Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
So we must realize that Scripture is here, as so often, going back to a point that the narrative had already passed; similarly in the earlier passage, after recording Noah’s sons, it states that they were, ‘according to languages and nations’,
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and yet later, as if this followed in
chronological order, it says, ‘and all the earth had one tongue, and there was one speech for all men.’
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How then could they have been classified ‘according to their nations and languages’, if there was ‘one speech for all men’? It can only be that the narrative goes back to a point it had already passed to make a fresh start.
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Similarly, then, in this passage Scripture says first, ‘The days of Terah in Haran were 205 years, and Terah died in Haran’;
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and then it returns to a point that had been omitted, the omission being due to the desire first to complete that story of Terah which had been begun. ‘Then the Lord’, it says, ‘said to Abram, “Leave your country” ’,
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and so on. And there words of God are followed by, ‘And Abram departed, as the Lord had bidden him, and Lot went away with him. Now Abram was seventy-five years old when he left Haran.’
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This happened, then, when his father was in his hundred and forty-fifth year; for Abraham was then in his seventy-fifth year. The problem can be solved in another way, by assuming that the seventy-five years of Abraham when he left Haran were reckoned from the time of his escape from the ‘fire of the Chaldeans’,
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instead of from his birth, as if this escape is to be regarded as his real birthday.
However, the blessed Stephen, when he recounted these events in the Acts of the Apostles, said, ‘The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham, when he was in Mesopotamia, before he made his home in Haran, and said to him: “Leave your country and your kindred and the home of your father, and come into the country which I shall show you.”’
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According to these words of Stephen it was not after his father’s death that God spoke to Abraham – for Terah died in Haran, where his son Abraham also lived with him – but it was before Abraham made his home in Haran, although he was already in Mesopotamia. Thus he had by now left the Chaldeans. For when Stephen adds, ‘Then Abraham departed from the land of the Chaldeans and made his home in Haran’, the statement does not refer to what happened after God had spoken to him – for he did not depart from the land of the Chaldeans
after
God’s bidding, since Stephen says that God spoke to him when he was in Mesopotamia; it refers to the whole period, ‘then’ meaning ‘after the time when’. Stephen is saying.’ After
the time when he departed from the Chaldeans and made his home in Haran’. Similarly, the following statement, ‘Then, after his father died, God settled him in this land, where you now live [and where your fathers lived]
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does not mean ‘after his father died, he left Haran’, but ‘after his father died, then God settled him here.’
Thus we are to understand that God had spoken to Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran, but that Abraham had arrived at Haran with his father, in obedience to God’s instructions) and had left Haran in his seventy-fifth year, the 145th year of his father’s life. We are told that his settling in the country of Canaan, not his leaving Haran, took place after his father’s death, since his father was already dead when Abraham bought the land in Canaan of which he then, and not till then, became proprietor. As for the words which God spoke to him when he was already established in Mesopotamia, that is, when he had already left the country of the Chaldeans, ‘Leave your land and kindred and your father’s home’; this was not a command to remove his body from there – he had done that already – but to tear his mind away from it. For he had not left the place in spirit, if he was still in the grip of the hope and the longing to return; and the tie of this hope and longing needed to be severed, according to God’s command and with God’s help, and by his own obedience. There is certainly nothing improbable in the supposition that it was when Nahor subsequently followed his father into Haran that Abraham fulfilled the Lord’s instructions to leave Haran, taking with him his wife Sarah and his nephew Lot.
16.
The order and nature of God’s promises to Abraham
We now have to consider God’s promises to Abraham; for in these the oracles of our God, that is, of the true God, begin to become more evident. These oracles concern the people of his genuine worshippers, which had been foretold by the authority of the prophets. Now the first of these promises is contained in this passage,
The Lord said to Abram: ‘Leave your land and kindred and your father’s home and go into the land which I shall show you; and I shall make you into a great nation, and I shall bless you and give you a great name, and you will be blessed; and I shall bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you, and in you all the tribes of the earth will be blessed.
