Genesis 14:15: He divided his forces by night, and did not stop at the border

"And he divided his forces against them by night, he and his servants, and defeated them and pursued them to Hobah, north of Damascus." The previous verse got Abram to Dan. This one tells you how a household of three hundred and eighteen beats a coalition army, and the answer is that it does not fight one. He divides his force and attacks in the dark — which is what a smaller force does, because a night attack turns numbers into confusion and makes a large camp its own worst enemy. Gideon does the same thing in the same part of the country with three hundred men, torches and jars. Then he keeps going. Damascus is fifty miles north-east of Dan, out of Canaan entirely, across the Hermon massif and onto the plain the caravan roads cross. Hobah is beyond it. Whatever else this verse is, it is not a rescue that stopped when the prisoners were safe; the chase runs the enemy off the edge of the country and past the largest city in Syria. The map draws Hobah standing on Damascus's own pin, because that is where the sources put it and they will not be more precise. The verse itself gives the only bearing anyone has — north of Damascus — and it is drawn as an open line continuing past the city rather than a second point, since a place located only by a direction from another place is not a place a map can honestly fix. Damascus is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth, and this is its first appearance in the Bible. It comes back one chapter later in a sadder key: the heir Abram expects to leave everything to is Eliezer of Damascus, because he has no son.