Genesis 20:6

The scene in Gerar repeats something Abraham had done before. In Egypt he had passed Sarah off as his sister out of fear for his life, and Pharaoh had taken her into his house (Genesis 12:10–20). Now, after the destruction of Sodom, Abraham has moved into the Negev and settled near Gerar, a Philistine city, and he tells the same half-truth there. Abimelech, whose name means “father of the king”, takes Sarah into his household, as the kings of that day commonly took women, and he probably means to marry her. Abraham’s fear was real, for a husband had reason to fear a powerful ruler who wanted his wife. Even so, the lie put Sarah in danger and brought an innocent king to the edge of a grave sin, and it put at risk the promise of a son through Sarah.

“But God came” opens the verse, and from that point God is the one acting. The word for dream, chălôwm, covers both the ordinary dream of sleep and the dream that carries a message from God, and this is the second kind. God spoke through dreams at other times too, as he later did with Joseph (Genesis 37), and here he speaks so to a king who stands outside the covenant family, because his rule reaches every nation and every ruler.

His first words are blunt: “Behold, thou art but a dead man”. The KJV supplies “art but”, and the Hebrew sets Abimelech before God simply as a dead man, using the verb mûwth, to die. Two reasons follow, each opened by “for”: the woman he has taken, and the fact that “she is a man’s wife.” That last phrase is built from the noun baʻal, a master and so a husband, and the verb bâʻal, to be master and so to marry. Sarah is a married woman under her husband’s authority and protection, and God treats that bond as one that no king may override.

Before Abimelech speaks, the narrator adds a fact: “Abimelech had not come near her”. The verb qârab, to come near, settles that the king had never lain with Sarah. That matters for all that follows, because it is why God can listen to his plea and why the wrong can still be undone.

Abimelech answers God as “Lord”, ʼĂdônây, an emphatic form of the word for master that Scripture uses only as a name of God. A king outside Abraham’s family recognises the one speaking to him as the supreme Lord, who holds the power of life and death and to whom a man may appeal for justice. His question uses hârag, to slay or kill, a hard word that shows how seriously he took the warning: “wilt thou slay also a righteous nation?” He speaks for his whole people, his gôwy, a word for a nation and often for a foreign one, because the judgment that falls on a king can fall on everyone under him.

The question is a protest, and it appeals to God’s justice. It echoes Abraham’s own plea for the righteous in Sodom only a little earlier, when he asked, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:23–33). The scene is full of irony. Abraham, the man of faith who received God’s covenant, has fallen back on deceit, while a pagan king fears God and argues for what is right.

Abimelech goes on: “Said he not unto me, She is my sister? and she, even she herself said, He is my brother”. He lays the deception where it belongs, first on Abraham and then on Sarah. The small word gam, “even”, adds weight to her part, and together with the pronoun hûwʼ, “she”, it presses home that Sarah herself said it. With husband and wife telling the same story, Abimelech had every reason to believe it. It was a half-truth, since Sarah was Abraham’s half-sister (Genesis 20:12), but she was first of all his wife.

Then comes the centre of his plea: “in the integrity of my heart and innocency of my hands have I done this.” tôm, integrity, means completeness and usually moral innocence. Joined to lêbâb, the heart as the inmost part of a person, it describes a sincere motive with no guile in it. niqqâyôwn, innocency, means cleanness, and “innocency of my hands” speaks of his outward deeds. The two phrases stand side by side in the way Hebrew often pairs its thoughts, the inner motive beside the outward act, so that together they claim blamelessness in both. The same pairing marks the one who may stand in God’s holy place: “He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart” (Psalm 24:3–4).

Every man’s own conduct looks clean to him, as Proverbs warns: “All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes; but the LORD weigheth the spirits” (Proverbs 16:2). Abimelech’s claim needed God to weigh it, and in the next verse God does.

God speaks again in the dream, and he grants Abimelech’s plea: “Yea, I know that thou didst this in the integrity of thy heart”. “Yea” is the same word gam that stood under “even” in verse 5, and here it confirms what the king said. The verb yâdaʻ means to know, properly to know by seeing, and God’s knowledge reaches the motive itself. “For the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). God takes up Abimelech’s own words, “the integrity of thy heart”, with the same tôm and lêbâb.

