Genesis Vol 3.pdf - College Press

12:l-20 GENESIS
to furnish some important details. In fact the narrative
in the first five verses of this chapter is merely an expansion
of the short notice in the preceding one; and therefore
our translators have properly rendered the verb in the
Pluperfect tense, ‘had said.’ This revelation is not to be
accounted for by representing it, as one writer has recently
done, to be only ‘the newly increased light of his inner
consciousness,’ or by saying, with another, that the ‘Lord’
of Abram ‘was as much a creature of human imagination
as a Jupiter or an Apollo.’ In whatever way it was made
to him-whether in a dream, by a vision, or by a visible
manifestation (the language of Stephen, Acts 7:2, implies
that it was some glorious theophany, perhaps like the super-
natural light and words that suddenly converted Paul-a
miracle well adapted to the conceptions of a Zabian idol-
ater) -Abram was thoroughly persuaded that it was a
divine communication; and it was probably accompanied
by such special instructions as to the being and character
of ‘the Most High God, the possessor of heaven and earth,’
as carried conviction to his understanding and heart.” (It
is impossible) for me to accept the view that Abram had
drifted away from the knowledge of the true God so far
as to share the idolatry of some of the members of his
family: the Scripture story does not intimate such a notion,
and surely Abram’s subsequent walk of faith invalidates it.
C.C.).
Whitelaw (PCG, 117) writes: “Designed to trace the
outward development of God’s kingdom on the earth, the
narrative now concentrates its attention on one of the
foregoing Terachites, whose remarkable career it sketches
with considerable minuteness of detail, from the period of
his emigration from ChaIdea to his death at Hebron in the
land of Canaan. Distinguished as a man of undoubted
superiority both of character and mind, the head at least
of two powerful and important races, and standing, as one
might say, on the threshold of the historical era, it is yet
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