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Eusebius decides that this promise was made in Abraham’s seventy-fifth year,
assuming that Abraham left Haran soon after it had been made, since the Scripture cannot be contradicted, and in Scripture we read, ‘Abram was seventy-five years old when he left Haran.’ Now if the promise was made in that year, Abraham was evidently already staying with his father in Haran; for he could not have left Haran without having lived there first. Now is this in contradiction to what Stephen says? His words are, ‘The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he made his home in Haran.’ It is not; for we must take it that all these events happened in the same yean God’s promise before Abraham made his home in Haran, Abraham’s settlement in Haran, and his departure from Haran. And this is not only because Eusebius in his
Chronicle
reckons from the year of this promise and shows that the Exodus from Egypt, when the Law was given, took place 430 years later,
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but also because the apostle Paul mentions it.
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17.
The three outstanding Gentile empires, Assyria already a great power when Abraham was born
At this period there were three outstanding Gentile empires, in which the city of the earthborn, that is, the society of men who live by man’s standards, achieved a notable predominance under the sway of the apostate angels. These three realms were those of Sicyon, Egypt, and Assyria.
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But the Assyrian Empire was by far the most powerful and exalted of the three. For the famous King Ninus,
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son of Bel, had subjugated the peoples of the whole of Asia, with the exception of India. When I say ‘Asia’ here I do not refer to that part which is only one province
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of greater Asia, but what is called ‘the whole of Asia’. Some people
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have reckoned this as one of the two divisions of the world, though the majority count it as the third part of the whole, which, according to them, consists of Asia, Europe, and Africa. This does not make an equal division. For the part called Asia reaches from the south, through the east, to the north, Europe from the north to the west, and then Africa begins and stretches from the west to the south. Hence the divisions, Europe and Africa, are seen to contain half the world, while Asia by itself contains the other half. The reason why
Europe and Africa are treated as two separate parts is that between them the water enters from the Ocean to form the intervening sea, our Great Sea. Therefore, if you divide the world into two parts, the East and the West, Asia will be in one, and both Europe and Africa in the other. That is why the Sicyon realm, of the three outstanding powers of the time, was not subject to the Assyrians, because it was in Europe. Whereas Egypt inevitably came under the power of those who held all Asia, with the sole exception, it is said, of India.
Thus in Assyria the ungodly city exercised predominant power. Its capital was that Babylon whose name, ‘Confusion’, is most apt for the earthbom city. Ninus was reigning there at this time, after the death of his father Bel, who was the first king there, reigning for sixty-five years. Now his son Ninus, who succeeded to the throne on the death of his father, reigned fifty-two years; and he had been on the throne for forty-three years when Abraham was born. This was about 1,200 years before the foundation of Rome, the second Babylonia, as it were, the Babylonia of the West.
18.
God’s second promise: the land of Canaan
And so Abraham departed from Haran in his seventy-fifth year, when his father was 145. With Lot, his nephew, and his wife Sarah, he reached the land of Canaan, and arrived eventually at Shechem, where he again received an oracle from God, which is thus described: ‘Then the Lord appeared to Abram, and said to him: “I shall give this land to your seed.” ’
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There is nothing said here about that seed in respect of which he became the father of all nations; the only seed mentioned is that by which he is the father of the one nation of Israel; for it was this seed that took possession of that land.
19.
Sarah’s chastity safeguarded by God in Egypt
Then Abraham built an altar there and called upon the name of the Lord. After that he left the place and lived in the desert; and from there he was compelled by stress of famine to go into Egypt. In Egypt he called his wife his sister;
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and this was no lie, for she was that also, because she was closely related by blood. In the same way Lot, who was similarly related, being his brother’s son, was called his brother. And so Abraham said nothing of her being his wife; he did not deny it. Thus he entrusted his wife’s chastity to God, and, as a
man, took precautions against man’s treachery; since if he had not taken all possible precautions against danger he could have been testing God, rather than putting his hope in him. But on this subject I have said all that needs saying in rebutting the false criticisms of Faustus the Manichean.
