Genesis13chapter 13

Genesis 13:1-2

Abram went up out of Egypt: Abram comes up out of Egypt with his wife, his nephew and everything he had, and the next line counts the wealth in cattle, silver and gold. Much of that came from Pharaoh, who had paid him for Sarai in chapter 12, so the profit of the half-truth travels north with him. The shape of the whole episode is the road Israel will walk as a nation, since famine drives the family down, the LORD strikes Pharaoh, and they come up out of Egypt richer than they went in.

Genesis 13:3-4

He retraces chapter 12 in reverse, up through the south to Bethel, and stops on the exact ground where his tent had stood before the famine. The text says he came to the place of the altar rather than to the altar, which Gill takes to mean the stones were gone, and there he calls on the name of the LORD again. Genesis records no altar and no word from God for the whole time he was in Egypt, so he picks his life up at the last place he set it down.

Genesis 13:5-7

Lot's herds have grown as well, and the land cannot carry both households at once. What came out of Egypt is what pulls the family apart, so the gain of chapter 12 turns into the strife of chapter 13. The herdmen quarrel in front of an audience the writer names, since the Canaanite and the Perizzite were dwelling in the land at that time, and Wesley points out that the neighbours knew exactly what these two men professed.

Genesis 13:8-9

Abram holds both the promise and the seniority, and he hands the first choice to the younger man. His reason is that they be brethren, which is a stretched word for an uncle and a nephew, and the stretching is the point of it. Genesis opens with one brother killing another over what he brought to God, and here a man gives up his right rather than fight a kinsman over pasture.

Genesis 13:10-11

Lot decides by looking, and what he sees is that the plain was well watered every where. The writer measures it against the two places behind them, the garden of the LORD and the land of Egypt, then tells you the end before Lot has chosen, that this was before the LORD destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. Looking, seeing that a thing is good, and taking it is the same sequence as Eve at the tree in 3:6 and the sons of God in 6:2.

Genesis 13:12-13

pitched his tent toward Sodom: The move happens by degrees. He pitches his tent toward Sodom here, is living in Sodom by 14:12, and is sitting in the gate of Sodom by 19:1, which was where a city did its business and gave its judgments. The very next verse states what the place was, that the men of Sodom were wicked and sinners before the LORD exceedingly, and Peter still calls him righteous Lot, vexed by what he saw and heard there.

Genesis 13:14-15

God gives Abram the same words Lot had used of himself four verses earlier, and gives them only after Lot was separated from him. Lot lifted up his eyes and took one plain; Abram is told to look northward, southward, eastward and westward, and is given all of it. The grant runs to thee and to thy seed for ever, though Stephen says of Abraham that God gave him none inheritance in it, no, not so much as to set his foot on.

Genesis 13:16-17

The seed is measured three times in Abraham's story and never twice by the same thing, dust here, the stars of heaven in 15:5, and the sand upon the sea shore in 22:17. Then he is told to arise and walk the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it, which was how a man took legal possession of ground in that world. He walks it and owns none of it, and Hebrews says the patriarchs died in faith without receiving the promises, confessing that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.

Genesis 13:18

He moves on to the plain of Mamre in Hebron and builds a third altar, after Shechem in 12:7 and Bethel in 12:8. Hebron is where the one piece of ground he ever owns in the land of promise will be, the cave of Machpelah in the field before Mamre, bought from Ephron for four hundred shekels of silver in chapter 23. The man who has just been given the whole country buys a burial place in it and nothing besides.