Abram in Egypt

Some time later a famine struck Judea. Abram had learned that the Egyptians were prospering, and he decided to go down to them, both to share in the plenty they enjoyed and to hear their priests and learn what they said about the gods. He meant either to follow them, if their ideas were better than his, or to bring them over to a better way, if his own proved the truer. [a]

Since he was to take Sarai with him, and feared the madness of the Egyptians where women were concerned — that the king might kill him because of his wife’s great beauty — he devised this plan: he pretended to be her brother, and told her to keep up the same pretense, saying it would be to their advantage. As soon as he reached Egypt, things turned out as he had expected. The fame of his wife’s beauty was on everyone’s lips, so that Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, was not content with reports of her but insisted on seeing her himself, and was preparing to enjoy her. But God put a stop to his unjust desire by sending a disease on him, and an uprising against his rule. When he offered sacrifice to be freed from these troubles, the priests declared that his misery came from the wrath of God, because he had wanted to abuse the stranger’s wife. Then, frightened, he asked Sarai who she was, and who the man was that she had brought with her. When he had found out the truth, he excused himself to Abram: he had supposed the woman was his sister and not his wife, and had set his heart on her because he wanted to be related to him by marriage, not because lust drove him to abuse her. He also gave him a large gift of money, and allowed him to converse with the most learned of the Egyptians; and through those conversations his virtue and his reputation became better known than before.

For the Egyptians used to follow different customs, despised one another’s sacred and traditional rites, and were very angry with one another over them. Abram talked with each group, refuted the arguments each of them used for its own practices, and showed that those arguments were empty and had no truth in them. In these discussions they admired him as a very wise man and a very shrewd one, able not only to understand whatever subject he took up but to persuade others to agree with him as well. He taught them arithmetic and passed on to them the science of astronomy. Before Abram came into Egypt they knew nothing of these branches of learning; that science came from the Chaldeans into Egypt, and from there to the Greeks also.

As soon as Abram had come back into Canaan, he divided the land between himself and Lot, because their shepherds were quarreling over the pastures where they should graze their flocks. He gave Lot the choice of which lands he would take, and took for himself what Lot left — the lower ground at the foot of the mountains. He himself lived in Hebron, a city seven years older than Tanis in Egypt. Lot took the land of the plain and the Jordan River, not far from the city of Sodom. Sodom was a fine city then, but it has now been destroyed by the will of God; I will show the cause of this in its proper place later. [c]