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“’You have heard that it was said, “YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR and hate your enemy” (Lev. 19:18; Deut. 23:3-6). But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.’” (Matthew 5:43–45 NASB)
We can learn from Abraham, the father of our faith in God, how to put these words of Yeshua the Messiah (Jesus the Christ) into action in the Torah reading חַיֵּי שָׂרָה Chayey Sarah (“life of Sarah,” Gen. 23:1–25:18). Even as God’s hundreds of years of merciful patience with Canaan’s reprehensible behavior were ticking down, Abraham was praying for the nations’ safety and paying them a large sum for property in the area.
The first topic I want to cover is to compare the conversation that Eliezer had with Rivkah (Rebekah) with a similar conversation Messiah had during his earthly ministry.
Abraham goes to the “sons of Heth” to purchase a burial site for Sarah. Although the “sons of Heth” were descendants of the Hittites, and they were politically dominant but they were not the only ethnic group in Canaan. There were many other groups living in Canaan, such as the Amorites.
Unforgivable sin?
Most of these tribes were so culturally abhorrent to God that God told Abraham back in Genesis 15 that He in about 400 years, he would wipe out the Amorites and these other Canaanite groups. They were so unteachable and incorrigible that He had to wipe them out of the Promised Land.
Some of these groups were exterminated but most of them were pushed out and they fled elsewhere. However, there were some that the children of Israel refused to push out, disobeying God’s explicit command and they suffered greatly as a result.
As as believers in the Messiah Yeshua, we wonder “How can you possibly say this into great? Is there a sin too great for God to forgive?” This isn’t about forgiveness.
What God has said is that the culture of the Amorites and other Canaanite groups was so foul and the cultures were so severe that they could not be molded and changed. They were too severe and set in their ways to be forgiven.
These groups had institutionalized injustice to such an extent that they couldn’t be fixed. He destroyed them before they got even worse. I don’t even want to guess how much worse they could have become if God hadn’t intervened.
Torah doesn’t record all of the Canaanite’s reprehensible deeds, and that’s God’s wisdom that those deeds weren’t recorded because humans tend to repeat history. We would duplicate what they had done because of our natural curiosity.
Leviticus 20 gives more than enough information to understand why the Canaanites were so horrible that they had to be wiped out. We get enough of a glimpse into the nature of these people that we can understand why Abraham told his servant, “Do not choose a wife among these people for my son Isaac.” Abraham was not pleased with how the Canaanites conducted themselves.
“You are therefore to keep all My statutes and all My ordinances and do them, so that the land to which I am bringing you to live will not spew you out. ‘Moreover, you shall not follow the customs of the nation which I will drive out before you, for they did all these things, and therefore I have abhorred them. ‘Hence I have said to you, “You are to possess their land, and I Myself will give it to you to possess it, a land flowing with milk and honey.” I am the LORD your God, who has separated you from the peoples. ‘You are therefore to make a distinction between the clean animal and the unclean, and between the unclean bird and the clean; and you shall not make yourselves detestable by animal or by bird or by anything that creeps on the ground, which I have separated for you as unclean. ‘Thus you are to be holy to Me, for I the LORD am holy; and I have set you apart from the peoples to be Mine.” (Leviticus 20:22–26 NASB)
Most of the behaviors listed in Leviticus 20 are abhorrent to us even today. God is recording a list of unethical behavior. God is telling the Israelites that the Canaanites did all these things with each other and that is why He is expelling them from His promised land by any means possible.
Child sacrifice and being complicit in those offerings disgusts God. Sexual relations with close relatives, wether they are related by blood or covenant disgusts God.
I can’t imagine how much worse Sodom and Gomorrah were that God destroyed them in Abraham’s lifetime but waited an additional 400 years before destroying the Canaanites. So whatever the people of Sodom and Gomorrah were doing, it was worse than all this. I’m not sure what all was and I don’t want to go much deeper than that.
God could not tolerate Sodom and Gomorrah surviving any further and God tells Abraham in Genesis 15 that in about 400 years, His patience with the Canaanites will run out, too.
Show me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are
Why is that? Well, I have a simple question for you. Does good corrupt evil or does evil corrupt good?
The prophet Isaiah tells us that wickedness spreads like wildfire (Isa. 9:18). It spreads and grows very quickly.
