THE EGYPTIAN PYRAMIDS WERE AGES OLD WHEN THE JEWS,UNDER THE LEADERSHIP OF ABRAHAM,VENTURED FORTH FROM THE OUTSKIRTS OF THE STONY DESERT OF ARABIA AND WENT WESTWARD TO FIND NEW PASTURAGE FOR THEIR FLOCKS
Abraham was a pioneer.
He died many thousand years ago,but the story of his life reminds us of the brave men and women who conquered the plains and the mountains of our own west during the first half of the nineteenth century.
The family of Abraham came from the land of Ur which was situated on the western bank of the river Euphrates.
They had all been shepherds ever since their great-grand-father Shem had left the Ark.They had done well in this world,and Abraham himself was a rich farmer who owned thousands of sheep.He employed more than three hundred men and boys to look after his flocks.
They were very loyal to their master and would give their lives for him at a moment's notice.They formed a small private army and they were of great use when Abraham had to fight for new pastures in the hostile land near the Mediterranean shore.
When Abraham was seventy-five years old,he heard the voice of Jehovah,who bade him move away from his father's house and find a new home in Canaan,which was the old name for Palestine.
Abraham was glad to go.The Chaldeans,among whom he then lived,were forever at war with their neighbours,and this wise old Jew was a man of peace,and saw little good in all this useless strife.
He ordered his tents to be taken down.His men rounded up his sheep.The women packed the sleeping rugs and put up food for the trip through the desert.And so began the first great migration of the Jewish people.
Abraham was married.The name of his wife was Sarah.Unfortunately,she had no children.And so Abraham took Lot,his nephew,to be second-lieutenant of the expedition.Then he gave the sign for departure,and followed a path which led him straight towards the setting sun.
His caravan did not enter the great Babylonian valley,but kept close to the outskirts of the desert of Arabia,where the soldiers of the ferocious Assyrian army could not find the Jews and steal their sheep and perhaps their women.Without mishap,they all reached the pastures of western Asia.
There they halted near the village of Shechem,where Abraham built an altar to Jehovah near an oak,called Moreh.Afterwards,he moved on towards Bethel,where he rested for a while to decide upon his future plans.For alas!the land of Canaan was not as rich as he had expected.
When Abraham and Lot so suddenly appeared with all their flocks,the grass of the hillsides was soon eaten up.Then the shepherds of Abraham and Lot began to fight among each other to see who should get the best pastures,and soon the expedition threatened to end in a general riot.
This was entirely contrary to the nature of Abraham.He called his nephew into his tent and he spoke to him and proposed that they divide the country and live in peace,as good relatives should always do.
Lot,too,was a sensible young man,and so he and his uncle came to terms without any difficulty.
The nephew preferred to remain in the valley of the river Jordan,and Abraham took the rest of the country,which is now generally called Palestine.He had spent the greater part of his life under the scorching sun of the desert.No wonder that he hastened to find a place which should offer him the cool shade of mighty trees.
He pitched his tent among the oaks of Mamre,near the old city of Hebron,and there he built another new altar to show his gratitude that Jehovah had safely guided him into this happy new home.
But he was not allowed to live in peace very long.His nephew was already in trouble with his neighbours and Abraham was forced to go to war to protect his family.
The most dangerous of the native rulers was the mighty King of Elam.He was so powerful that he could hold his own against the rulers of Assyria.Just then he was trying to levy tribute from the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.When they refused to pay,the King of Elam marched against them with his army.
Unfortunately,the fighting took place in the valley which Lot had occupied.Soldiers,when they get excited,do not always stop to ask questions.When they rounded up the men and women from Sodom and Gomorrah,to carry them away as prisoners,they also took Lot and his family.
Abraham heard of this through a neighbour who had managed to run away.He called together all his shepherds.He himself rode at the head of his troop.In the middle of the night he reached the camp of the King of Elam.He attacked the sleepy Elamites at once and before the sleepy guards knew what had happened,Abraham had set Lot free and was on his way back to the river Jordan.
Of course,this made him a great man in the eyes of the neighbouring tribes.
The King of Sodom,who had escaped the slaughter,came forward to meet him.He was accompanied by Melchizedek,who was King of Salem,or Jerusalem,a very ancient city in the land of Canaan which had existed hundreds of years before the Jews had moved westward.
Melchizedek and Abraham became fast friends,for they both recognised Jehovah as the ruler of all the world,but Abraham did not like the King of Sodom,who worshipped strange heathenish gods,and when the King of Sodom offered Abraham the greater part of the booty which he had recaptured from the Elamites,he refused to take it.His hungry men had eaten a few of the sheep,but all the rest went back to the rightful owners in the city of Sodom.
Alas!they did not make good use of it.
Both the people of Sodom and those of Gomorrah had a very bad reputation in the western part of Asia.They were lazy and indolent and they committed all sorts of wicked crimes and never brought a murderer to justice for his wickedness.
Often they had been warned that this could not go on for ever.They merely laughed and continued to be a general nuisance to all the decent folks of that part of the world.