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The Generation After the Flood_ From Shem_ Ham_ and Japheth to the Tower of Babel · truthunedited

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Speaker 1: The Tower of Babel happened while Noah was still alive,
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Speaker 1: And when that man died, God did not start over
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Speaker 1: with the world. He bet everything on a single, childless
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Speaker 1: old man. Noah was nine hundred fifty years old. He
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Speaker 1: had survived the flood, had seen the entire world drown
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Speaker 1: and then be reborn, had been the only man on
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Speaker 1: earth whom Heaven called righteous in the midst of his generation.
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Speaker 1: And one day, without a thunderclap, without a sign, without
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Speaker 1: any catastrophe, he simply lay down and stopped breathing. The
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Speaker 1: text tells it in two verses, almost in passing, at
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Speaker 1: the end of Chapter nine of Genesis. He lived three
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Speaker 1: hundred fifty years after the flood. All his days were
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Speaker 1: nine hundred fifty years, and he died. That's all. Not
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Speaker 1: one more word about him. I know it sounds him possible.
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Speaker 1: So let's go to the numbers, because Genesis itself notes
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Speaker 1: them down one by one. Most people imagine that the
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Speaker 1: chaos came after Noah. The tower that tried to touch
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Speaker 1: the sky, the confused tongues, the peoples scattered across the planet.
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Speaker 1: It sounds logical. The last giant of the ancient world
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Speaker 1: dies and everything collapses only its backwards. There was a
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Speaker 1: great great grandson of Noah, in whose days, the text says,
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Speaker 1: the earth was divided the dispersion of Babel. According to
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Speaker 1: the most common reading of that phrase, his name was Peleg,
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Speaker 1: and according to the chronology of the Hebrew text, that
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Speaker 1: Peleg died before his great grandfather Noah. It's worth being honest.
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Speaker 1: The ancient Greek translation stretches those years another way, and
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Speaker 1: there the numbers change. But if we follow the Hebrew
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Speaker 1: numbers just as they're written, the man who built the
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Speaker 1: ark was still breathing when the world had already split
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Speaker 1: into languages that couldn't understand one another. So what really
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Speaker 1: happened after Noah closed his eyes for the last time.
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Speaker 1: That's the question for today, And the answer resembles nothing
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Speaker 1: you expect, because after his death there were not nine
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Speaker 1: instantaneous catastrophes. There was something much stranger and much quieter.
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Speaker 1: There was a funnel. Think about it. The world had
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Speaker 1: just filled up with peoples. Right before this part of
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Speaker 1: the story, Genesis stops to do something that seems tedious
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Speaker 1: but turns out to be key. A census, a very
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Speaker 1: long list of the descendants of the three sons of Noah,
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Speaker 1: the peoples that sprang from Shem, from Ham, and from Jeffeth,
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Speaker 1: and spread across the earth after Babel. Scholars call it
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Speaker 1: the Table of Nations, and there's an ancient Jewish tradition,
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Speaker 1: which it's worth taking as a tradition and not as
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Speaker 1: something the text affirms in those words that counts seventy
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Speaker 1: nations in that list, seventy people's seventy tongues, the whole
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Speaker 1: world divided into seventy branches. Keep that number seventy, because
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Speaker 1: at the end of this journey it's going to return
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Speaker 1: in the most unexpected way. Every language, every nation, every
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Speaker 1: border that exists today began in those chapters. Multitudes spread
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Speaker 1: across the whole earth, and right in that instant, when
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Speaker 1: humanity was more numerous and more divided than ever, the
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Speaker 1: Eternal did something no strategist would have advised. He did
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Speaker 1: not speak to the nations. He did not choose an empire.
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Speaker 1: He did not seek the strongest king or the richest city.
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Speaker 1: He sought a single old man, childless, lost in a
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Speaker 1: city of Mesopotamia called Er. Why him keep that question,
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Speaker 1: because it's the thread that holds up everything that comes
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Speaker 1: and keep this image too, because we're going to come
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Speaker 1: back to it exactly at the end. This story that
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Speaker 1: begins with the death of the man who saved the
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Speaker 1: world is going to end with the death of another
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Speaker 1: man who saved his family, and with a coffin, a
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Speaker 1: closed coffin in Egypt that no one opened for four
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Speaker 1: hundred years. Only before reaching the old man of Er,
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Speaker 1: there's someone we have to follow first, because when Noah died,
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Speaker 1: one of his three sons was still alive, and he
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Speaker 1: didn't outlive him by a few years. He outlived him
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Speaker 1: by a century and a half. His name was Shem,
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Speaker 1: and his mere presence, still alive in the new world
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Speaker 1: was a silent bridge to the world the flood had
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Speaker 1: carried away. Before we go on, one quick thing, if
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Speaker 1: you arrived at this channel for the first time to day,
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Speaker 1: don't leave me any like yet. Seriously, wait, watch the
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Speaker 1: video to the end to that coffin. I promised you,
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Speaker 1: And if this gives you something real, then you leave
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Speaker 1: it to me. And if not, no problem, you owe
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Speaker 1: me nothing. But if you're all ready deep part of
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Speaker 1: the family here, leave me that like in good faith,
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Speaker 1: because that tells the algorithm that this story has to
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Speaker 1: reach more homes. That done, we continue. There's a word
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Speaker 1: that organizes the entire book of Genesis, and very few
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Speaker 1: people know it. In Hebrew, it's tolidot. It's usually translated
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Speaker 1: as generations or descendants, but its sense is deeper. It
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Speaker 1: means something like, this is what came out of These
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Speaker 1: are the ones who came after. Every time Genesis wants
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Speaker 1: to turn the page from one era to the next,
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Speaker 1: it repeats that formula. These are the tolidot of Adam,
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Speaker 1: These are the tolidot of Noah, These are the tolidot
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Speaker 1: of Shem. The book advances like a river that keeps narrowing.
