This post is part of my ongoing series of writing down my thoughts on the Bible passages I read each day. Some days I hope to have great insight that the Lord gives me, and many days, I will likely struggle through the text and not know what to write down based on what I read. My hope and prayer is that as I make this a habit, just as I did daily writing for so long, that I will improve on my ability to read and understand the passages I’m reading. Please keep in mind that many of these posts may be published late at night or with little time studying and simply be my first thoughts after reading. This is in no way a commentary that one should use to discern the Bible, but my own personal thoughts.
Back in Genesis today made me think through several interesting things about beginnings. Reading through some of these stories realizing this would have been the first time these kinds of events had ever happened before. For example, in chapter 14, it talks about kings going to war with each other. He mentions I think over 6 kings of different kingdoms, including the kingdoms of Sodom and Gomorrah (kingdoms which are widely talked about in later passages and remembered in history because of their destruction brought forth by God).
I realized that not only was this probably some of the first all-out battles of kingdoms but maybe even some of the first kings. Though perhaps people like Nimrod, who were mentioned in the 10th chapter of Genesis, were also king-like figures. In fact, before the days of Noah, there could have been very many kings, but we don’t know stories from any of their lives, and from the sounds of things in the time of Noah, it sounds like they might not be the most uplifting stories.
It’s also odd because it talks about Pharoh in this passage, as Abram sojourns there and deceives Pharoh into thinking that Sarai is his sister and not his wife so that he is not killed. This doesn’t end well for Pharoh, but that’s beside the point I was trying to make.
The point is, when we think of a Pharoh of Egypt, we probably think of the Pharoh of Egypt during Moses’ time, where there may have been tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Egyptians there. But in based on the genealogies provided by Genesis 5 and Genesis 11, we can know that Shem would have been 98 years old when the flood happened and following Abram’s family tree back to Shem, we see that there were 392 years between the Flood and Abram’s birth (which by the way means that Shem was alive during Abraham’s time, and actually outlived him by over three decades). All this to say that Egypt was likely much smaller than we normally think of it. Maybe even only a couple of hundred people. There may be experts who know much better what this might have looked like, and as I think about it, 392 years is another 150 years longer than the US has been around, so maybe it was huge. Who knows!
The history in the Bible during this time is incredibly fascinating to me because after we get to Abraham, we pretty much have detailed records of things that happened almost every century after this. There are a few that are skipped, but not like in the first 11-12 chapters of Genesis. We pass entire millennia with hardly anything at all being told to us about what life was like.
It’s an incredible history that we have of this time and I’m very thankful for it.