Genesis 12:6: The first place inside the land, and the first altar beside it

"Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land." One sentence, one stop, and two things that are really one place: Genesis gives Shechem and the oak of Moreh as a single address, and so does every identification behind this map. Shechem sits in the pass between Mount Ebal to the north and Mount Gerizim to the south, where the central ridge of Canaan is cut through east to west. That is why the walk down the country starts here. Every north-south road along the spine of the hills has to come through this gap, and the east-west road from the Jordan to the coastal plain crosses it. It is the natural first stop for anyone entering the land from the north-east, which is the direction Genesis 12:5 brought him from. The next verse is the one people quote — the LORD appears, promises the land to his offspring, and Abram builds an altar. But the next verse names nowhere. It says "there", and "there" is this verse's place: the oak of Moreh at Shechem. So the first altar in Abraham's life is on this map and not on its own, because the sentence that sites it is this one. The last clause is doing something the map cannot draw and should say in words: "At that time the Canaanites were in the land." It is a note about occupancy, written from a later vantage point, and it is what makes the promise of the next verse strange. The land Abram is promised is the land he is walking through as a stranger, past towns that belong to somebody else, and he takes possession of exactly nothing in it for the rest of his life except a field with a cave in it that he pays four hundred shekels for. The oak he stops under is not his. Shechem is not his. He builds an altar and moves on.