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Speaker 1: It begins with Heaven and the whole earth, and it
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Speaker 1: ends with a single family tucked into Egypt. And the
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Speaker 1: exact point where the river truly begins to narrow is
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Speaker 1: the death of Noah. Because after that death, the text
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Speaker 1: does something curious. It doesn't stay with humanity. It slips
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Speaker 1: into a single channel, that of Shem, and the numbers
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Speaker 1: of that channel are by themselves one of the most
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Speaker 1: striking things in Genesis. Shem lived six hundred years, his
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Speaker 1: children and grandchildren still hovered around four hundred, and then
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Speaker 1: right in Peleg's generation, the one of the division of
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Speaker 1: the Earth, the figures collapsed to almost half all at once.
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Speaker 1: Suddenly people lived two hundred thirty two hundred until reaching
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Speaker 1: a man who will live one hundred seventy five. That
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Speaker 1: man will be Abraham. In just a few generations, human
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Speaker 1: life shrank to a fraction of what it had been
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Speaker 1: before the flood. The new world was more fragile than
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Speaker 1: the old. People died, younger empires grew, and God's promise
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Speaker 1: still had no owner. And noticed the paradox, because it's
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Speaker 1: the heart of everything that comes right. In that shorter
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Speaker 1: and more fragile world, where no one lived long enough
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Speaker 1: anymore to see much of anything fulfilled, Heaven decided to
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Speaker 1: plant an oath that would take centuries to bloom. That's
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Speaker 1: why it didn't rest it on a single thousand year giant,
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Speaker 1: but on a chain of fragile people who would die soon,
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Speaker 1: each one forced to trust and to hand the torch
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Speaker 1: to the next without ever seeing the end. And while
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Speaker 1: that staircase descended, Shem was still alive. This is what's
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Speaker 1: hard to believe when you do the math. The son
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Speaker 1: of Noah outlived his own father by about one hundred
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Speaker 1: and fifty years, Shem saw several generations of his own
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Speaker 1: descendants be born and die. He saw the world become populated,
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Speaker 1: and the line of the design, the one Heaven was
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Speaker 1: going to use to touch the whole earth, passed through him.
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Speaker 1: And there's a rabbinic tradition. It's worth treating it as
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Speaker 1: a tradition, not as a fact of the text that
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Speaker 1: went so far as to identify this with Melchizedek, that
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Speaker 1: priest without genealogy, who one day steps out to meet
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Speaker 1: Abraham to bless him and immediately disappears without a trace.
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Speaker 1: The text never affirms it, but the mere idea paints
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Speaker 1: the picture, the last witness of the ancient world, silently
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Speaker 1: holding the thread of something that had not yet begun.
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Speaker 1: Because the thread kept descending down the line of Shem
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Speaker 1: from father to son, until it stopped at a name,
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Speaker 1: almost no one remembers a man called Terra. And with
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Speaker 1: Terra at last, the story stops being a list of
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Speaker 1: ages and becomes a journey. Terra lived in Ur of
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Speaker 1: the Chaldeans, and hear it's worth being honest about something.
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Speaker 1: Scholars still debate for centuries that Or was located in
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Speaker 1: southern Mesopotamia in what today is Iraq, one of the
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Speaker 1: oldest and most powerful cities in the world. But there
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Speaker 1: are specialists who propose a different ur farther north, near Haran.
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Speaker 1: There's no absolute consensus. What the text does say without ambiguity,
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Speaker 1: is that one day Terra gathered his family and left
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Speaker 1: er with a destination in mind, the land of Canaan.
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Speaker 1: He took his son Abram, his daughter in law Sarai,
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Speaker 1: and his grandson Lot, the son of a brother who
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Speaker 1: had already died, and they set out. Only they didn't arrive.
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Speaker 1: Half way along the route, in a place called Haran,
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Speaker 1: the caravan stopped and stayed. The text doesn't explain why.
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Speaker 1: Perhaps terror grew old, perhaps Haran was comfortable prosperous enough.
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Speaker 1: What's certain is that the man who had set out
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Speaker 1: looking for Canaan never set foot in Canaan. He settled
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Speaker 1: half way and there in Haran. Terra died at two
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Speaker 1: hundred five years. He died looking toward a promised land
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Speaker 1: that was not for him. He died in the waiting
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Speaker 1: room and noticed the detail because it's it's one of
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Speaker 1: those Genesis drops. Without underlining, the father attempted the journey
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Speaker 1: and stopped half way. The son is going to finish it.
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Speaker 1: There are dreams one generation barely manages to begin, and
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Speaker 1: that are only fulfilled when someone else decides not to stop.
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Speaker 1: In Haran, that someone was Abram. Imagine the scene, and
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Speaker 1: I ask you to imagine it for real, because the
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Speaker 1: text only gives us the skeleton. A man of seventy
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Speaker 1: five in a city he knows by heart, with his
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Speaker 1: father just buried, with a wife who has not been
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Speaker 1: able to have children, with his whole world fitting into
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Speaker 1: a couple of dusty streets, a man in short with
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Speaker 1: no reason to move. The age for adventures has passed.
