I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Genesis 12-15.

The passage does not say so explicitly, but it appears to me that when Terah, Abram’s father died, God called Abram to continue on his way to the land of Canaan.  The passage suggests that Abram was quite wealthy when he left Haran.  Nothing in the passage says this, but the feeling I get from it is that Abram felt unwelcome in Haran because of his belief in God, just as his father had felt unwelcome in Ur a generation earlier.  If we assume that we have the stories told in Genesis up until this point because Abram passed them on to his descendants we can see how this might have happened.  One of the many things skeptics of the Bible bring up is the similarities between the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Biblical account of the Flood.  Many people claim that the Biblical account of the Flood borrows, or is even derived from, the Epic of Gilgamesh.  However, what if the “borrowing” went the other direction?  

After the Flood, we have a story where Noah’s son Ham comes upon his father drunk and naked and brings this to his brother’s attention.  The implication in the passage was that Ham told his brothers so that they could join him in laughing at their father’s drunkenness.  The important part of this story for the moment is that Noah favored his son Shem as a result of this incident.  Abram was a direct descendant of Shem.  So, the descendants of Japheth and Ham went their own ways after the separation of languages and lost the stories from before the Flood, but Shem’s descendants remembered them and passed them down.

Some time later, there arose among those of Shem’s descendants given the task of remembering the stories the idea that they could gain greater power over their fellows by modifying those stories.  Thus arose the Epic of Gligamesh, a retelling of the Flood story which served the purposes of those who had gained political power in Mesopotamia.   This would have made life difficult for those who continued to faithfully tell the stories which had been passed down, Terah and his children.  I will note that scholars place the origins of the Epic of Gilgamesh at about the same time which other scholars place Abram (as a general rule, scholars who research the dates for the Epic of Gilgamesh are not researching the dates for Abram).