Kind of Like Me

During the fall of 2009, I got the idea of starting a blog telling Bible stories the general public may have missed out on if they haven’t been reading them or hearing them since their Sunday School days. I was imagining a person who has had some exposure to the Bible, but not enough to hear about some of the stories that may not have been covered in Sunday School class. I was excited about the idea and most people I ran it across liked it, too. It would be my 2010 personal devotions to carry it out, I thought. Well, it’s mid-February as I type this, and I’ve studied some and written a few things, but nothing has come anywhere near to being posted on a blog. I still don’t much know how to start a blog. If you’re reading this, that means I got past my wall of insecurities that is at this moment holding me back. I was just about to give up the idea altogether, but this story made me rethink quitting.

If I do give up, I’m a whole lot like the guy in the next story I want to tell. His name was Terah, and we have several details of his family life. He lived in a city called Ur, and he had three sons, not one of whom was born before he reached the age of 70. There is some indication that Abram was a younger son, if not the youngest of all, and that he wasn’t born until Terah was about 130 years old. Don’t let these ages throw you. The world was younger back then. The Bible is clear that the cause of death is sin, and people hadn’t been sinning as long back then as they have now. The lifespan of humankind was, at this time, slowly dwindling. Today it is a tenth or less of what it was in Adam’s time. In Terah’s time, it was longer than it is today, but far, far less than it was in Adam’s time. Terah, is, I think, the last man in the Bible to reach 200 years old, and he didn’t live very many years after that. His three sons names were Nahor, Haran, and Abram. You may have heard of Abram. He’s better known by the name God gave him later—Abraham. But this story is more about Abram’s father, before Abram took this name. It did, however, take place after all three sons were grown. Terah, obviously, was a very old man by this time.

The story begins with a family tragedy—Haran, who was probably the eldest, and certainly older than Abram, had died. We are not told what happened to him. He did, however, leave three children: two daughters, one of whom was named Milcah, and the other Iscah, and a son, Lot. Nahor married his niece Milcah, and Abram took Lot in. We are not told what happened to Iscah. One commentary I looked in gave the surprising suggestion that Iscah was Sarah, then called Sarai. I don’t know if that is likely or not. After all, Abram said later that she was actually his half sister. But it may have been cultural to indicate a person’s grandchild as their child. What Abram actually said was that she was the daughter of his father, but not if his mother. If she was his father’s granddaughter, and if there was cultural precedent for calling a granddaughter a daughter, then Abram would have been telling the truth (as opposed to what he had just before been telling). And there is the fact that Haran may have been as much as 60 years older than Abram. Plenty of time for him to have daughters close enough to the age of his younger brothers that Nahor and Abram could marry their nieces, which was not considered a bad thing in those days. There weren’t as many mutations back then, once again, because there hadn’t been as much sin yet. But Sarai is named as Abram’s wife in the same verse where Iscah is mentioned, so I think it probably indicates two separate people.

Sometime after these weddings took place, long enough after for it to be discovered that Sarai wasn’t going to have children, something else happened. There are hints in the Scripture that God’s call to Abram to leave Ur happened about this time. Anyway, somewhere Terah got the idea to pack everybody up and go to Canaan. Nahor, however, and his niece/wife Milcah, were conspicuously absent.

Terah got as far as a place called Haran. Nahor and family must have come later, because that was where Abraham’s servant Eliezer found Nahor’s descendants some years later, when he was looking for them. I assume the place was named for Terah’s late son, and that Haran had settled there before he died, but I could find nothing in the commentaries I consulted to say whether or not this was so. What the commentaries did tell me, however, was that Haran was a short, two day journey from Ur, maybe 40 miles.

And here they stayed until Terah died. When I told my husband what my research for this story revealed, he commented, “It’s like setting out from Indianapolis [where we live] to go to Canada, and stopping when you get to Anderson.” If you look at a map of Indiana, you won’t have to look very far away from Indianapolis to find Anderson.

I wonder how the story would be different if Terah had gone all the way to Canaan. I wonder if Sunday School children would be singing songs about Father Terah, instead of Father Abraham. And maybe our greatest President would have been named Terah Lincoln.

We’re not told why Terah didn’t make it. It may be that I am being too hard on him. He may have simply been too old to travel like that. But it could be simply that he gave up, perhaps out of fear of the unknown. I just know I don’t want to be like him. I don’t want to start, and give up before I get very far out of the starting gate. I want to be like Paul, who said at the end of his life, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. (2 Timothy 4:7)