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Speaker 1: What comes next, normally is to stay put and wait
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Speaker 1: for the end, like his father. And then in the
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Speaker 1: middle of that silence a voice. The text presents it
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Speaker 1: without preamble at the beginning of chapter twelve, and it's
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Speaker 1: the first words the Eternal directs to Abram in all
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Speaker 1: the Bible. In Hebrew, they are two short words, almost
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Speaker 1: a blow leje leijjah. They're normally translated as go, but
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Speaker 1: they hold something more intimate and stranger. Literally, it would
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Speaker 1: be something like go for yourself, go toward yourself, go
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Speaker 1: for your own good It's not only an order to leave,
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Speaker 1: it's an invitation to become someone. And what follows is
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Speaker 1: one of the sentences that has most changed the history
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Speaker 1: of the world. Go from your land, from your kindred
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Speaker 1: and from your father's house to the land that I
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Speaker 1: will show you. Keep that sentence, to the land that
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Speaker 1: I will show you. Not to Canaan, not to such
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Speaker 1: and such river, to such and such mountain, to the
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Speaker 1: land that I will show you. The Eternal did not
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Speaker 1: give him a map. He gave him a direction and
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Speaker 1: a promise, and asked him to walk, before knowing where
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Speaker 1: to Of a man of seventy five, childless, he asked
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Speaker 1: that he leave everything secure for a destination he wouldn't
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Speaker 1: even name for him. And here enters the greatest promise
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Speaker 1: of the Old Testament, the one that is going to
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Speaker 1: hold up absolutely everything that comes after to the very
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Speaker 1: end of the Bible. The Eternal said to him, I
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Speaker 1: will make of you a great nation, and I will
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Speaker 1: bless you and make your name great, and you shall
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Speaker 1: be a blessing, and in you all the families of
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Speaker 1: the earth shall be blessed. Read that last line again,
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Speaker 1: because there the whole funnel is explained in a single sentence,
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Speaker 1: in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
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Speaker 1: The world had just divided into hundreds of peoples at Babel,
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Speaker 1: and now God tells a single man without a single child,
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Speaker 1: that through him, all those divided families are going to
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Speaker 1: be blessed. The smallest, a barren old man, is going
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Speaker 1: to reach them, the greatest, all of humanity. Heaven decided
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Speaker 1: to touch all the people, starting with one. And do
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Speaker 1: you know what Abram did with that impossible order. The
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Speaker 1: text says it in four words that weigh more than
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Speaker 1: an entire sermon. And Abram went without arguing, without asking
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Speaker 1: for guarantees, without demanding to see the map. First, an
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Speaker 1: old man raised his camp, loaded up his barren wife
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Speaker 1: and his orphaned nephew, and walked toward a land he
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Speaker 1: did not know, chasing the voice of a God who
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Speaker 1: was barely beginning to reveal himself. He crossed the desert
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Speaker 1: Terra didn't dare to cross, and he did not stop
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Speaker 1: in Haran. But the promise, however, enormous, had a problem,
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Speaker 1: a problem that was going to pursue Abram for the
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Speaker 1: rest of his life, and that seemed year after year
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Speaker 1: to make everything else impossible. He had been promised a nation,
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Speaker 1: he had been promised offspring as numerous as the stars,
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Speaker 1: and he still didn't have a single child. The wife
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Speaker 1: was aging, Abram himself was aging, and Heaven for a
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Speaker 1: long time kept silent until one night, a night on
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Speaker 1: which God did something so strange, so unsettling, that to
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Speaker 1: understand it you have to know what it meant in
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Speaker 1: that ancient world to cut an animal in half. In
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Speaker 1: Abram's world, when two parties wanted to seal an agreement
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Speaker 1: that could not be broken, they didn't sign a paper.
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Speaker 1: They did something much more serious. They took animals, split
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Speaker 1: them in half, arranged the halves facing each other, leaving
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Speaker 1: a corridor of blood in the middle, and then the
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Speaker 1: two parties walked together between the pieces. The gesture was
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Speaker 1: an oath without words. It meant, may the same happen
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Speaker 1: to me as to these animals if I break my
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Speaker 1: part of the deal. In Hebrew, to make a covenant
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Speaker 1: was said karat bear it, which literally is to cut
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Speaker 1: a covenant. You didn't sign an agreement, you cut it
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Speaker 1: with blood in between. Keep that image, because what happened
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Speaker 1: that night turns upside down everything you would expect. The
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Speaker 1: Eternal told Abram to bring the animals. Abram obeyed, split them,
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Speaker 1: arranged the halves, and then evening fell, and with the
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Speaker 1: evening upon Abram descended a deep sleep and a horror,
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Speaker 1: a great and dreadful darkness. The text says it that way,
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Speaker 1: without softening it. It was not a pretty vision. It
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Speaker 1: was terror in the darkness. And in the midst of
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Speaker 1: that darkness, the Eternal announced to him the distant future
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Speaker 1: of his descendants, that they would be foreigners in a
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Speaker 1: land not theirs, that they would serve and be afflicted
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Speaker 1: for four hundred years, and that afterward they would come
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Speaker 1: out from there with great riches. Four hundred years. Remember
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Speaker 1: that number, because at the end of this video it's
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Speaker 1: going to come back, and it's going to come back
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Speaker 1: inside a coffin. And then then when it was already
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Speaker 1: dead of night, the unexpected happened. A smoking oven and
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Speaker 1: a torch of fire appeared, and that burning presence passed
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Speaker 1: between the split animals. Stop here who passed between the halves.
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Speaker 1: Only God represented in that fire. The Eternal walked alone
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Speaker 1: down the corridor of blood. Abram did not walk. Abram
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Speaker 1: was asleep, sunk in that heavy slumber. Normally, in a
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Speaker 1: covenant like that, the two parties passed between the pieces
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Speaker 1: because both committed themselves, both risked their lives. But in
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Speaker 1: this covenant, only one passed. Only God bound himself. Only
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Speaker 1: God swore, in effect, may what happen to these animals
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Speaker 1: happen to me if this word is not fulfilled. The
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Speaker 1: commitment did not depend on Abram's strength, nor on his
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Speaker 1: perfect faith, nor on his descendants behaving well. God low
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Speaker 1: did both ends of the oath on to himself that
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Speaker 1: which holds up Israel. And in the end all the
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Speaker 1: families of the earth does not rest on a man.
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Speaker 1: It rests on the one who passed alone through the fire.
