Abraham's family came out of Ur, a wealthy city near the Persian Gulf, and settled for a time in Haran far to the north. Cities like these had paved streets, written contracts, schools for scribes, and towering step-temples called ziggurats where the moon-god was honored. Leaving that world for a tent was a step down in comfort and status, not up.
The patriarchs lived as herdsmen moving between wells and pastures in Canaan. Their wealth was counted in sheep, goats, cattle, silver, and servants. Water rights, grazing rights, and burial rights were the great disputes of such a life, which is why buying a cave for Sarah's grave (Genesis 23) is told with the careful detail of a legal deed, weighed silver and named witnesses included.
Many customs in Genesis match what archaeologists have found in ancient family records: a childless wife giving her servant to her husband to bear an heir, a birthright that could be traded away, a father's spoken blessing that carried the weight of a will. Covenants were cut by killing animals and passing between the pieces, so that the walk itself said, "let this happen to me if I break my word."
Egypt enters the story at the end. It was the granary of the ancient world, fed by the Nile's yearly flood, run by officials who stored grain against famine and by a Pharaoh worshiped as a god. Foreign Semites really did rise to high office there, and herdsmen from Canaan really were let in to graze during famine years, which is exactly where Genesis leaves Israel: settled in Goshen, and about to be enslaved.