God saw a source of a serious problem He is going to end it because the problem is going to spread too quickly.
God warned Moses that the Canaanites would pollute the children of Israel. The Canaanites would drive and pull them away from what is right over time. The descent into wickedness would not be instantaneous, but over the course of generations. That is how evil grows, slowly and quietly until it dominates and oppresses.
It’s like a weed, if you ignore its growth, the root becomes harder and harder to pull out until it almost becomes so deeply rooted that it is impossible dislodge. It’s the same thing with culture.
If evil is tolerated in a culture and not quickly uprooted, it becomes impossible to dislodge.
War and peace, Abraham-style
Now, we have an idea of the culture war that Abraham engaged as he lived among the Canaanites.
Abraham cared about where he lives. Most of us live in the USA. We care about where we live. We pray for our neighbors, we pray for our nation.
Jeremiah 29:4-8 tells us what to do, regardless of whether we live in a righteous or a wicked nation.
““Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon, ‘Build houses and live in them; and plant gardens and eat their produce. ‘Take wives and become the fathers of sons and daughters, and take wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; and multiply there and do not decrease. ‘Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf; for in its welfare you will have welfare.’” (Jeremiah 29:4–7 NASB)
God through the prophet Jeremiah is telling us that regardless of the character of our nation and our neighbors, it is in our best interest to seek our country’s peace, to seek its success and welfare. Why? Because that is how we have peace.
Our peace depends on God. God chooses which nations He will cover with peace and which nations will have their covering of peace removed. If God chooses to remove His covering of peace, that nation fails and so do those who live there.
It is in our best interest to always pray for our nation, so we will have peace and protection, too.
So, for Abraham, even though he lives among Canaanites, he prays for their safety and wellbeing. He also has already made military alliances with them.
Even though their conduct is very depraved, he still makes an alliance with them because it is in their mutual self interest to help each other out.
For Abraham, even though he disagreed on virtually every philosophical belief, it was in his family’s best interest to work with the Hittites and other Canaanite tribes and cooperate because if any one them stand alone, they will die.
This is one of the reasons why Abraham is willing to pay full price (or even more than full price) of 400 silver shekels for the field and cave where he buried Sarah.
When Jeremiah buys a somewhat similarly sized field 1,000 years later, it would cost him 17 shekels versus 400. So, Abraham paid a pretty penny for this acreage.
Peace from 30 pieces of silver
When Judas returned the 30 shekels in blood money he had “earned” for betraying Messiah Yeshua, the elders used that money to buy a similar amount of land as a burial plot (Matt. 27:3–10).
From Jeremiah to Judas, the value of the land doubled, but it was still nowhere near what Abraham had paid.
Abraham could have haggled and negotiated a better price for the land. After all, this is a man who haggled with God and won. Moses also knew how to negotiate with God and prevail. Abraham was a very wealthy money so he certainly knew how to create and maintain his wealth, but I think Abraham was in such a state of mourning that he was in no mood to haggle.
Once he purchased this land, Abraham was no longer a wanderer in the land. Now he has an established home based in the land.
Rebecca is the joy of Isaac’s heart.
Now Abraham’s attention turns to finding a wife for Isaac. Abraham is adamant that Isaac not find a wife among the Canaanites. It’s fine to have them as neighbors and to agree to fight alongside them in war, but Abraham didn’t want them as family. The way the Canaanites conducted themselves was so opposite with how God was teaching him to live that Abraham wanted to make sure that Isaac married a woman from his people back in Aram rather than from his neighbors.
I’m sure Abraham’s servant, Eliezer, had a lot of time to think long and hard about the kind of woman Abraham was looking for in a wife for Isaac.
Eliezer probably thought of a woman like Sarah, who his master Abraham adored. He knew that the Canaanites and the Egyptians did not produce the type of women Abraham was looking for to partner with Isaac.
The problem is that it’s not easy to see what is in someone’s heart, we can only see what is on the outside.
There’s one trait that is surprisingly not relevant to Abraham’s opinion about the Canaanites and that is idolatry. The Canaanites were idolators but so was Abraham’s family. Idol worship was not a deal-breaker for Abraham. That had nothing to do with the reason that Abraham doesn’t want a Canaanite daughter in law.