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Speaker 1: That word has a name in Hebrew, bear it covenant
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Speaker 1: a lions. It's one of the most repeated and most
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Speaker 1: important words in all the Bible. And here, on this
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Speaker 1: night of terror and fire, it is cut forever. The
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Speaker 1: funnel is no longer only a spoken promise. Now it's
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Speaker 1: an oath of blood that God made with himself. But
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Speaker 1: the years kept passing, and the count would not close.
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Speaker 1: Thirteen more years passed, thirteen Abram was now ninety nine.
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Speaker 1: Sarai was very close to ninety and the only son
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Speaker 1: in that camp was Ishmael, born of an Egyptian slave
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Speaker 1: named Hagar, in a human attempt to help God fulfill
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Speaker 1: what it seemed he wasn't going to fulfill on his own.
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Speaker 1: And right at that point, when every one, Abram included
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Speaker 1: had already done the math and accepted that the miracle
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Speaker 1: would not come by the normal road, the eternal appeared
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Speaker 1: to him again. And the first thing he did was
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Speaker 1: change his name. In that world, the name was not
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Speaker 1: a label, it was destiny. To change someone's name was
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Speaker 1: to rewrite who they were. And God took that old
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Speaker 1: man without a future and told him, you will no
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Speaker 1: longer be called Abram. You will be called Abraham. The
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Speaker 1: new name held an entire sentence in Hebrew. It sounds
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Speaker 1: like avhamon, father of a multitude, father of a multitude
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Speaker 1: of nations. Imagine the scene. A man of ninety nine,
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Speaker 1: with a single son and by a slave, receives from
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Speaker 1: heaven a name that means father of multitudes. Every time
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Speaker 1: someone called him by his name from that day on,
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Speaker 1: they would be proclaiming something His worn out body screamed
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Speaker 1: was impossible. Father of multitudes, an old man who barely
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Speaker 1: had one, and to Sarai too, he changed the name.
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Speaker 1: She came to be called Sarah, Princess, mother of nations.
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Speaker 1: From her would come kings of peoples, a woman of
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Speaker 1: ninety mother of kings. The Eternal spoke in the future
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Speaker 1: of things the present declared absurd, and as the seal
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Speaker 1: of that covenant, God asked for a mark, not a
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Speaker 1: mark on a stone, nor on a door, a mark
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Speaker 1: on the very body of every mail of his house. Circumcision,
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Speaker 1: a hidden private sign engraved in the flesh, so that
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Speaker 1: the covenant would not be something signed and put away
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Speaker 1: in a draw, but something worn day and night in
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Speaker 1: the very place from which the promised offspring would be born.
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Speaker 1: The promise was written on the body that would have
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Speaker 1: to produce it, and Abraham at ninety nine obeyed That
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Speaker 1: very day. He marked himself, marked Ishmael, marked every man
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Speaker 1: of his camp. He wagered his entire hire of flesh
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Speaker 1: on an oath he still didn't see fulfilled. What he
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Speaker 1: didn't know was that the fulfillment was a year away,
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Speaker 1: and that before holding him in his arms, he would
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Speaker 1: have to argue with God himself over the life of
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Speaker 1: an entire city. Because while Abraham waited for the promised son.
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Speaker 1: His nephew, Lot was living in a city that was
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Speaker 1: about to disappear from the map, Sodom, and one day
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Speaker 1: three visitors arrived at Abraham's camp, and after announcing to
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Speaker 1: him that within a year Sarah would have a son,
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Speaker 1: they rose and looked toward the valley, toward the cities
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Speaker 1: of the plain. The eternal had decided to go down
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Speaker 1: to see the outcry rising from Sodom. And then one
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Speaker 1: of the most astonishing conversations in all the Bible took place,
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Speaker 1: because for the first time a man dares to argue
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Speaker 1: with God face to face, not for himself, but for others.
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Speaker 1: We're not going to stop on what Sodom had done done,
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Speaker 1: nor on how the fire fell. That's a story that
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Speaker 1: deserves its own telling. What matters here in this journey
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Speaker 1: that goes from all humanity to a single man, is
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Speaker 1: what Abraham did in that moment, because when he learned
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Speaker 1: that the city was going to be destroyed, he did
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Speaker 1: not stay silent. He drew near, and he began to
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Speaker 1: negotiate with the owner of the universe. Will you also
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Speaker 1: destroy the righteous with the wicked? He asked him, and
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Speaker 1: what if there are fifty righteous within the city, And
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Speaker 1: the eternal accepted, if I find fifty, I will spare
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Speaker 1: the whole place for their sake. But Abraham did not stop.
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Speaker 1: He went down to forty five, then to forty, to thirty,
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Speaker 1: to twenty, and in the end, almost trembling to ten.
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Speaker 1: And what if ten are found? And the answer was
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Speaker 1: the same, for the sake of ten, I will not
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Speaker 1: destroy it. Notice what's happening. The man God chose to
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Speaker 1: bless all the family of the earth has just passed
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Speaker 1: his first great test as a blessing. He did not
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Speaker 1: use his closeness to heaven to ask for something for himself.
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Speaker 1: He used it to try to save others. The chosen
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Speaker 1: one became an intercessor. That was from the beginning the
22:16
Speaker 1: meaning of the funnel. God did not set a man
22:19
Speaker 1: apart from the world to abandon the world, but to
22:22
Speaker 1: have within the world some one who would plead for it.
22:26
Speaker 1: There were not ten. The city fell under fire and brimstone,
22:31
Speaker 1: and of that whole plane only a handful was saved.
22:34
Speaker 1: Lot and his two daughters pulled out almost by force
22:38
Speaker 1: by the hand of angels who had to take them
22:40
Speaker 1: by the arm, because they hesitated to leave. Lot's wife,
22:45
Speaker 1: who looked back toward what was already condemned, was turned
22:49
Speaker 1: into a statue of salt, a frozen monument to the
22:52
Speaker 1: people who are rescued from the fire, but leave their
22:55
Speaker 1: heart in the things that burn. And the text finishes
22:59
Speaker 1: with a detail all most no one notices. It says
23:03
Speaker 1: that God remembered Abraham, and that's why he pulled Lot
23:07
Speaker 1: out of the catastrophe. Lot was not saved for being righteous.
