Genesis 12

¹ Yahweh said to Abram, ‘Leave your country, your family and your father’s house, for the land I will show you.

² I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name so famous that it will be used as a blessing.

³ ‘I will bless those who bless you: I will curse those who slight you. All the tribes of the earth shall bless themselves by you.’

⁴ So Abram went as Yahweh told him, and Lot went with him.

⁵ Abram was seventy-five years old when he left Haran. Abram took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all the possessions they had amassed and the people they had acquired in Haran. They set off for the land of Canaan, and arrived there.

⁶ Abram passed through the land as far as Shechem’s holy place, the Oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land.

⁷ Yahweh appeared to Abram and said, ‘It is to your descendants that I will give this land’. So Abram built there an altar for Yahweh who had appeared to him.

⁸ From there, he moved on to the mountainous district east of Bethel, where he pitched his tent, with Bethel to the west and Ai to the east. There he built an altar to Yahweh and invoked the name of Yahweh.

⁹ Then Abram made his way stage by stage to the Negeb.

¹⁰ When famine came to the land Abram went down into Egypt to stay there for the time, since the land was hard pressed by the famine.

¹¹ On the threshold of Egypt he said to his wife Sarai, ‘Listen! I know you are a beautiful woman.

¹² When the Egyptians see you they will say, “That is his wife”, and they will kill me but spare you.

¹³ Tell them you are my sister, so that they may treat me well because of you and spare my life out of regard for you.’

¹⁴ When Abram arrived in Egypt the Egyptians did indeed see that the woman was very beautiful.

¹⁵ When Pharaoh’s officials saw her they sang her praises to Pharaoh and the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s palace.

¹⁶ He treated Abram well because of her, and he received flocks, oxen, donkeys, men and women slaves, she-donkeys and camels.

¹⁷ But Yahweh inflicted severe plagues on Pharaoh and his household because of Abram’s wife Sarai. So Pharaoh summoned Abram and said,

¹⁸ ‘What is this you have done to me? Why did you not tell me she was your wife?

¹⁹ Why did you say, “She is my sister”, so that I took her for my wife? Now, here is your wife. Take her and go!’

²⁰ Pharaoh committed him to men who escorted him back to the frontier with his wife and all he possessed.