Abraham was looking for a daughter in law with a particular character trait, not a particular religion or philosophy.
So, Eliezer prays to God and comes up with a test to help him find the right kind of woman for Isaac. When he comes up a test that the woman who offers him and his camels water at a well was the one for Isaac. We see in this test he is looking for a young woman who is generous, hospitable, and kind to animals. But the key character trait Eliezer was looking for is kindness to strangers.
No such thing as ‘stranger danger’
Rebecca, who was probably a teenager or a 20-something woman, would have every right to be leery of Eliezer and his entourage of able-bodied men, who were probably armed with weapons who she had never met before. No one would have judged her if she had wanted nothing to do with them, “stranger-danger” and so on.
But God tells us in the Torah many times, “remember when you were strangers…” Abraham was a stranger to the Canaanites when he first arrived. He was also a stranger in Egypt and Philistia. He was treated reasonable well in all three areas, despite his lies about Sarah’s relationship to him.
So, what are we to do when a stranger comes to us? We are to treat them as we would want to be treated.
A fish out of water looks for the nearest ocean
We see that Messiah Yeshua also met a woman at a well. What did she give and what did she want in return? We read that story in John 4.
“And He had to pass through Samaria. So He came to a city of Samaria called Sychar, near the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph; and Jacob’s well was there. So Jesus, being wearied from His journey, was sitting thus by the well. It was about the sixth hour. There came a woman of Samaria to draw water. Jesus *said to her, “Give Me a drink.” For His disciples had gone away into the city to buy food. Therefore the Samaritan woman *said to Him, “How is it that You, being a Jew, ask me for a drink since I am a Samaritan woman?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) Jesus answered and said to her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.”” (John 4:4–10 NASB)
What character trait is the Samaritan woman showing here? Does she trust this man who is asking her for water? No. She can tell by his appearance that He is Jewish and as a Samaritan, she has been taught not to trust Jews and Jews had been taught not to trust Samaritans.
Rebecca could have responded to Eliezer in the same way, but she didn’t. She saw on the outside the Eliezer was a wealthy individual to be in charge of such a large caravan of men and camels, but Rebecca didn’t even ask Eliezer “Who are you? Why are you asking me for water?” She simply responds by giving him and his camels the water they needed.
“She *said to Him, “Sir, You have nothing to draw with and the well is deep; where then do You get that living water? “You are not greater than our father Jacob, are You, who gave us the well, and drank of it himself and his sons and his cattle?” Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again; but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.”
The woman *said to Him, “Sir, give me this water, so I will not be thirsty nor come all the way here to draw.” He *said to her, “Go, call your husband and come here.” The woman answered and said, “I have no husband.” Jesus *said to her, “You have correctly said, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband; this you have said truly.”” (John 4:11–18 NASB)
The Samaritan woman continues to engage Messiah in conversation and quizzes Him, but she still hasn’t given him any water yet. She is not giving Him any water until He answers her questions. Rebecca asks nothing in return for her kindness.
“The woman *said to Him, “Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet. “Our fathers worshiped in this mountain, and you people say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.” Jesus *said to her, “Woman, believe Me, an hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. “You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. “But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. “God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” The woman *said to Him, “I know that Messiah is coming (He who is called Christ); when that One comes, He will declare all things to us.” Jesus *said to her, “I who speak to you am He.”” (John 4:19–26 NASB)
Once the Samaritan woman tags Yeshua as a prophet, she lets her guard down a bit and engages in conversation. Yet, she still hasn’t given him a cup of water. Now she knows who this man is and what gifts He can give her.
A matter of faith and trust
That is not the reaction that Rebecca gave, was it? She gave Eliezer, his men and his camels water and expected nothing in return. But she responded with kindness anyway.
Rebecca has a certain child-like innocence and simple trust the Samaritan woman doesn’t possess.
The promise that Rebecca received from that interaction with a total stranger was the promise of a radically new life. Her entire family line is changed from this point on.
The Samartian woman’s life also changed forever after her meeting with the Messiah but the gift she received was more spiritual, rather than physical. Two different responses and two different results.
We see with Abraham that as he is preparing for the end of his life, his primary concern is for his descendants, not just his immediate descendants but those far into the future, too.
Abraham wants to make sure they knew who God was, and that they would practice the lessons he has taught them.