23:11
Speaker 1: He was saved because someone was interceding for him from Afar.
23:16
Speaker 1: The funnel was already working. The salvation of one passed
23:20
Speaker 1: through the prayer of another, And while the smoke was
23:23
Speaker 1: still rising from the plain in the camp of the intercessor,
23:27
Speaker 1: the impossible was about to be fulfilled at last. A
23:32
Speaker 1: year had passed since the visit of the three, and
23:35
Speaker 1: the text says it with a simplicity that disarms the
23:39
Speaker 1: eternal visited Sarah as he had said, and did with
23:43
Speaker 1: her as he had spoken. Sarah conceived and bore a
23:48
Speaker 1: son to Abraham in his old age. He was one
23:51
Speaker 1: hundred years old, she ninety. The body that nature had
23:56
Speaker 1: closed decades earlier opened, and from those two old people
24:00
Speaker 1: a child was born, the son of the promise, the
24:04
Speaker 1: first real link of the nation that had been sworn
24:07
Speaker 1: to a man who had already stopped hoping. And what
24:10
Speaker 1: did they call him? Here is one of those winks
24:13
Speaker 1: you can only see in the original language. When God
24:17
Speaker 1: had announced to Abraham that he would have a son
24:20
Speaker 1: with Sarah, Abraham laughed. When Sarah heard it behind the tent,
24:24
Speaker 1: she also laughed, a bitter laugh, the laugh of the
24:27
Speaker 1: one who no longer believes, laughter of disbelief. And then
24:31
Speaker 1: God gave the child his name before he was born,
24:34
Speaker 1: and the name was Jitsak, which in Hebrew means he
24:38
Speaker 1: will laugh. Laughter. The name of the promised son is
24:43
Speaker 1: literally a burst of laughter. The same laughter that had
24:47
Speaker 1: been of doubt became laughter of joy. And Sarah said
24:50
Speaker 1: it herself, God has made me laugh, and everyone who
24:54
Speaker 1: hears it will laugh with me. Heaven took the silent
24:57
Speaker 1: mockery of two old people and engraved it forever in
25:00
Speaker 1: the name of their son, as if to say, what
25:03
Speaker 1: you received laughing out of disbelief, you're now going to
25:07
Speaker 1: tell laughing out of joy. And if you've gotten this far,
25:12
Speaker 1: I want you to pause for a second with me
25:14
Speaker 1: because what comes is the hardest and most beautiful scene
25:18
Speaker 1: in all of Abraham's life. And I want to ask
25:21
Speaker 1: you something before we enter it. When the next part ends,
25:25
Speaker 1: write in the comments a single word. I trust, just that,
25:30
Speaker 1: because we're going to talk about what it means to
25:33
Speaker 1: hand over what you love most without knowing why it's
25:36
Speaker 1: being asked of you. And I want to read how
25:38
Speaker 1: many of you have stood on that same mountain. Don't
25:41
Speaker 1: rush to write it yet, stay climb the mountain with
25:44
Speaker 1: me first. Because the same God who for twenty five
25:48
Speaker 1: years begged Abraham to trust in what was promised when
25:52
Speaker 1: Day asked him to kill it with his own hands,
25:55
Speaker 1: take now your son, You're only one whom you love, Isaac,
25:59
Speaker 1: and go to the land of Mariah and offer him
26:01
Speaker 1: there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains
26:04
Speaker 1: that I will tell you. Read it slowly, because every
26:07
Speaker 1: word is a knife. God did not say your son,
26:10
Speaker 1: He said you're only one whom you love, as if
26:14
Speaker 1: he wanted to make sure Abraham felt the full weight
26:16
Speaker 1: of what was being asked of him. That child was everything.
26:19
Speaker 1: He was the laughter, He was the miracle of two
26:22
Speaker 1: old people. He was the first link of the promised nation.
26:25
Speaker 1: He was the only way the plan to bless all
26:27
Speaker 1: the families of the earth could be fulfilled, and Heaven
26:31
Speaker 1: asked him to put him on an altar. Imagine the
26:33
Speaker 1: three days of the journey, because the text gives them
26:37
Speaker 1: to you, and almost no one stops on them. Three
26:40
Speaker 1: days walking beside the sun. You're going to lose, three
26:43
Speaker 1: nights sleeping at his side, knowing what you carry in
26:46
Speaker 1: your heart, three dawns watching him wake. Genesis tells us
26:50
Speaker 1: nothing of what Abraham thought in those three days. It
26:54
Speaker 1: only tells us that he rose very early, split the wood,
26:58
Speaker 1: and walked fiest obedience in the Bible fits into dry verbs.
27:03
Speaker 1: He rose, he split, he went, and on the third
27:06
Speaker 1: day Abraham lifted his eyes and saw the place from afar.
27:10
Speaker 1: He left the servants at the foot of the mountain
27:12
Speaker 1: and said a sentence that is going to matter enormously.
27:17
Speaker 1: I and the boy will go over there. We will worship,
27:21
Speaker 1: and we will return to you. We will return plural.
27:27
Speaker 1: We don't know whether it was pure faith or desperate hope.
27:31
Speaker 1: But the man said, the two of us will return.
27:35
Speaker 1: And then he put the wood on Isaac's shoulders, took
27:38
Speaker 1: the fire and the knife himself. And they went up together,
27:41
Speaker 1: the father carrying the fire and the blade, the son
27:45
Speaker 1: carrying the wood on which he was to be offered.
