Genesis 14:1: Four kings, four countries, and nine hundred miles between the first and the last

The confusion of tongues at Babel divided mankind into nations, and we can have little doubt that this soon led to fighting and regular warfare. But Scripture gives no record of a battle until we reach Genesis 14. There four kings from the Mesopotamian district marched towards the Dead Sea, destroying cities on the way, and in the end defeated the five kings of the cities of the plain. The "kings" named were mostly, if not all, the leaders of single cities — what we would now call petty chiefs. Chedorlaomer seems to have been the overlord of the kings with him, and he had spread his rule over the region of Sodom. They threw off his rule, and that was the reason for the expedition.

The chapter opens with a solemn picture of this present evil world. It is a scene where the nations form themselves into groups, and make alliances to push their plans for power and to defend themselves from attack.

The campaign of Chedorlaomer and his allies against the king of Sodom and his partners was not a great thing in itself. Yet Holy Scripture gives a whole chapter to it, for two important reasons. First, because a saint of God, Lot, was caught up in it. Second, because the world's first recorded battle is in many ways a foreshadowing of the last great disaster of Armageddon.

Here we have a very detailed account of a battle fought by "four kings with five," and we may ask: what did this quarrel between "the potsherds of the earth" have to do with the history of the people of God? With Abram, in one sense, nothing, for he was outside it all. His tent marked him as a stranger to all these things. It marked him as one to whom the battle of "four kings with five" would matter very little. His altar marked him as one whose pursuits were of another kind — heavenly. His tent showed him to be a stranger on earth; his altar showed him to be at home in Heaven.

Lot's sufferings at the hands of the Gentile kings were entirely due to his unfaithfulness to God. Had he stood apart from the world and its ways, as Abram did, his path might have been as peaceful and happy as Abram's. He sought worldly advantages for himself and his family, so he sank to the world's level, and he suffered with the world in the day of trouble.

The names are hard to read, and at least two of the allied countries are just as doubtful. But in the first list Amraphel, king of Shinar, stands first. He is beyond question the representative of the kingdom of Nimrod, although Chedorlaomer appears the most active and interested. They all seem to be only divisions of this Babylonish empire, though no doubt changed into an alliance of more or less equal powers… These four kings… are at war with the five petty kings of the plain of Jordan. As a picture, these last stand for the world in its open and sensual wickedness. The Babylonish kings stand for the religious world-power, which always seeks to hold that more open form of evil captive — and generally succeeds.

He had found the record of a king matching the Chedorlaomer of Genesis 14, about 1900 B.C., who was given the title "the ravager of Syria."

Faith accepts the record in Genesis 14, not because the clay tablets confirm it (however interesting that fact may be), but because the Spirit of God has written it. Anyone who accepts the statements of Scripture only when outside evidence confirms them is at heart an unbeliever.

Genesis 14 gives the first campaign on record. We cannot say what its political results may have been. But a spiritual outcome came out of it, and its value will last "for ever."