1Kings 1:1-49: How to establish one’s legacy while you’re still alive
If we really look very closely in our TaNaK, it is quite obvious that David is the most talked about individual in the whole Bible. There are entire books about him. I would say David’s life is better documented than Messiah Yeshua. Why does David have more ink in the bible than the Messiah?
He wrote the book of Psalms, the books of Samuel, Chronicles and Kings. They give us details about his life, and all the kings of Judah after him are compared to him afterwards, and most of them are found wanting in comparison to the standard of kingship established by David.
Because there’s something about King David that God wants us to understand. He is a key character.
David was not a perfect man by any means. He was not always a good man. He did some very bad things but what was unique about David is that when he realized how bad he had been, he genuinely repented. That is a character trait we see repeated in his story over and over again. Regardless how awful his conduct, David still goes back to God and asked for forgiveness. Then he repeats the cycle and needs to repent and ask for forgiveness again. I think David’s story is recorded in our TaNaK so that we can see that the cycle of sin, repentance and forgiveness is a lifetime cycle, not just a one time event.
We learn from David that no matter what happens, always remember, Go back. It doesn’t matter what we did, we can repent and go back. David was an adulterer and a murderer. Most of us have never committed sins like that, but even David was able to repent and return to God.
At this time, David is an old man and not in good health. We read here how Adonijah is raising himself up to inherit the throne. He does seem like the logical choice as he is David’s surviving eldest son. Solomon was the youngest son and was considered too young to inherit David’s throne and David did not rebuke Adonijah straight away for his conspiracy.
Notice when Nathan the Prophet comes to Bathsheba, what is his warning. He warns her that if Adonijah is successful, than he will have Solomon and her executed. Why? Because as long as there’s someone who can dispute Adonijah’s kingdom, his possession of the throne is tenuous and he will do what must be done to establish his power. You can call yourself a king all you want but it’s only when there’s no one else to dispute your claim that you become officially King.
So, as long as David remains silent while Adonijah declares himself king, enough people will agree with Adonijah and he would become king.
So, here we have a man who has the army and the priesthood on his side declaring himself as king.
But Adonijah does not have the prophet Nathan on his side. The prophet is the mouthpiece of God and God is not on Adonijah’s side.
Those supporting Adonijah were those who, from a worldly point of view, one would need to establish oneself as king of a nation. But he didn’t have God on his side.
Adonijah did not invite Nathan the prophet or those he knew would not support his actions to witness his self-coronation.
Bathsheba, on the advice of Nathan the prophet approaches King David and tells him about Adonijah’s conspiracy. She also reminds David that he swore an oath in HaShem’s name that Solomon would be his heir. David knows the Torah very well. He knows that any vow or oath made in God’s name can’t be revoked, even if it means your death. God does not allow His name to be used haphazardly.
She also warns David that if he doesn’t interceded, that once he passes away, Adonijah will have her and her son Solomon executed for treason.
We also see here that there were some priests and some portions of the army who were not supportive of Adonijah. This division is happening while David is still alive.
Let’s compare and contrast Adonijah v. Solomon. We see in this one section clues about the character of both the Messiah Yeshua and HaSatan. On the surface they look the same, except one has the Prophet of God and the sworn oath of the king and the other doesn’t. One makes a show to look like a king and the other is a king.
We later see that Adonijah’s followers run before him while Solomon’s followers come after him. A real king is not lead by his subjects. A real king is followed by his subjects.
Based on this haftarah, what do we learn about David? David was concerned about what was going to happen after he dies. He is concerned about his legacy. Hence he reaffirms his decision that Solomon is the right King and issues instructions to make that happen. Nathan and the others follow David’s instructions and they follow Solomon as king.
We see the difference between a follower pretending to be a king, like Adonijah in stark contrast with Solomon, a leader who others follow.
We also see a contrast between Rebecca and how she lived a life of trust and the Samaritan woman who did not trust.
We see in Solomon and Adonijah the difference between those who follow God and those who follow men.
Although we know that everything that happens is God’s will, God is pleased with us when we diligently teach the younger generations about Him. He wants us to practice what He taught us. He wants us to be hospitable to strangers, trusting and to care about how we leave the world better than it was when we began.
Summary: Tammy