27:48
Speaker 1: And the two went up together. The text says twice,
27:52
Speaker 1: it repeats it like a heartbeat. And the two walked together,
27:56
Speaker 1: and in the middle of the climb, the child's voice,
28:00
Speaker 1: Here is the fire and the wood, But where is
28:03
Speaker 1: the lamb for the burnt offering? And Abraham answered with
28:06
Speaker 1: the sentence that would become the heart of everything. God
28:09
Speaker 1: will provide for himself, the lamb my son. And they
28:13
Speaker 1: kept walking, the two together. They reached the top. Abraham
28:19
Speaker 1: built the altar, arranged the wood, and then he bound
28:23
Speaker 1: his son. Imagine that instant, in all its rawness, a
28:27
Speaker 1: father's hands tying up his son, the son letting himself
28:31
Speaker 1: be tied. The two in a silence. The text fills
28:34
Speaker 1: with nothing. Abraham put Isaac on the wood, stretched out
28:39
Speaker 1: his hand, took the knife, raised it, and in the
28:42
Speaker 1: last possible second, when the blade was already on high,
28:46
Speaker 1: Heaven cried out his name, Abraham, Abraham, do not stretch
28:51
Speaker 1: out your hand against the boy, nor do anything to him.
28:54
Speaker 1: For now I know that you fear God. Since you
28:57
Speaker 1: have not withheld from me your son, you're only one.
29:01
Speaker 1: Abraham lifted his eyes, and there, caught by its horns,
29:04
Speaker 1: in a thicket was a ram, a substitute. He took
29:09
Speaker 1: it and offered it in place of his son. The
29:11
Speaker 1: lamb that was missing was not brought by Abraham. It
29:15
Speaker 1: was provided by God, exactly as Abraham had said, without
29:19
Speaker 1: knowing how right he was. And to that mountain Abraham
29:23
Speaker 1: gave a name. He called it in Hebrew, with a
29:26
Speaker 1: word related to to see and to to provide. The
29:32
Speaker 1: eternal will see the eternal will provide Jehovah Jireh. And
29:36
Speaker 1: the text adds that this is why it still said,
29:40
Speaker 1: on the mountain of the eternal it will be provided.
29:43
Speaker 1: There's an ancient tradition, which it's worth taking as a
29:46
Speaker 1: tradition and not as a closed fact of the text
29:50
Speaker 1: that identifies that mountain of Mariah with the same place
29:54
Speaker 1: where sentries later the Temple of Jerusalem would be raised.
29:58
Speaker 1: The mountain where a father did not have to hand
30:01
Speaker 1: over his son because God provided the substitute, would be
30:05
Speaker 1: the mountain where an entire people would bring their sacrifices.
30:09
Speaker 1: The name remained like an oath to the future. On
30:13
Speaker 1: this mountain, God provides. And here, if you've been paying attention,
30:17
Speaker 1: you should be starting to feel the weight of where
30:20
Speaker 1: this funnel is going. A father, an only and beloved son,
30:24
Speaker 1: wood loaded on the son's shoulders, climbing a mountain, a
30:28
Speaker 1: sacrifice stopped by God's provision. I'm not going to tell
30:32
Speaker 1: you what to think of those images. I only ask
30:34
Speaker 1: you to keep them because the Bible itself is going
30:37
Speaker 1: to use them again. Much much later, Abraham came down
30:40
Speaker 1: from the mountain with his son alive, and that covenant
30:44
Speaker 1: tested in the fire kept descending toward that son. Only
30:49
Speaker 1: here Genesis does something almost no one comments on, and
30:53
Speaker 1: that says a lot about how heaven works. Because of
30:56
Speaker 1: the three great patriarchs, Isaac is the quot one, the
31:01
Speaker 1: one with no adventure of his own. His father Abraham
31:05
Speaker 1: crossed deserts following a voice, argued with God over an
31:09
Speaker 1: entire city, raised the knife on a mountain. His son
31:13
Speaker 1: Jacob will dream of stairways to heaven and wrestle with
31:16
Speaker 1: a stranger until dawn. Isaac, between the two, does almost
31:21
Speaker 1: nothing spectacular. He is the only one of the three
31:24
Speaker 1: who never left the Promised Land. The only one who
31:27
Speaker 1: had a single wife, the only one whose name God
31:30
Speaker 1: never changed, the heir, whose job at bottom was one thing,
31:34
Speaker 1: only to survive and to pass the promise intact to
31:39
Speaker 1: the next hand. And that, though it makes no noise,
31:43
Speaker 1: is also part of the funnel. There are generations that
31:47
Speaker 1: carry the torch across the desert, and there are generations
31:50
Speaker 1: whose greatness consists in not letting it fall. Isaac was
31:55
Speaker 1: one of the second kind, and sometimes the most silent
32:00
Speaker 1: link is the one that holds the whole chain. When
32:03
Speaker 1: Isaac was of age to marry Abraham, now very old,
32:07
Speaker 1: refused to look for a wife among the daughters of Canaan,
32:10
Speaker 1: the people in whose land he lived, but whose gods
32:13
Speaker 1: were not his. He sent his most faithful servant back
32:17
Speaker 1: to the land of his kindred far away, to look
32:20
Speaker 1: among his own for the woman who would carry the
32:22
Speaker 1: promise forward. And the servant, arriving at a well as
32:26
Speaker 1: evening fell, did something beautiful. He asked God for a
32:30
Speaker 1: concrete sign that the young woman he asked for a drink,
32:34
Speaker 1: and who not only gave to him, but also offered
32:37
Speaker 1: to draw water for all his camels, and that one
32:40
Speaker 1: would be the chosen one, and it's worth understanding the
32:43
Speaker 1: weight of that test. Drawing water by hand for ten
32:46
Speaker 1: thirsty camels was not a gesture of courtesy. It was
32:50
Speaker 1: hours of work, jar after jar, bucket after bucket. It
32:55
Speaker 1: was a test of character disguised as kindness. And before
33:00
Speaker 1: the servant finished praying, a young woman named Rebecca arrived,
33:04
Speaker 1: gave him a drink, and then said the exact words
33:07
Speaker 1: he was waiting for, I will also draw water for
33:10
Speaker 1: your camels until they finished drinking. The promise found its
33:14
Speaker 1: next bearer, not for her beauty, though she had it,
33:18
Speaker 1: but for a heart that served without anyone asking. Rebecca
33:22
Speaker 1: married Isaac, and then Genesis repeats with a coldness that
33:27
Speaker 1: makes you shudder, exactly the same problem as before. Rebecca
33:31
Speaker 1: was baron again. The grandfather had waited for the miracle
33:36
Speaker 1: with a barren wife until almost a hundred and now
33:40
Speaker 1: the son the miracle itself, the child they had called Laughter,
33:44
Speaker 1: found that his own wife could not give him children.
