part0065

The Myth: And it came to pass, when he was come near to enter into Egypt, that he said unto Sarai his wife, Behold now, I know that thou art a fair woman to look upon: Therefore it shall come to pass, when the Egyptians shall see thee, that they shall say, This is his wife: and they will kill me, but they will save thee alive. Say, I pray thee, thou art my sister: that it may be well with me for thy sake; and my soul shall live because of thee. (Gen. 12:11–13)

And Abraham journeyed from thence toward the south country, and dwelled between Kadesh and Shur, and sojourned in Gerar. And Abraham said of Sarah his wife, She is my sister: and Abimelech king of Gerar sent, and took Sarah. (Gen. 20:1–2)

The Reality: Genesis has three different stories about a patriarch who feared that a foreign king would kill him in order to take his beautiful wife for a queen, so the patriarch’s wife pretended to be his sister. All three stories stem from a common mythological source.

When Abraham left Mesopotamia and came to Canaan, a famine plagued the land and he had to go to Egypt for food. For some reason, he feared that the pharaoh would be aware of his presence and find his wife most attractive and desirable. (Sarah was about sixty-five years old at the time.) Abraham figured that if the pharaoh thought Abraham and Sarah were husband and wife, the monarch would have him killed so that he could take Sarah into the royal household. Therefore, he asked her to pretend to be his sister. Presumably, Abraham tolerated his wife becoming concubine to the pharaoh.

The pharaoh did indeed learn about the beautiful Sarah and did take her as a wife. But great plagues struck the king’s household and he learned the truth. The pharaoh returned Sarah to Abraham and sent them out of the country with great wealth— cattle, gold, and silver .

Some twenty-five years later, Abraham and Sarah traveled to the city of Gerar, a Philistine city ruled by a king named Abimelech, who had an army captain named Phicol. Sarah, now about ninety, was still a great beauty, and once again Abraham feared the king would kill him in order to take Sarah as a royal wife. So, again, he had Sarah pretend to be his sister and again the king took Sarah into the royal household. But this time, before the king consummated his affair, he had a warning from God and returned Sarah to Abraham. He, too, bestowed great wealth on Abraham. Subsequently, Abraham and Abimelech feuded over some wells and they resolved the dispute with a treaty. They named the site Beer-sheba, meaning “well of an oath.”

About forty-five to sixty-five years later, another famine struck Canaan and God directed Isaac, Abraham ’s son, to go not to Egypt but to Gerar. Again, the city belonged to the Philistines, Abimelech ruled as king, and Phicol headed up the guard. When Isaac arrived at Gerar with his wife, Rebekah, the townspeople saw how beautiful she was and Isaac, fearing the king would kill him, said that Rebekah was his sister.

And Isaac dwelt in Gerar: And the men of the place asked him of his wife; and he said, She is my sister: for he feared to say, She is my wife; lest, said he, the men of the place should kill me for Rebekah; because she was fair to look upon . (Gen. 26:6–7)

Again the king discovered the cover-up, made peace with Isaac, and subsequently feuded with him over some wells. They concluded a treaty and named the site Beer-sheba.

Gerar and Beer-sheba lie on the southern border of Canaan, in the Wilderness of Shur. In describing the length of the Israelite territory, biblical writers occasionally described it as running from Beer-sheba to Dan. In tribal terms, the territory belonged to Simeon, the second oldest son of Jacob.

These three stories present alternative accounts of the same event, but the biblical redactors don’t agree on whether the incident happened in Egypt or Canaan or if it involved Abraham or Isaac. The incident of Abraham at Gerar belongs to the E source but the story of Isaac at Gerar belongs to the J source. The Egyptian Abraham story also belongs to the J source, and both J accounts involve a famine .

In the Abraham famine story, Abraham went to Egypt, but in the Isaac famine story God told the patriarch, “Go not down into Egypt; dwell in the land which I shall tell thee of” (Gen. 26:2). Why? Egypt was the breadbasket. That’s where Abraham and Jacob’s children went during the famine. There seems to be a conscious effort here to downplay both the connection to Egypt and Abraham’s connection to Beer-sheba.

The E source tends to reflect ideas from the northern kingdom while the J source tends to favor the southern kingdom. That the two sources present conflicting claims over which patriarch went to Gerar and how Beer-sheba got its name suggests some esoteric political feud in the period after Israel and Judah split into separate kingdoms.

One can tell that both the Abraham and Isaac Gerar stories have a late origin because they each claim that Philistines controlled and lived in and about Gerar. The Philistines didn’t arrive in Canaan until the twelfth century B.C., about six hundred years after the time of Abraham and Isaac. So, the Gerar stories are false. But what about the first story, taking place in Egypt?

As we saw in Myth #49, when Abraham left Egypt he headed south into Upper Egypt, not into Canaan. This suggests that the story of Abraham and the pharaoh stems from an Egyptian source. Following the traditional Jewish chronology of the Bible, Abraham arrived in Egypt during the latter half of the eighteenth century B.C. For the Egyptians, this was a troubling time that Egyptologists refer to as the Second Intermediate Period.

During this era, a coalition of non-Egyptians residing in the Egyptian delta began to seize power. Known as the Hyksos, they eventually took control over most of Egypt and ruled for almost two centuries. The legitimate Egyptian kings in Thebes either kept control over some portion of Upper Egypt or served as vassals to the Hyksos rulers in Lower Egypt.

In an interesting mythological/literary twist, the Hyksos kings worshipped the Egyptian god Set, the only recognized mythological rival to Horus. The Hyksos-Thebes conflict mirrored the Horus-Set conflict, and later Egyptian literature tended to identify foreign invaders as agents of Set. The Hyksos interregnum had a powerful impact on the Egyptian mind and generated much mythic and literary imagery .

The Hyksos built their capital at Avaris and dedicated the city to Set. About 450 years later, well after Egypt expelled the Hyksos, Pharaoh Ramesses II changed the name of Avaris to Pi-Ramesses. This city was one of the two cities that Hebrew slaves worked in, although it is not clear whether they worked there before or after the name change. The city continued to be a center for Set worship. Israelite tradition, therefore, would recall Set as an enemy king who persecuted them.

When Abraham arrived in Egypt during the famine he would have arrived in the Egyptian delta at about the time that the Hyksos had already established a stronghold in that region. The desire of the pharaoh to marry Abraham’s wife would have been a metaphorical portrayal of the negotiations and feuds between the rising Hyksos princes and the opposing local princes. The Hyksos leader wanted a treaty. Abraham, corresponding to a local Egyptian governor, at first acquiesced and then rebelled. He fled south to Thebes, joining the legitimate rulers in their struggle against the invaders.

The city of Gerar was located in the Wilderness of Shur, the territory that Egyptians associated with the god Set. In post-Hyksos times, the rebellion of an Egyptian Abraham against a Set-worshipping king in the delta came to be equated with a rebellion against the forces of Set in the Wilderness of Shur. Abimelech of Gerar, whose name means “Father-King,” would have originally been a symbolic representation of the last Hyksos ruler, but since Gerar lay in what later became Philistine territory, the biblical redactors assumed that Abimelech must have been a Philistine king. This later rewriting of the story reinforced the idea in the mind of biblical editors that when Abraham left Egypt he went to Canaan.

So, while the story of Abraham and the pharaoh originally symbolized the conflict between Thebes and the Hyksos kings, and took place in Egypt, the story evolved into a conflict with a king in the territory of Set, and evolved further into a conflict with a Philistine king. In the meantime, political factions argued over whether Abraham or Isaac established a better claim to Beer-sheba, an argument that no doubt had something to do with resolving territorial claims among the Israelites.