Memory Text.—A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity. Proverbs 17:17.
LIGHT FROM OTHER BIBLE PASSAGES
Psalm 110:4; Hebrews 5:5-10; 6:20 to 7:28.
Note.—The statements in Hebrews that Melchizedek was without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, merely mean that the Scriptures do not mention his ancestors, parents, birth, or death.—New Century Bible, Genesis, W. H. Bennett, D.D.
FROM THE COMMENTATORS
Archæology. In this chapter we again come in contact with Babylonian records, not, as heretofore, with mythology, but with history. We may regard it as certain that Chedorlaomer and his allies were actual historical personages; that Elam at one period was the dominant power in the lands east of the Euphrates, as implied in verses 5, 9, and 17; and that in the same period the dominant power in those Eastern lands claimed and sometimes exercised a certain supremacy in Palestine, which was enforced occasionally by such warlike expeditions as the one described here. It is also not improbable that the four Eastern kings mentioned here were contemporaries, and that Elam was the dominant power in their time.... Amraphel: usually identified with Hammurabi, a Babylonian king, known to us from the inscriptions. Numerous letters and inscriptions of Hammurabi have been discovered, including forty-six dispatches (inscribed tablets of baked clay) to a high official or tributary prince. “Hammurabi,” we are told, “is already known, from the date on a Babylonian contract, to have succeeded in defeating the Elamites in the course of his reign, and this fact would not be inconsistent with his having been Chedorlaomer’s ally during the earlier part of his reign, to which period the narrative in Genesis 14 would, on this assumption, be referred.”—New Century Bible, Genesis, W. H. Bennett, D.D.
No one fails to see what it was that balanced Abram in this intoxicating march. No one asks what enabled him, while leading his armed followers flushed with success through a land weakened by recent dismay and disaster, to restrain them and himself from claiming the whole land as his. No one asks what gave him moral perception to see that the opportunity given him of winning the land by the sword was a temptation, not a guiding providence. To every reader it is obvious that his dependence on God was his safeguard and his light. God would bring him by fair and honorable means to his own. There was no need of violence, no need of receiving help from doubtful allies. This is true nobility; and this, faith always produces.—The Expositor’s Bible, Genesis, Marcus Dods.
AIM
The aim in this lesson will be practically the same as that of Lesson 9. This story shows again the kindliness and unselfishness of Abram and even more forcibly and attractively perhaps for the Junior children, as those qualities are exhibited in the doing of a brave and hazardous thing.