33:47
Speaker 1: The promise of offspring as numerous as the stars hung
33:51
Speaker 1: again from a single thread a closed womb. And stop here,
33:57
Speaker 1: because this is one of the most astonishing patterns in
33:59
Speaker 1: all of Genesis, and practically no one points it out.
34:04
Speaker 1: The chosen nation was on the verge of not existing,
34:07
Speaker 1: not once, but again and again, always for the same cause.
34:13
Speaker 1: A woman who could not conceive Sarah Baron until old age,
34:18
Speaker 1: Rebecca Baron in the middle of her youth, and later
34:21
Speaker 1: Jacob's beloved wife Rachel, also Baron, also desperate until The
34:27
Speaker 1: text says that God remembered her and heard her three
34:31
Speaker 1: generations in a row, three times. The line on the
34:34
Speaker 1: verge of going out in an empty womb, as if
34:37
Speaker 1: Heaven wanted to leave, engraved again and again a message
34:41
Speaker 1: impossible to misinterpret. This people does not exist because nature
34:46
Speaker 1: produced it. It exists because God opened it. Every link
34:51
Speaker 1: of this chain is literally a miracle against biology. Isaac
34:56
Speaker 1: did not resign himself. He did the only thing he
34:59
Speaker 1: knew his father would have done. He pleaded with the
35:02
Speaker 1: eternal for his wife, and the text says with enormous
35:06
Speaker 1: simplicity that the eternal heard him and Rebecca conceived. They
35:11
Speaker 1: had been married twenty years when at last that pregnancy came,
35:15
Speaker 1: twenty years of waiting and of Heaven's silence. And when
35:19
Speaker 1: it finally came, it did not come with one son.
35:22
Speaker 1: It came with two twins, and with those two twins
35:27
Speaker 1: in the womb, the funnel was once again on the
35:30
Speaker 1: verge of breaking, this time in a war of brothers
35:33
Speaker 1: the twins fought from before they were born. The text
35:37
Speaker 1: says that the children struggled within their mother's womb, and
35:41
Speaker 1: that the eternal announced to her that there were two
35:44
Speaker 1: nations in her and that the elder would serve the younger.
35:48
Speaker 1: The first to come out was Esau, red and hairy.
35:50
Speaker 1: Behind him, gripping his brother's heel, came the second, and
35:54
Speaker 1: for that gesture they gave him his name in Hebrew Yakov,
35:58
Speaker 1: which comes from the word for heel and means something
36:01
Speaker 1: like the one who grabs the heel, the one who supplants,
36:05
Speaker 1: the one who comes from behind. From the first second,
36:09
Speaker 1: the child's name was a warning. This one came to
36:12
Speaker 1: take what was not his by birth, and he fulfilled
36:15
Speaker 1: his name. One day, Esau came from the field dying
36:19
Speaker 1: of hunger, and Jacob sold him a plate of lentil
36:22
Speaker 1: stew in exchange for the birthright the right of the
36:26
Speaker 1: elder son. Esau for a plate of food despised what
36:30
Speaker 1: an entire inheritance was worth, and years later, with the
36:34
Speaker 1: complicity of his mother. Jacob disguised himself as his brother,
36:38
Speaker 1: deceived his father, Isaac, who was already blind, and stole
36:42
Speaker 1: from him too, the blessing of the first born. The
36:45
Speaker 1: supplanter supplanted to the end, and he had to flee
36:49
Speaker 1: because Esau swore to kill him. Here is where the
36:53
Speaker 1: story takes a turn you wouldn't expect, because that man,
36:57
Speaker 1: a trickster, a thief of blessings, who was fleeing from
37:00
Speaker 1: his own brother, is exactly the man God chose to
37:03
Speaker 1: carry the line forward, not the honest Esau, the cunning Jacob.
37:09
Speaker 1: The channel did not pass through the one who seemed
37:12
Speaker 1: to deserve it. It passed through the one God chose,
37:15
Speaker 1: and that in itself was already a message. And in
37:20
Speaker 1: the middle of his flight, alone in the middle of nowhere,
37:24
Speaker 1: with a stone for a pillow, Jacob had a dream.
37:28
Speaker 1: He saw a ladder resting on the earth whose top
37:31
Speaker 1: touched heaven, and angels of God going up and down
37:34
Speaker 1: on it. And at the top was the Eternal repeating
37:38
Speaker 1: to him, to the fleeing trickster, the same oath he
37:41
Speaker 1: had made to his grandfather, Abraham, In you and in
37:45
Speaker 1: your descendants, all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
37:49
Speaker 1: Jacob woke trembling and said, surely the eternal is in
37:53
Speaker 1: this place, and I did not know it. Stop a
37:56
Speaker 1: second on that, because it's one of the most surprising
37:59
Speaker 1: things in all his story. Heaven did not wait for
38:03
Speaker 1: Jacob to fix his life. It did not wait for
38:06
Speaker 1: him to ask forgiveness for having deceived his blind father,
38:10
Speaker 1: nor to repair what he had stolen from his brother.