Then God tells the king what he could never have known: “for I also withheld thee from sinning against me: therefore suffered I thee not to touch her.” The verb châsak means to withhold or hold back, and God names himself as the one who held Abimelech back. The king’s integrity kept him from intending wrong, and God’s hand kept him from doing it. “Touch”, nâgaʻ, means to lay a hand on someone, and here it is a modest way of speaking of a man lying with a woman. The chapter goes on to tell of the barrenness the LORD had sent on Abimelech’s household.

Verse 7 turns from explanation to command: “Now therefore restore the man his wife”. shûwb means to turn back or return, and here it means giving Sarah back to her rightful husband, fully and at once. Then comes the reason, and with it a surprise: “for he is a prophet, and he shall pray for thee, and thou shalt live”.

This is one of the earliest places in Scripture where anyone is called a prophet. A nâbîyʼ is one called to speak for God, a man to whom God shows his will, and in Abraham’s case his nearness to God shows itself especially in prayer. The verb pâlal means to pray or intercede for another, and its root sense is probably to step in between. Abraham had already pleaded with God for Sodom, and now God tells a king that his life hangs on that same man’s prayer. The powerful king must depend for his life on the prayer of the sojourner who has just deceived him. God keeps his servant’s calling even while his servant fails, and he makes him the channel of mercy.

Scripture remembers how God guarded the patriarchs in their wanderings: “He suffered no man to do them wrong: yea, he reproved kings for their sakes; Saying, Touch not mine anointed, and do my prophets no harm” (Psalm 105:14–15). And the power of a righteous man’s prayer endures: “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much” (James 5:16).

The promise châyâh, “thou shalt live”, stands against the warning of death. If Abimelech refuses, “know thou that thou shalt surely die, thou, and all that are thine.” The Hebrew doubles the verb mûwth, the verb behind “dead man” in verse 3, to make the certainty plain, and the KJV renders it “surely die”. The judgment would reach his whole household, because in Scripture the deeds of a leader can bring blessing or ruin on all who belong to him.

This night in Gerar is about God’s faithfulness more than anyone’s goodness. God had promised to bless Abraham and through him all the families of the earth (Genesis 12:1–3), and he had promised a son through Sarah. Abraham’s fear nearly undid it, and God stepped in to keep it. His plans rest on his own steadfast character, as Paul says: God remains faithful even when we are faithless (2 Timothy 2:13).

The son whose line God guarded here leads on to Christ, the seed of Abraham to whom the promises were made (Galatians 3:16), and through whom the gospel preached beforehand to Abraham reaches the nations (Galatians 3:8).

Abimelech could claim integrity of heart and innocency of hands only in one matter and only in a limited sense. Christ had them wholly. He was “without sin” (Hebrews 4:15), he “did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth” (1 Peter 2:22), and he fulfilled all righteousness (Matthew 3:15). The righteousness that we could never reach God gives through faith in him (Romans 3:21–26). He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), sins of ignorance and sins done knowingly alike, and in him we are made the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21). His blood cleanses the conscience (Hebrews 9:14).

God’s warning came to Abimelech as a mercy that offered a way out of death, and in Christ God has come to people who were “dead in trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1). Abraham the prophet prayed so that a king might live, and Christ is the Prophet Moses foretold (Deuteronomy 18:15), the Son who makes the Father known (John 1:18), and the one who intercedes for his people at God’s right hand (Romans 8:34) and always lives to make intercession for them (Hebrews 7:25). He loves the church as a faithful husband and gave himself for her (Ephesians 5:25–27). Abimelech’s choice was life by obedience or death by refusal, and the gospel sets the same choice before us: the one who believes on the Son has everlasting life, and the wrath of God abides on the one who rejects him (John 3:36).

God sees what is hidden from us. He knew Sarah was a wife when Abimelech was deceived, and he knew Abimelech’s heart was sincere when the king’s own claim needed weighing. He judges with perfect knowledge of what we knew and meant.

God also guards his people and his promises in ways they cannot see. Abimelech learned only in the dream that God had been holding him back, and Abraham, who had trusted his own scheme, was kept by a faithfulness far stronger than his fear. The Lord who restrained a king that night still holds back evil that would otherwise overtake us.

And God joins mercy to warning. The same night that brought the sentence of death brought the way to life, through obedience and the prayer of a man God had called. His warnings come so that we may turn and live.