Why did God choose Abraham?
- Westerner: God chooses whoever he wants - doesn't matter why
- Jewish mind: There has to be a reason - the story is written this way for a purpose
Observations
- Terah has 3 sons
- Haran, his third son, dies in Ur of the Chaldeans
- Abram and Nahor take wives or Sarai and Milcah (The daughter of Haran)
- Sarai was barren
- Hebrew grammar is all messed up (see below)
Problems
- Sarai is barren
- Abram is first-born and we're told his wife is barren
- Haran is either not married or his wife is not mentioned
- This would be slightly inconsistent with Milcah and Iscash being mentioned
- The last born son, Haran, is the first listed in the genealogy of Terah
- Also Haran is the one with children before the eldest son is even married
- Milcah is mentioned 3 times but Iscah is only mentioned once
- Iscah is not mentioned later in the story - so what is the reason?
- The barrenness of Sarai is mentioned in a weird spot, should be in the previous verse, 3 ideas before but instead it's tacked onto the end of the wife description of Terah's 3 sons.
- note Nahor married his niece (not unhead of in the ancient world)
Midrash
Teaches that Abram marries Iscah. If you say "Iscah" in a Chaldean tongue it means "my princess" but "Sarai" in Hebrew means "my princess", so there's an idea that Sari and Iscah may be the same person.
Hebrew grammar being messed up (from observations)
- "Abram and Nahor he took wives" (Genesis 11:29)
- "took" is singular
- This same thing is done back in Genesis 9 where Noah's sons, "Shem and Japheth he took blankets"
- You have a plurality of people deciding to do a benevolent thing together - they are of one mind
- First named gets the credit, so Shem gets the credit for this
- So back to the Abram/Nahor thing, then Abram and Nahor are of one mind together, doing a benevolent thing, is to marry their nieces. Their father (Haran) has died who is their protector and it was Abram's idea.
- Abram ought to be the one who gets to choose between Sarai and Milcah and Iscah (who Midrash teaches is the one that Abram picks and she may then be the same person as Sarai - see note below)
- They may not know that Sarai is barren, but it seems that the story is written in a way that presumes it is known... how?
- When a woman menstruates she is given away in marriage because it is the sign her bodyis ready to conceive.
- Doing the math on the story (whatever this means) makes Iscah/Sarai older, not a young girl - so it would be relatively obvious by age and lack of menstruation that she is barren
- Abram is not ever "shocked" that Sarai is barren
- Abram chose the barren daughter, which means that his family line is over.
- At the very least the story is written in a way that wants us to know that she's barren from the onset
- Story so far has a focal point on someone's name (Adam, Eve, Cain, ...) and so we have a man, Abram, who seems to not care much about his own name - he's more interested in someone else...
The backend of the chaism of Genesis 1-11
Abram is a man who knows when to say enough and control himself and this is why God chooses him