Genesis 20:10

Genesis 20 opens with Abraham moving south, soon after the LORD destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19. Ishmael has already been born, and Isaac, the son God promised through Sarah, is yet to come. At Gerar Abraham said of Sarah, “She is my sister” (Genesis 20:2), and Abimelech took her into his house. He did it in integrity, believing what he had been told. Then God came to him in a dream and told him he was “a dead man”, because she was a married woman. God also told him that he had kept him from sinning against him by keeping him from touching her, and that unless he restored her, he and all that were his would die (Genesis 20:3–7).

This had happened once before. In Egypt Abraham had asked Sarah to call herself his sister, out of fear for his life, and God stepped in to protect her there as well (Genesis 12:10–20). So when Abimelech confronts Abraham in these verses, we are watching the same failure for the second time, and the same faithful God dealing with it.

“Therefore Abimelech rose early in the morning.” The word for morning, bôqer, is the ordinary word for it, traced to the breaking through of daylight. “Rose early in the morning” is a common biblical way of saying that someone acted at once, and Abimelech plainly took God’s warning seriously enough to act on it as soon as day came.

He “called all his servants, and told all these things in their ears”. The verb dâbar is the everyday word for speaking or telling. The word “all” stands twice in this part of the verse, “all his servants” and “all these things”, and together they show that he kept back nothing from anyone. “In their ears” means he told them directly and plainly, so that they would understand. He had good reason to gather them, because God’s warning reached “all that are thine” (Genesis 20:7). In that day a king’s actions could bring blessing or judgment on his whole household and people, and Abimelech acted as a ruler responsible for them.

“And the men were sore afraid.” The word for sore, mᵉʼôd, means very, greatly or exceedingly, and the verb yârêʼ means to fear, and can also mean to revere. The men were very afraid, and rightly so, because the God who had spoken in the night held their lives in his hand. Their fear moved them toward obedience, and by the end of the chapter God heals Abimelech’s household (Genesis 20:17).

Scripture often joins the fear of God with turning to what is right. After the Red Sea, “the people feared the LORD, and believed the LORD, and his servant Moses” (Exodus 14:31). “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Psalm 111:10), and “by the fear of the LORD men depart from evil” (Proverbs 16:6).

Then Abimelech calls Abraham, and the king summons the patriarch to give an account. His first question, “What hast thou done unto us?”, speaks for his whole people, who had been placed in danger along with him. His second, “what have I offended thee”, uses châṭâʼ, to miss or to sin. Abimelech is asking what wrong he had ever done to Abraham to deserve this, and the honest answer is none at all. Both questions are the cry of an innocent man who has been wronged.

He goes on: “thou hast brought on me and on my kingdom a great sin”. The word for sin, chăṭâʼâh, means sin or guilt, and it can also mean a sin offering. The word for great, gâdôwl, means great in size, standing or intensity, and here it marks how serious this sin would have been. What Abraham’s deception nearly caused was adultery with another man’s wife, committed unknowingly by the king. Abimelech understood that the guilt would have fallen on his whole kingdom. Scripture shows the same thing in the sin of Achan, which brought defeat on all Israel (Joshua 7:1–5). God had told Abimelech that he was a dead man, and Paul writes that “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).

“Thou hast done deeds unto me that ought not to be done.” The verb ʻâsâh, to do, comes back here from the king’s first question, and it lays the whole weight on Abraham’s own conduct. Abimelech appeals to a standard everyone knows, and he is right. “Lying lips are abomination to the LORD” (Proverbs 12:22).

Abraham’s answer begins, “Because I thought”. He had judged the people of Gerar in advance. “The fear of God” uses yirʼâh, a word for reverence and awe that can also mean dread. Abraham means the reverence for God that restrains people from wrong, and he assumed that a city outside God’s covenant would have none of it. The word for God, ʼĕlôhîym, is plural in form, and when it names the true God it is read as a plural of majesty, with its verbs usually singular. Here it means the one true God. “They will slay me” uses hârag, to kill, and it names Abraham’s deepest fear: that he would be murdered so that another man could take his wife.

The danger itself was real. Rulers in that day could take a beautiful woman into their households, and a husband could be killed to get her. Abraham’s judgment of Gerar, though, was wrong. Abimelech had acted in the integrity of his heart (Genesis 20:6), and when his servants heard what God had said they were very afraid. The verse turns on an irony: Abraham was sure there was no fear of God in Gerar, and the men of Gerar trembled at God’s word while he hid behind a half-truth.

