Thirty years ago William L. Holladay wrote in these pages that the narrative of Genesis 12:1–9 was “stripped bare” by its authors in order to tell a simple story: God commands Abram to go, and Abram goes (“A new beginning: Abram,” May 22–29, 1996). Certainly we are given some detail in the story. We are told where Abram goes as he leaves his family land in Haran, and we can easily trace his movements through the land of Canaan. We are told what Abram leaves behind (his country, his kin, and his “father’s house”) and who and what he takes with him (his possessions, his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, and the people he had “acquired”—the servants, slaves, or dependents who are unnamed but might number in the tens or even hundreds). We are told that God goes with Abram, holding out the promise of blessing, protection, security, and belonging. But collectively, all these narrative details do seem to reinforce this single, simple point: God commands Abram to go, and Abram goes.
It is this faithful going—recorded without hesitation, question, or protest—that makes this story the thematic center of the Torah for Hebrew Bible scholar Bruce Waltke. It is a profound moment of covenant-making between God and God’s people. It shifts the brokenness of the story that precedes it: the Fall, the flood, and the tower at Babel. It marks a new beginning, a restored and unshakable relationship between God and humanity, not only Abram or Abram’s family but “all the families of the earth.” In a book about Romans, New Testament scholar Rafael Rodríguez argues that this passage shapes the whole of the biblical record, which is ultimately oriented around the call to a faithful life unhesitatingly oriented to the voice of God. As Walter Brueggemann writes, it is a voice that calls Abram from nothing into “a new future” and “a new community” wrought “only by miracle and reliant only to God’s faithfulness.”
As I sit with this passage and the interpretations of these scholars, I am moved by the symbolic and thematic importance of this story as it profoundly narrates God’s covenant being made with God’s people. It is a story that makes central the work of God’s faithful calling and Abram’s faithful going. But it is also a story that calls me back into it. It calls me to reread, to pause, to stay awhile in this ancient moment—and as I linger there, I begin to wonder about all the things that are missing, that are not recorded in the biblical tale.
