Vineri We know that God asked Abraham to leave the most advanced city where he lived at that time in order to take possession of his “lot” which God had assigned to him. We do not know how Abraham imagined that land to be, but his arrival to the destination is described by the Bible in the following words:
“And Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb. Now there was a famine in the land. So Abram went down to Egypt to reside there as an alien, for the famine was severe in the land. When he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, ‘I know well that you are a woman beautiful in appearance; and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, «This is his wife»; then they will kill me, but they will let you live. Say you are my sister, so that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared on your account’” (Gen 12:9-13).
For those who are not familiar with the geography of the Middle East, Abraham came from the North and crossed all Palestine to arrive to Negeb, which names the desert which makes the South of the country, reason for which negeb means also South in Hebrew. He left the most prosperous and advanced city to receive his “lot” promised by God only to discover that his “lot” was actually a desert. If Abraham expected God to welcome him in the promised land with milk and honey, when he was welcomed with a severe famine he must have thought that God was pretty cynical. Of course, there were some better parts in the land as Lot had noticed: “Lot looked about him, and saw that the plain of the Jordan was well watered everywhere like the garden of the LORD, like the land of Egypt” (Gen 13:10). While Lot was satisfied with a “lot” that was “like the land of Egypt,” Abraham decided not to mess up with cheep imitations of Egypt but to go for the real thing. He did not want just any civilization; he wanted the cream of it.
Unlike Lot who thought that civilization was just a piece of cake to enjoy, Abraham understood that the journey to civilization involved risks and sacrifices. He realized that if he wanted to live in the greatest civilization, he had to risk his own life to get there and he told his beautiful wife that if any powerful men who always rule over civilizations wanted her, she should tell everyone that she was not married and therefore she was available to provide some fun. Why would anyone in his right mind want do that? Is this story about a man who did not mind if other men had fun with his beautiful wife or is it about something else? How beautiful was Sarah anyway? If Sarah was so stunningly sexy that any powerful man would kill her husband in order to have her, how come that none of the powerful men whose territories Abraham had crossed during his long journeys noticed Sarah’s sexiness and left Abraham alive? If Abraham was 75 when he left Ur of Chaldea and Sarah was 10 years younger, Sarah must have been at least 65 if not 75 when they arrived in Negeb, the most southern part of Canaan. How sexy can a woman be at over 65 during the bronze age when nomads never used even moisturizers let alone cosmetic surgeries? And how come that Abraham was never afraid to travel in Canaan where people like those in Sodom would lynch foreigners no matter whether they had beautiful wives or not and suddenly he was afraid to travel to the greatest civilization which even today admired and worshiped by our scholars and historians?
As the Bible makes clear, Abraham decided to risk his life and sacrifice his family not because his life and family were under any threat in Negeb or that he was under any threat of starvation in spite of the famine, but because there was more abundance in Egypt. He was willing to trade his life and family for more food, or to put it in our language, “for a few dollars more.” The Bible uses Abraham to describe a pattern of thinking that moved uncountable number of people from places of poverty to places of abundance risking and often losing their own lives. Whether people left Romania crossing the Danube River swimming or left Cuba crossing the Atlantic Ocean on inner tubes or left Africa to cross the Mediterranean Sea in rotten boats, or left Mexico trying to cross the Arizona desert on foot without any resources, they all knew that they would risk their lives with the hope that they would earn and own several times more than they were able to do in their own country. They were “economic migrants,” people who would do anything for a few dollars or euros more. How many died on such journeys no one will ever know but even those who made it, they knew that after they arrived in their promised land their life would be “illegal” so that any citizen of the civilized country would have the right, indeed, the patriotic duty, to kill them or hand them over to the authorities to put them in jail no matter whether they had any wife at all. Those who were married had to follow their jobs and a better payment which meant that their marriage had to go out of the window if their jobs did not allow them to be together. Although there may have been hungry people in Negeb, Abraham was not one of them. The poorest people never migrate because they cannot afford to therefore economic migrants are always the most skilled, the most hard working, and the most resourceful. Because economic migrants are the most profitable people, they are the work force by whom all civilizations are built. They provide the cheap labor to create all the “values” cherished by “civilized people”: abundance of food, services, entertainment, large and comfortable homes, and monumental buildings like the Tower of Babel, the Pyramids, skyscrapers, and so on. “Civilized” people like the “values” and the services which economic migrants provide but despise and hate them because they are dirty, uneducated, cannot speak their pure language, take away their jobs which they do not like anyway, and are dangerous. We know that Abraham was a pastoralist and that the Egyptians hated pastoralists. They liked the milk and the meet which sheep provided but did not like the smell of sheep and of shepherds. Abraham went to Egypt to get more food only to discover that he was an expert on producing food providing it to the Egyptians who took great pride in the fact that they would not get their hands dirty with such lowly pursuits. Eventually he was classified as a dangerous foreigner and got expelled from Egypt when the Egyptian ruler decided to cleanse that great civilization of those dirty foreigners who were ruining their great country and were destroying their “values.” Abraham not only was glad to leave Egypt, but never wanted to go back, and when Lot later chose to live in Sodom because it was “like the land of Egypt,” Abraham did not have the slightest interest for such places. If he wanted to live in a place where God blessed him, he knew that God cannot bless such places.
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