebusites.”
The “river of Egypt” makes several appearances in the Bible as a border of Israel. There is a long seasonal stream, today called Wadi al-Arish, in the northeast Sinai peninsula, which may be the best candidate. At times, it is not clear whether this stream or the Nile River is the more accurate interpretation, and it may be that the biblical authors sometimes intentionally leave the issue ambiguous in prophetic language to suggest more than one idea at once. In an earlier post on the geography of Genesis 1-11, we saw that Genesis 2 associates the river that flows through Cush (which could be received as the Nile River) and the Euphrates River with Eden. Here, the river of Egypt and the Euphrates are borders of the land God is promising Abram as an inheritance.
In the image below, the white area in the lower left/southwest that leads from the mountains to the sea is the Wadi al-Arish, thought by some scholars to be the river of Egypt.
Genesis 16 - The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring of water in the wilderness—the spring that is along the road to Shur….the well was called Beer Lahai Roi. (It is located between Kadesh and Bered.)
When Abram’s wife Sarai decided she no longer wanted to wait for God to give them the son he had promised them, she told Abram to try to have one with her servant Hagar, an Egyptian. When Sarai mistreats her, there are cultural and geographical ideas in play. Hagar appears to flee with her son (and Abram’s) to the edge of the territory God is promising Abram’s descendants back toward Egypt where she is from. God sees and talks with her, and she returns for now to Hebron and Abram’s family.
At Hebron, God meets with Abram, gives him the name Abraham, promises him a son with Sarai-now named Sarah, and tells Abraham that he is going down to judge Sodom, one of the cities of the plain we have seen above. Though there are several proposed sites, the location of Sodom is not known, so I have not attempted to show the locations in the destruction of Sodom and Lot’s escape.
After Isaac is born, Sarah orders Abraham to exile Hagar and their son Ishmael. Abraham complies, and she once again travels to the wilderness on the edge of the border of the promise to Abraham and Egypt. Ishmael eventually settles in Paran to the southeast.
Genesis 20 - Abraham journeyed from there to the Negev region and settled between Kadesh and Shur. While he lived as a temporary resident in Gerar
…Abimelech said, “Look, my land is before you; live wherever you please.”
Genesis 21 - Hagar…went wandering aimlessly through the wilderness of Beer Sheba.
…Ishmael…lived in the wilderness of Paran. His mother found a wife for him from the land of Egypt.
[Abraham and Abimelech] made a treaty at Beer Sheba; then Abimelech and Phicol, the commander of his army, returned to the land of the Philistines. Abraham planted a tamarisk tree in Beer Sheba…So Abraham stayed in the land of the Philistines for quite some time.
Abraham deals with the king of Gerar as he had with the pharaoh of Egypt, however Abimelech responds righteously, putting Abraham to shame. He lets Abraham stay in his territory because he sees that God blesses Abraham.
Abraham receives a shocking command from God and travels to Mount Moriah with Isaac to fulfill it. Mount Moriah is apparently in the immediate vicinity of Melchizedek’s Salem, where God blessed Abraham after a successful hostage rescue of Lot and the people of Sodom. Now God asks Abraham to sacrifice his own son there. Abraham complies, apparently understanding that it is a test and that God will provide.
Genesis 22 - …after these things God tested Abraham...“Take your son—your only son, whom you love, Isaac—and go to the land of Moriah!”
On the third day Abraham caught sight of the place in the distance.
Abraham returned to his servants, and they set out together for Beer Sheba where Abraham
stayed.
After the averted sacrifice episode, we learn that Abraham and his servants return to Beersheba, but Isaac is not mentioned.
Sarah dies, and Abraham negotiates the purchase of a cave and field in the vicinity of Hebron, so he can own the land where he buries her.
When Abraham dies, Ishmael and Isaac also bury him there.