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In fact Abraham’s trust in God was confirmed by the event. For Pharaoh, king of Egypt, who had taken her as his wife, was grievously afflicted and restored her to her husband. In this connection it would be utterly wrong for us to suppose that she had been polluted by intercourse with another; for it is much more probable that Pharaoh was prevented by his great affliction from such intercourse.
20.
The separation of Lot and Abraham by amicable agreement
On the return of Abraham from Egypt to the place from which he had come, his nephew Lot left him to go into the land of Sodom, without any breach of affection. In fact they had become rich, and had begun to have many herdsmen for their flocks. These men quarrelled among themselves, and Abraham and Lot took this course to avoid disputes and fighting between their households. For in the way of human nature this might have given rise to quarrels between themselves also. These are the words which Abraham then addressed to Lot to obviate this unpleasantness: ‘Let there not be any quarrel between you and me, and between my herdsmen and yours, for we are kinsmen. Look, is not the whole land in front of you? Leave me. If you go to the left, I shall go to the right; if you go to the right, I shall go to the left.’
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This was perhaps the start of the peaceable custom among men whereby when any landed property is to be shared, the elder makes the division and the younger has the choice.
21.
God’s third promise: the land of Canaan in perpetuity
Thus Abraham and Lot parted company and settled in separate homes, not because of a quarrel – that would have been a disgrace – but because of the need to support their households. Abraham was now in the land of Canaan, while Lot was living among the men of Sodom; and now God spoke to Abraham in his third oracle,
Lift your eyes and from the place where you are now look towards the
north and the south and the east, and towards the sea; for all the land which you see I shall give to you and your seed for ever, and I will make your seed like the sands of the earth. If any man can number the sands, your seed also will be numbered. Arise and walk through the length and breadth of the land, because I shall give it to you.
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It is not clearly disclosed whether this promise includes also the promise by which Abraham became the father of all nations. For the words, ‘I shall make your seed like the sands of the earth’, might seem to connect it with the former promise. But we have here an instance of the figure of speech called ‘hyperbole’ by the Greeks; it is surely a figurative rather than a literal statement. Indeed, no student of Scripture can have any doubt that Scripture often employs this figure, as it does the other tropes. Now this trope, or figure of speech, occurs when what is said is far in excess of the facts referred to in the statement. No one could fail to see how incomparably greater is the number of the sands than the number of all human beings can possibly be, from Adam himself to the end of the world. How much more numerous, then, are they than the seed of Abraham, meaning not only that posterity of his which belongs to the race of Israel, but also those who are and will be his descendants, by following the example of his faith, in all nations throughout the whole world! This seed is certainly represented by a mere few, in comparison with the multitude of the ungodly; and yet these few make up an innumerable multitude of their own, and this is expressed, in hyperbole, by ‘the sands of the earth’. This multitude, to be sure, which is promised to Abraham is innumerable to men, but not to God; for to God not even the sands of the earth are beyond counting.
Since it is not only the nation of Israel to whom this promise is made, but the whole seed of Abraham, referring rather to spiritual than physical descendants, then these are more fittingly compared to the multitude of the sands, and so we can understand that the promise of both these posterities is given in this passage. But the reason for my statement that there is some ambiguity here is that the nation physically descended from Abraham through his grandson Jacob increased to such a multitude that it has filled almost all parts of the world. Because of this it would have been possible for this nation itself to be compared, in hyperbole, to the multitudes of the sands, since even this race, by itself, is beyond man’s reckoning.
At any rate, no one doubts that the only land referred to here is the country called Canaan. Yet the statement, ‘I shall give it to you and to
your seed for ever’, may puzzle some people, if they take ‘for ever’ (
usque in saeculum
) to mean ‘for eternity’.
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If, on the other hand, they accept the word
saeculum
here in accordance with our confident belief that the beginning of the future era (
saeculum
) starts with the end of the present era, there will be nothing to puzzle them. For even though the Israelites have been expelled from Jerusalem, they still remain in other cities of the land of Canaan, and they will remain there to the end. And the whole land, being inhabited by Christians, is itself the seed of Abraham.