Covenant and Canaan
On the painted wall of an Egyptian tomb, a line of thirty-seven people walks forever toward you. Painted around 1900 BC, they wear striped coats of red and blue, lead loaded donkeys, and carry a small harp. The Egyptians called such travelers Aamu, "the Asiatics" — herding families down from Canaan looking for grain. They owned no city, yet a wall painted four thousand years ago still keeps their faces.
Key Terms
- Abraham
- A wealthy herdsman who left the city of Ur to walk toward a land he had never seen, trusting a promise from an unseen God.
- Ur
- The wealthy Mesopotamian city Abraham left behind, with schools, written records, and a tower-temple to the moon god Sin.
- Haran
- The stopping point on Abraham’s long walk from Ur down into Canaan, reached by following the curve of the rivers.
- Canaan
- The fertile land of dozens of small, walled city-states, each ruled by its own king and fighting its neighbors for fields and roads.
- Megiddo
- A walled Canaanite city-state ruled by its own king when Abraham arrived in the land, along with Hazor and Shechem.
- Tell
- A mound built up over centuries as people knocked down old houses and built new ones on top; Canaanite cities sat on tells.
- Sarah
- Abraham’s wife, who died at Hebron; burying her was the reason he finally bought a piece of ground of his own.
- Cave of Machpelah
- The burial site Abraham paid full price for, refusing it as a gift because a gift could be taken back.
- Hebron
- The place where Sarah died and where Abraham made his first purchase of land in Canaan.
- Shekel
- The unit silver was weighed out in; Abraham paid 400 shekels, about ten pounds of silver, for the cave of Machpelah.
- Covenant
- God’s binding promise to Abraham: a land for his people, descendants too many to count, and a blessing for every nation on earth.
- Patriarch
- The title Abraham holds as the founding father of the Hebrew people.
- Monotheism
- Belief in one God rather than many; it set Abraham apart from the Mesopotamian world he left, where gods stayed in their cities’ temples.
- Semi-nomad
- A herder like Abraham, who moved his flocks between settled cities rather than living inside one himself.
- Hebrews
- Abraham’s descendants, also called the people of Israel, who went down into Egypt during a famine and multiplied there into a great people.
- Famine
- A time with almost no food, which drove Abraham’s descendants down into Egypt, where they later multiplied and were made slaves.
- Moses
- The man who led Abraham’s enslaved descendants out of Egypt into the desert of Sinai, about six centuries after Abraham left Ur.
- Mount Sinai
- The mountain where, around 1400 BC, God gave Moses ten commandments written on stone for a whole wandering people.
- Ten Commandments
- Rules given on stone at Mount Sinai, the same for every person who carried them, with no separate price for noble, commoner, or slave.
- Faith
- Placing trust in a promise worth trusting and acting on it, the virtue that let Abraham walk over a thousand miles into an unknown land.