And Abram and Nahor took wives the name of Abram's wife was Sarai; and the name of Nahor's wife, Milcah, a daughter of Haran, the father of Milcah and the father of Iscah.
This verse drops two marriages into a family list. It looks like bare record-keeping. Yet these few names set up the story that follows: who leaves home, who stays, and through whose family God keeps working.
The verse spends its words on wives, not achievements. One writer sees God's care here for the closest of human ties, written into a word that lasts for ever.
God takes a kind interest not only in the people who deal with Him but in their relationships — above all in marriage, the most important of all natural ties for a human being. Those on both sides here may not have known Him yet. But He knew the end from the beginning, and in His providence He guided those who would play an important part in the future dealings of His grace. He records it in His word, which lasts for ever. In this way He shows how serious it is to all who fear Him, as they take their own steps here below. Above all, He wants them to seek His guidance.
Nahor marries the daughter of his own brother Haran. That makes her his niece. The gap in ages between Terah's sons is what makes such a match possible.
Verse 32 tells us that Terah lived two hundred and five years. His eldest son was born when he was seventy, so that son could not have been Abram. Genesis 12:4 tells us that Abram was only seventy-five when he left Haran, after Terah's death... It would seem from the history that Haran was the eldest son, born when his father was seventy. From this we can understand how Nahor married Haran's daughter Milcah, his niece... We also see more clearly how the granddaughter of Nahor became the wife of Isaac, Abraham's son.
The verse names a second daughter of Haran and then says nothing more about her. An old suggestion tried to fill the silence.
Daughter of Haran, the brother of Abraham. Genesis 11:29. According to Josephus, the Jews believed she was Sarai, Abraham's wife.
Commentators differ. One reports the tradition. Another weighs Abram's own later words in Genesis 20:12 and finds it unconvincing.
Still, I cannot help believing that Abram's words to Abimelech (Genesis 20:12) point more naturally to Terah as Sarah's father by a second and later wife, since she was ten years younger than her husband. Scripture does not hide facts that clashed with the law given at a later day. But it is easy to see why the Jews might try to soften or remove what was discreditable by a so-called tradition.
Milcah stays behind when Abram leaves. So why does the verse name her at all?
Milcah, who was Nahor's wife, is also mentioned, because her descendants come into the history of God's ways later on.
That line runs on to the woman who becomes Isaac's wife.
Of Milcah we hear very little. She was Haran's daughter and Nahor's wife, and as Genesis 22 and 24 tell us, mother of Bethuel and seven other sons. Bethuel was the father of Laban and Rebekah, about whom Scripture says so much there and later on. We know nothing more about Iscah than that she too was Haran's daughter.
The verse marries off both brothers in one sentence. Then their paths split.
Nahor, however, another of Terah's sons, did not come under this influence. He was comfortably settled at home with his wife, and at home they stayed, when Terah, Abram, Sarah and Lot set out from the land of their fathers.
Nahor's life is not a disaster. It grows in every way but one.
Nahor is not moved in this day when God is at work. He and his wife remain in Mesopotamia, and they do well there. They have children; goods and property increase. They make an easy and respectable journey across the world; but they do not grow in the knowledge of God, and bear no testimony, or at best a small and unclear testimony, to His name.
- Registered — God records marriage in a word that lasts for ever. He guides people who may not yet know Him into parts His grace will later use.
- Related — Nahor married Milcah, his brother Haran's daughter and so his niece. The wide age gap between Terah's eldest and youngest sons makes the match understandable.
- Reported, not resolved — Iscah is named and then dropped. An old tradition made her Sarai. Abram's words in Genesis 20:12 point instead to Terah as Sarah's father by a later wife.
- Reaching forward — Milcah appears because her line runs to Bethuel, then to Laban and Rebekah, who becomes Isaac's wife.
- Ruled by response — Abram and Nahor start in the same house and the same verse. One leaves home; the other does well there and bears little testimony to His name.
And Sarai was barren she had no child.
Genesis traces the line of Shem name by name down to Abram. Just as God is ready to build a nation, the record stops on a closed womb: everything that follows rests on a couple who cannot have children.
Scripture does not hide the difficulty. It states the fact and lets it stand for years. One writer notes how long the pain lasted, and what it led to in the end.
It is said here that Sarai was barren; she had no child. And this remained a painful fact for many years. Yet she was still to bear Abram's heir, the child of promise. That came after long patience of faith, mixed here and there with some impatience of unbelief. God said his offspring would be named through Isaac. Isaac is a picture of the "Child born" and of the "Son given," at whose name every knee will bow and every tongue confess. He even pictures Him in being received back from the dead, in figure.
The picture here is not only about childbearing. It says something about every one of us by nature.
The barren woman is in Scripture the type of nature's ruined and helpless condition. There is no ability to do anything for God — no power to bring forth any fruit to Him; all is death and barrenness. Such is the real condition of every child of Adam. He can neither do anything for God nor for himself, as regards his eternal destiny. He is emphatically "without strength"; he is "a dry tree," "a heath in the desert." Such is the lesson taught us by the barren woman.
The emptiness is not only in Sarai's womb. Abram's family worshipped idols. Neither its religion nor its ability to produce an heir offered God anything to build on.
The call of God goes out in sovereign grace, separating to Himself a man no better than his fellows but openly caught up in the idolatries of his fathers.
The family line that leads to Abram gives no ground for confidence either.
In the chosen line itself we have only a thin record of names and lifespans. Even so, it is plain that there is decay, and that it never stops. Elsewhere we read that these men fell away from God, which left every possibility of hope to His sovereign grace. The root of all the blessing that follows is here and only here.
