Genesis20chapter 20

Genesis 20:1-2

He leaves Mamre after the destruction of Sodom and settles on the southern border between Kadesh and Shur, which is the country the road to Egypt runs through. There he says of Sarah what he had said in Egypt about twenty-five years earlier, and God had by now dated the birth of the son to a set time in the next year. So the mother of the promised seed is taken into another king's house in the very season she is to conceive. Calvin observes that the proverb about fools growing wise through suffering does not hold here.

Genesis 20:3-5

This is the first dream in Genesis, and it is given to a pagan king rather than to the prophet. Abimelech answers God with the argument Abraham himself had made over Sodom two chapters earlier, wilt thou slay also a righteous nation, and this time the plea is allowed to stand. Clarke reads the exchange as evidence that knowledge of the true God reached beyond Abraham's household, since God does not dispute the word the king uses of his people.

Genesis 20:6-7

God tells the king that the restraint was his own work, so the line of promise is kept safe by God holding back a foreigner and not by the patriarch guarding his wife. The next verse carries the first use of the word prophet anywhere in Scripture, and it falls on Abraham at the point of his failure. Missler's law of first mention makes that placement worth stopping on, because the word arrives attached to a man who is told to pray for the king he wronged.

Genesis 20:8-9

He obeys at once, calls his whole household together, and the men are sore afraid, which answers Abraham's excuse before Abraham has made it. The rebuke that follows, what hast thou done unto us, sits between Pharaoh's words in chapter 12 and the words a later king of this name uses to Isaac in chapter 26. Three times in Genesis a man outside the covenant states the moral case plainly, and each time the man carrying the promise has little to say back.

Genesis 20:10-11

The king asks what he actually saw, and the answer is that he saw nothing and assumed. Abraham says the fear of God is not in this place, in a chapter where the king of the place rose early to obey God and the prophet did not. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read the assumption as carried out of Sodom, a judgment on one city applied to a town he had never tested.

Genesis 20:12-13

The defence is that the words were true as far as they went, and Clarke answers that a lie is anything said in order to be taken in a sense the speaker knows is false. Then comes the line that reframes chapter 12, since Abraham says the arrangement had been settled at every place from the day God caused him to wander from his father's house. What looked like a decision made at the Egyptian border was standing policy from the start, and the son repeats it in chapter 26, in this same town, to a king of this same name.

Genesis 20:14-15

The episode ends as the Egyptian one did, with the patriarch leaving richer than he came, and the older writers read the sheep and oxen as restitution rather than purchase. The parting is where the two accounts differ, because Pharaoh sent Abram away under escort while Abimelech says my land is before thee, dwell where it pleaseth thee. Gill notes that the wronged king offers the man who wronged him any part of the kingdom he likes.

Genesis 20:16

The silver comes with a public word about Sarah, and the king calls Abraham thy brother, using the very word the couple had hidden behind. The clause that follows, that he is to thee a covering of the eyes, is obscure enough in the Hebrew that Clarke says the interpreters do not agree on it; the sense usually taken is that her honour is now cleared before everyone who watched her being taken. The last three words, thus she was reproved, are all the chapter spends on Sarah's own part in the agreement she made back in verse thirteen.

Genesis 20:17

Abraham prays and the whole household is healed, so the cure comes through the man who caused the trouble. Two chapters earlier he had interceded for Sodom and the city burned anyway; here he prays for a pagan house and it lives. Henry calls praying for those who need it a prophet's work and a prophet's reward, and this man is handed the office in the middle of his worst recorded failure.

Genesis 20:18

The last verse explains the affliction: every womb in the king's house had been shut, and shut because of Sarah. Clarke takes the healing at Abraham's prayer to mean a real disease had been laid on them, and possibly the means by which the king was withheld in verse six. Genesis has been holding one closed womb open as a question since chapter eleven, where Sarai's barrenness is stated one verse before the promise of descendants, and the next chapter opens with the LORD visiting Sarah as he had said.