Abraham’s own fear was the fear of man, and “the fear of man bringeth a snare” (Proverbs 29:25). The fear of God is a deep reverence for his holiness and power that leads to wisdom, integrity and obedience, as “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10). Abimelech’s conduct also shows that God holds all people to a moral standard they know. Paul speaks of Gentiles who show “the work of the law written in their hearts” (Romans 2:14–15).

In verse 12 Abraham defends the words he had used. “Indeed” is ʼomnâh, truly or in truth, and with it Abraham insists that what he said was a fact. The word for sister, ʼâchôwth, is simply the feminine of ʼâch, brother. Abraham defines the tie at once: “the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother”. Sarah shared his father, Terah, and had a different mother. Then he adds the fact that mattered most: “and she became my wife”. The word ʼishshâh means a woman and, as here, a wife, and “became my wife” speaks of a recognised marriage.

Verse 13 shows that the plan was old. “When God caused me to wander from my father’s house” looks back to God’s call in Genesis 12:1, when he told Abraham to leave his country and his father’s house. The verb tâʻâh, in the causative form used here, means to cause to wander and can also mean to lead astray. Here Abraham means that God led him away from all he knew into strange lands. He names God, ʼĕlôhîym, as the one who set the course of his whole life.

From the start of that journey Abraham had said to Sarah, “This is thy kindness which thou shalt shew unto me”. The word cheçed usually speaks of steadfast love, loyalty, mercy and faithfulness. Abraham asks it of Sarah as a favour of loyalty, and the favour he wants is that she join in the deception. A word that belongs to faithful love is pressed into the service of fear.

“At every place whither we shall come, say of me, He is my brother.” The word ʼâch is the ordinary word for brother, used of a blood relation and also more widely. Sarah was his half-sister, so the word was true in itself, but the purpose was to hide the marriage. In some cultures a sister may have had more protection than a wife, so that her husband was less likely to be killed for her. “Every place” makes it a standing agreement. The deception in Egypt and the deception in Gerar came from the same plan, and Isaac would later do the same thing at Gerar.

Abraham had clear and repeated promises from God, and he had seen God rescue Sarah in Egypt. Still the fear for his own life came back, and he reached again for the plan he had made years before. Even a man of great faith can carry the same weakness for a long time, and learning to trust God is often the work of a lifetime. Scripture tells the failures of its heroes honestly.

His faith was real all the same. Hebrews honours Abraham for going out when God called him, not knowing where he went, and for looking for the city whose builder and maker is God (Hebrews 11:8–10). His faith was imperfect and lasting, and God’s faithfulness rested on God’s own character: “If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself” (2 Timothy 2:13).

So God stepped in. He kept Sarah from harm and Abimelech from sin, and he preserved the line through which Isaac would come. The LORD brings the plans of the nations to nothing (Psalm 33:10), and here he overruled both a king’s taking and a patriarch’s scheming to keep his word.

God protected Sarah because the promise ran through her, and the promise led to Christ. Paul says that the seed promised to Abraham is Christ (Galatians 3:16), and that in Abraham all nations are blessed (Galatians 3:8).

Abraham feared for his life and hid behind a half-truth to save it. Jesus laid down his life of his own will (John 10:17–18) and was “obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:8). He is himself the truth (John 14:6). He is also the true kindness Abraham misused, the steadfast love of God shown in that “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).

Abraham brought “a great sin” near to others. Christ bore sin himself and put it away by the sacrifice of himself (Hebrews 9:26). He is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). God kept Abimelech from sin, and in Christ he forgives and removes it, delivering us into the kingdom of his dear Son, in whom we have redemption (Colossians 1:13–14).

The terror of Abimelech’s household before God’s judgment finds its answer in him too. Justified by faith, we have peace with God (Romans 5:1–2), and we who were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ (Ephesians 2:13). The fear that remains is reverence and loving obedience toward God as our Father. Nothing can separate us from his love in Christ (Romans 8:38–39), and all his promises in Christ are yea and amen (2 Corinthians 1:20).

These verses show us a God who is holy, who speaks to a foreign king, who takes sin seriously even when it is committed in ignorance, and who holds every nation to account. They show us that fear of people can lead even a man of great faith into deceit that endangers others, and that a half-truth told for safety can do as much harm as a plain lie.

They also show us a God whose faithfulness is greater than his servants’ failures. He guarded Sarah, spared Abimelech, and kept the line of promise safe while Abraham was at his weakest. Our security rests in him. The New Testament puts the lesson of Gerar in a single command: “put away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour” (Ephesians 4:25).