The Patriarchs

Three verses after the first altar, a famine sends him to Egypt and he coaches Sarah to say she is his sister — the promise-bearer trading his wife for his own safety.

Sarai acts after Abram had dwelt ten years in the land of Canaan (Genesis 16:3), and the verdict on him is one clause long: Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai. Ishmael is born in relay year 86 — fourteen years before the promised son.

He laughs face-down; she laughs behind the tent door. The son's name, Isaac, keeps the laugh on the record permanently.

At Gerar he says it again, to Abimelech. Genesis places the episode immediately before Isaac's birth, so this is not a young man's failure — it is a repeat offence committed within a year of the promised son arriving.

The command is aimed exactly at the promise: thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest. Everything God had sworn now lies bound on the wood Abraham cut himself.

Married at forty, a father at sixty — the ages themselves fix the wait at twenty years. The seed-promise, in its second generation, hangs on a prayer.

He said, She is my sister — the same sentence, the same city, the same fear. Genesis records the inherited sin as plainly as the inherited blessing.

Isaac loved Esau, because he did eat of his venison. The split household that follows is stated as a matter of appetite.

Blind, deceived by goatskins and his wife's cooking, he gives the great blessing to the wrong son by his own reckoning — and to the right one by God's.

He does not steal it; he negotiates it, under oath, over a pot of lentils. Esau despises it, which is the point Genesis makes about him.

He lies to a blind man's face wearing his brother's clothes, and gains what God had already told his mother would be his (Genesis 25:23).

Wherefore then hast thou beguiled me? — the man who exploited a father's blind eyes is undone by a dark tent. Younger swapped for elder, exactly as he had done.

I will not let thee go, except thou bless me. He finally asks for the blessing instead of taking it, gets a new name, and limps for it.

Simeon and Levi's massacre at Shechem, Reuben and Bilhah, and then the coat: he repeats his own father's favouritism on Joseph, with worse results.

Sold at seventeen by the brothers who carry the same promise he does. The covenant family's worst act is committed against its own future preserver.

How then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God? He is imprisoned for the one clean decision Genesis records him making under pressure.

Yet did not the chief butler remember Joseph, but forgat him. Genesis 41:1 then adds two full years — the relay's longest recorded silence.

Manasseh: God hath made me forget all my toil, and all my father's house. The Egyptian court is comfortable enough that home has to be actively forgotten.