1“‘You shall make for yourselves no idols, and you shall not raise up a carved image or a pillar, and you shall not place any figured stone in your land, to bow down to it; for I am Yahweh your God.
2“‘You shall keep my Sabbaths, and have reverence for my sanctuary. I am Yahweh.
3“‘If you walk in my statutes and keep my commandments, and do them, 4then I will give you your rains in their season, and the land shall yield its increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit. 5Your threshing shall continue until the vintage, and the vintage shall continue until the sowing time. You shall eat your bread to the full, and dwell in your land safely.
6“‘I will give peace in the land, and you shall lie down, and no one will make you afraid. I will remove evil animals out of the land, neither shall the sword go through your land. 7You shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword. 8Five of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall chase ten thousand; and your enemies shall fall before you by the sword.
9“‘I will have respect for you, make you fruitful, multiply you, and will establish my covenant with you. 10You shall eat old supplies long kept, and you shall move out the old because of the new. 11I will set my tent among you, and my soul won’t abhor you. 12I will walk among you, and will be your God, and you will be my people. 13I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that you should not be their slaves. I have broken the bars of your yoke, and made you walk upright.
14“‘But if you will not listen to me, and will not do all these commandments, 15and if you shall reject my statutes, and if your soul abhors my ordinances, so that you will not do all my commandments, but break my covenant, 16I also will do this to you: I will appoint terror over you, even consumption and fever, that shall consume the eyes, and make the soul to pine away. You will sow your seed in vain, for your enemies will eat it. 17I will set my face against you, and you will be struck before your enemies. Those who hate you will rule over you; and you will flee when no one pursues you.
18“‘If you in spite of these things will not listen to me, then I will chastise you seven times more for your sins. 19I will break the pride of your power, and I will make your sky like iron, and your soil like bronze. 20Your strength will be spent in vain; for your land won’t yield its increase, neither will the trees of the land yield their fruit.
21“‘If you walk contrary to me, and won’t listen to me, then I will bring seven times more plagues on you according to your sins. 22I will send the wild animals among you, which will rob you of your children, destroy your livestock, and make you few in number. Your roads will become desolate.
23“‘If by these things you won’t be turned back to me, but will walk contrary to me, 24then I will also walk contrary to you; and I will strike you, even I, seven times for your sins. 25I will bring a sword upon you that will execute the vengeance of the covenant. You will be gathered together within your cities, and I will send the pestilence among you. You will be delivered into the hand of the enemy. 26When I break your staff of bread, ten women shall bake your bread in one oven, and they shall deliver your bread again by weight. You shall eat, and not be satisfied.
27“‘If you in spite of this won’t listen to me, but walk contrary to me, 28then I will walk contrary to you in wrath. I will also chastise you seven times for your sins. 29You will eat the flesh of your sons, and you will eat the flesh of your daughters. 30I will destroy your high places, and cut down your incense altars, and cast your dead bodies upon the bodies of your idols; and my soul will abhor you. 31I will lay your cities waste, and will bring your sanctuaries to desolation. I will not take delight in the sweet fragrance of your offerings. 32I will bring the land into desolation, and your enemies who dwell in it will be astonished at it. 33I will scatter you among the nations, and I will draw out the sword after you. Your land will be a desolation, and your cities shall be a waste. 34Then the land will enjoy its Sabbaths as long as it lies desolate and you are in your enemies’ land. Even then the land will rest and enjoy its Sabbaths. 35As long as it lies desolate it shall have rest, even the rest which it didn’t have in your Sabbaths when you lived on it.
36“‘As for those of you who are left, I will send a faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies. The sound of a driven leaf will put them to flight; and they shall flee, as one flees from the sword. They will fall when no one pursues. 37They will stumble over one another, as it were before the sword, when no one pursues. You will have no power to stand before your enemies. 38You will perish among the nations. The land of your enemies will eat you up. 39Those of you who are left will pine away in their iniquity in your enemies’ lands; and also in the iniquities of their fathers they shall pine away with them.