Years later God promises Abram a son. By then Abram has long known what nature says. One writer traces his faith back to that impossibility.
At the time when God promised him an heir Abraham was childless... Every evidence of nature said he could never have an heir. Yet he believed the promise of God that he would have one. So the faith that lays hold of God as the One who gives life to the dead was already there in him, in seed form.
That is the shape of all real faith. It does not calculate from what it can see.
If he reasoned from himself and Sarah, the promise of God was beyond hope, and even against it. But he believed in hope, because God had declared he would have as many descendants as the stars and the sand. Faith reasons from God and His word, not from self or circumstances.
The story does not end in loss. Later Scripture calls the barren woman to sing, and it matters which woman that is.
"Sing, O barren one, who did not bear; break forth into singing and cry aloud, you who have not been in labor! For the children of the desolate one will be more than the children of her who is married." ... The law knew nothing of praise. Hagar's son was born of the flesh. Sarah's child was the child of God's grace and power... When the barren woman bears a child, nothing but praise can express it.
- Barren. Sarai had no child. That painful fact stood for many years, and nature offered no way forward.
- Bankrupt. The barren woman pictures our ruined and helpless condition. We have no power to bring forth fruit for God. We are "without strength."
- Because. The line was in decay and the family in idolatry. That left every possibility of hope to the sovereign grace of God — the root of all the blessing that follows.
- Believing. Abraham reasoned from God's word, not from himself. The faith that grasps God as the One who gives life to the dead was already in him, in seed form.
- Bearing. God calls the barren woman to sing. Her child is the child of His grace and power, and only praise can answer that.
And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son's son, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram's wife; and they went forth together out of Ur of the Chaldeans, to go into the land of Canaan, and came as far as Haran, and dwelt there.
Genesis 11 ends with a family leaving Ur for Canaan — and stopping halfway. Three questions shape everything that follows: who received the call, why the journey stalled, and what the delay cost.
Terah's name heads the sentence, not Abram's — and commentators treat that order as the key.
The call of the Lord was not to Terah but to Abraham, whom God called to go out from his kindred as well as his country. Here we learn that he failed. For "Terah took Abram his son," and so on. This was no right answer to the call of God. The result was that for the time it came to nothing. They "went forth together," kindred and all, "to go into the land of Canaan." But into the land of Canaan they did not come. They "came to Haran" and "settled there." But Haran was no more Canaan than Ur of the Chaldeans.
Stephen's account in Acts 7 tells us who appeared to Abram, and where.
From Stephen's address, recorded in Acts 7, we learn that "the God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia." Here we see what sets this call apart from every other call. It comes from God — the God of glory. This world builds cities and towers reaching up to heaven. Nothing in it speaks of God; it only exalts and displays the glory of man. "The God of glory" speaks of another scene where there is nothing of man but everything that displays God. This is the God who, in wonderful grace, appears to a man living in a world estranged from God and sunk in idolatry.
The father's name and the town's name both fit what happened there.
Terah lives up to his name ("delay"), and ends his days at Haran, called after his dead son. Natural things hold him fast, though death is written on them, and memory only keeps his loss fresh. "Haran" means "parched," yet there he stays (and Abram with him) until he dies. Then we see that Terah had been holding back the very man he had led. Now Abram rises up in the power of a divine call — a call that had come to him, and to him alone, from the start.
Abram did leave Ur. He gave up a great deal. But leaving is not the same as arriving.
Abraham came to Haran. He did not get into Canaan at once. He took with him something God had called him away from. God had commanded him to leave his kindred and his father's house. There was a reserve in his heart, and so he got only part of the blessing. He lost his home and his country for very little, while he was only halfway toward where God had sent him.
What kept Abram at Haran was not an enemy but a loved relative.
How many of us have been held back for a time by some loved relative. We fail to take the separate path that fits the call of God. The call reaches the believer. He accepts that it is true, but he delays his answer because a close relative is not ready for that separate place. The soul clings to the hope that after a little waiting the relative will see the call, and then both can act together. Faith cannot lift nature up to its own level, though nature can drag down and hinder the man of faith. People can raise many pleas to excuse this halfway halt, but in reality it puts the claims of nature above the call of God.
Lot travels as a passenger, carried along by natural ties rather than by a call of his own.
Here we find nature trying to follow a divine call which it had never understood, and had never heard for itself. The greatness of the One who had called Abram had not touched Lot's heart, and neither had the greatness and power of the call of the God of glory.
Some have claimed Stephen's account contradicts Genesis on when Terah died. Commentators answer that there was more than one call.
If we look carefully at the accounts of Abraham's call, we never find the phrase "the call," because there was clearly more than one. Stephen says the God of glory appeared to Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran. The effect was that he left his country, and perhaps many of his kindred. But his father went with him, and Sarah, and Lot, and they lived in Haran. They stayed there long enough to gain souls in Haran. Then it seems God called him to leave his country, kindred, and father's house, and come into a land He would show him. The effect of this call was that he left Haran.
- Called — the God of glory appeared to Abram alone, in Ur. No one else in the house had heard that call.
- Compromised — "Terah took Abram" reverses the order. The man God had not called took the lead, and the answer came to nothing for a time.
- Halted — Terah means "delay," Haran means "parched." The family stopped at a name that described them.
- Cost — a reserve in the heart buys only part of the blessing. Abram gave up home and country but never reached Canaan, and Lot came along without ever hearing the call.
- Completed — death removed the hindrance. Then Abram left Haran for the land God would show him.