Setting: Genesis 13:14-18
Lot lifts up his eyes to the crowded city of Sodom, but I seek the more spacious places. It is not that I disdain cultured society, but that I would build a society with more room to breathe. I once heard a man say that in their fear our forefathers gathered too near together, and it may be that that fear shall endure a little longer, so that city walls separate hearths from fields.
Would that Adonai would gather men’s houses in his hand, and like a sower gently scatter them in forest and meadow. Would that the valleys were our streets, and the green paths our alleys, that we might seek one another through vineyards, and come with the fragrance of the earth in our garments.
When Lot had departed for the valley of the Jordan and its cities, Adonai came to me and instructed me to lift up my eyes. This was the very thing that Lot had done; he had lifted up his eyes and in confidence surveyed the land. I did not want to do the same, but when Adonai speaks, I listen, and so I lifted up my eyes and looked in all directions as I was commanded.
And God said to me “all the land that you see, I will give to you and to your seed forever, and I will make your seed as the dust of the earth, so that if a man can count the pieces of dust on the earth, then your seed can also be numbered.” And God said to me “Arise, and walk through the length and the breadth of the land; for I will give it to you.”
I was overwhelmed, for the presence of El Elyon is ever strange and ever terrifying, even if one has experienced it before. And I was sullen, for Lot, my only blood relative who could possibly be my heir, had departed to be his own separate tribe, so what was all of this talk of “my seed?” And I was overjoyed, for the God who possesses heaven and earth was reaffirming His decree that this land should be mine. And I was humbled, even unto dread, that He should say such a thing to a dead dog such as I.
And in my terror and my sullenness and my joy and my dread I arose, in the body or out of the body I cannot say, and walked the length and breadth of the land of Canaan, and saw its transcendent beauty as the very garden of God, and wept and wept and wept.
The next morning I awoke strong and healthy, and I removed my tent and we journeyed to Hebron, encamping in the plain of Mamre, among the three brothers who I had so quickly come to know and love before the famine and our sojourn in Egypt.
And there I built an altar to El Elyon, Possessor of Heaven and Earth, and called upon the name of Adonai who is my shield and my strength.
And I joined this alliance. Yes, I cut my hand so the blood ran red, as did the three brothers, and I grasped each man’s hand and embraced him so that our blood was mingled and our lives were not our own but each others, and we ate bread and drank wine and we danced and we sang and I lay with my wife Sarai and in each of these things I could have sworn that heaven was on earth.