40“‘If they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their fathers, in their trespass which they trespassed against me; and also that because they walked contrary to me, 41I also walked contrary to them, and brought them into the land of their enemies; if then their uncircumcised heart is humbled, and they then accept the punishment of their iniquity, 42then I will remember my covenant with Jacob, my covenant with Isaac, and also my covenant with Abraham; and I will remember the land. 43The land also will be left by them, and will enjoy its Sabbaths while it lies desolate without them; and they will accept the punishment of their iniquity because they rejected my ordinances, and their soul abhorred my statutes. 44Yet for all that, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them, neither will I abhor them, to destroy them utterly and to break my covenant with them; for I am Yahweh their God. 45But I will for their sake remember the covenant of their ancestors, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the nations, that I might be their God. I am Yahweh.’”
46These are the statutes, ordinances, and laws, which Yahweh made between him and the children of Israel in Mount Sinai by Moses.
We first encounter Abraham (father of many nations) as Abram (great father) in Genesis 11:26-31). He was the son of Terah, brother of Nahor and Haran, and uncle of Lot. Abram's brother Haran died while Abram was still in Ur of the Chaldees (Gen 11:28), where also he married Sarai, his half-sister. We discover toward the end of Genesis 11 that his father Terah left Ur, and went to the land of Canaan, via a city named Harana, where Terah died.
The story of Abraham becomes important in chapter 12, in which we are introduced to important biblical characters, locations, and events that set the stage for the remainder of the Bible. Yahweh came to Abram was commanded him to go to a land that He would show him. In this passage, Yahweh sets forth and unilateral and unconditional covenant, in which He promised to make from him a great nation, make his name great, and through him bless all of the families of the earth.[1]
"Abraham (Abram) was first of the patriarchs, father of Isaac and Ishmael, grandfather of Jacob and the traditional ancestor of the Jewish people. Abraham (originally Abram, which means "exalted father") came from Ur in Mesopotamia. His father, Terah, took him (with his wife, Sarah, and his nephew, Lot) to Haran. God called Abraham to leave this new home and to find another home elsewhere in Canaan. After a brief stay in Egypt, Abraham settled near Hebron where he became involved in a local political quarrel when Lot was taken prisoner by an alliance of four eastern chieftains. Abraham launched a successful attack against this confederacy and on his victorious return encountered the mysterious Melchizedek, king of Salem, to whom he gave a tenth of all the spoil he had taken in the battle.
For many years of their marriage, he and Sarah were childless, but God assured Abraham that he would eventually become the father of a great nation. Sarah disbelieved and persuaded Abraham to beget a child by her maid, Hagar, who bore him his first son, Ishmael. When Abraham was ninety-nine years old, God appeared to him, and instituted with him a covenant of circumcision, giving him the new name of Abraham (meaning "father of a multitude") and told him that a son, to be named Isaac was shortly to be born to Sarah. When the boy was in his childhood, God ordered Abraham to take him up to a mountain in the land of Moriah and offer him up as a sacrificial victim. Abraham prepared to do so, but was prevented at the last moment from carrying out the sacrifice, and told that he would be blessed for his faithfulness in being ready to offer up his son.
When Sarah died Abraham bought the plot of ground (the field of Ephron in Machpelah) that became the burial place for many generations of his descendants. He subsequently made arrangements for the marriage of Isaac, and took another wife, Keturah, who bore him Zimran, Medan, Midian, Ishbak and Shuah. At the age of one hundred and seventy five, Abraham died and was buried in Machpelah.
The principal narrative of the part of Genesis dealing with Abraham's history is interrupted in various places by other stories involving the patriarch. These include the parallel stories of his sojourns in Egypt and in Gerar. On both occasions Abraham lied about his relations with Sarah, jeopardising the fulfilment of God's promise (as both Pharaoh and Abimelech intended to take Sarah for themselves), while protecting himself. Both times God intervened to save him from the consequences of his deception. In another story we read of Abraham's intercession on behalf of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, which were destroyed for their wickedness."[2]
[1] See Genesis 12:1, for an explanation of God's covenant with Abraham.
[2] Based on the website Mini-Biografias de Personajes Biblicos Web de Recursos Cristianos) (trans. Mini-Biographies of Biblical Characters, Christian Resources Web).