38:13
Speaker 1: It appeared to him right in the middle of his flight,
38:16
Speaker 1: with his hands still dirty from the deception, sleeping on
38:19
Speaker 1: the ground of an open field, like the fugitive he was.
38:24
Speaker 1: And what it showed him was not a threat or
38:27
Speaker 1: a reproach. It was a ladder that joined the earth
38:30
Speaker 1: with Heaven planted exactly above his head. On the worst
38:34
Speaker 1: and loneliest night of his life. It was as if
38:37
Speaker 1: the eternal were telling him that, not even in his
38:40
Speaker 1: most shameful flight, not in his lowest hour, was he
38:44
Speaker 1: outside the reach of that old promise made in err
38:48
Speaker 1: And to that place he gave the name in Hebrew Betel,
38:52
Speaker 1: which means house of God. None of this was fulfilled
38:57
Speaker 1: because Jacob was good. It was fulfilled because God is
39:02
Speaker 1: faithful to a word he cut alone on a night
39:06
Speaker 1: of fire with the grandfather of that fugitive. Twenty years passed,
39:13
Speaker 1: Jacob married, had children, grew rich, and at last decided
39:16
Speaker 1: to go back home, knowing he would have to face
39:19
Speaker 1: the brother he had betrayed. And the night before the reunion,
39:23
Speaker 1: the strangest scene of all his life occurred. Jacob stayed
39:27
Speaker 1: alone at the bank of a river, and suddenly, in
39:30
Speaker 1: the darkness, a man grabbed him and they wrestled. They
39:35
Speaker 1: wrestled all night, hand to hand, without either one winning,
39:39
Speaker 1: until dawn broke. The mysterious adversary touched Jacob's thigh and
39:44
Speaker 1: dislocated it, but Jacob wounded, and all did not let
39:49
Speaker 1: go of him, And he said a sentence that defines
39:52
Speaker 1: him entirely, I will not let you go unless you
39:56
Speaker 1: bless me the one who all his life had grabbed
39:59
Speaker 1: he this time grabbed hold of God and did not
40:03
Speaker 1: let go. And then the adversary asked him his name, Jacob.
40:07
Speaker 1: He answered the supplanter, and the answer changed history. You
40:12
Speaker 1: shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel. In Hebrew
40:16
Speaker 1: yisra el, a word that joins the verb to struggle
40:20
Speaker 1: with the name of God el and that the text
40:23
Speaker 1: itself explains this way, because you have struggled with God
40:27
Speaker 1: and with men and have prevailed. The trickster received a
40:31
Speaker 1: new name, just like his grandfather. But this name did
40:34
Speaker 1: not mean father of multitudes. It meant the one who
40:38
Speaker 1: struggles with God. And to that ford of the river,
40:42
Speaker 1: Jacob gave the name Penial, which in Hebrew means face
40:45
Speaker 1: of God, because he said, I saw God face to face,
40:49
Speaker 1: and my life was delivered. He came out of that
40:51
Speaker 1: struggle limping, renamed, and wounded at the same time. And
40:55
Speaker 1: that new name, Israel, did not stay with him. It
40:59
Speaker 1: became the name of an entire people. The nation God
41:03
Speaker 1: promised to an old man of r would forever bear
41:06
Speaker 1: the name of a man who struggled all night and
41:08
Speaker 1: refused to let go. Israel had twelve sons, twelve, and
41:13
Speaker 1: from those twelve would be born the twelve tribes of
41:15
Speaker 1: a people. The channel which had begun with a single
41:19
Speaker 1: childless man, now had twelve branches. The promise was alive, growing, multiplying,
41:26
Speaker 1: and then, right when everything seemed to be going upward,
41:30
Speaker 1: one of those twelve sons, the favorite, was thrown into
41:33
Speaker 1: a pit by his own brothers and sold as a
41:36
Speaker 1: slave to some merchants on their way to Egypt. And
41:39
Speaker 1: with that souled boy, bound weeping on the road to
41:42
Speaker 1: a foreign land, begins the last stretch of our funnel,
41:46
Speaker 1: the stretch that is going to end in a coffin.
41:49
Speaker 1: The boy was named Joseph. He was the son Israel
41:53
Speaker 1: loved most, the one of his old age, the one
41:56
Speaker 1: of the wife who had died, and his father didn't
41:59
Speaker 1: even hide it. He had given him a special tunic
42:02
Speaker 1: that set him apart from all the others. And as
42:04
Speaker 1: if the favoritism weren't enough, Joseph had two dreams and
42:08
Speaker 1: committed the imprudence of telling them aloud. He dreamed that
42:12
Speaker 1: everyone was binding sheaves in the field, and that his
42:16
Speaker 1: sheaf rose upright, while those of his brothers bowed in
42:19
Speaker 1: a circle around it. He then dreamed that the sun,
42:23
Speaker 1: the moon, and eleven stars bowed down before him. His
42:27
Speaker 1: brothers understood the message perfectly. This boy sees himself reigning
42:33
Speaker 1: over all of us, and they hated him. They hated
42:36
Speaker 1: him so much that one day, far from home, they
42:40
Speaker 1: threw him into a dry cistern, took away the tunic.
42:43
Speaker 1: The father had given him and sat down to eat
42:45
Speaker 1: at the edge of the pit while he pleaded from
42:47
Speaker 1: the bottom. Then they sold him for twenty pieces of
42:50
Speaker 1: silver to a caravan of merchants, dipped the tunic in
42:53
Speaker 1: goat's blood and told Old Israel that a wild beast
42:57
Speaker 1: had devoured his son. Father tore his garments and refused
43:02
Speaker 1: to be comforted, weeping for a son who was actually alive,
43:05
Speaker 1: walking in chains on the road to Egypt. And here,
43:09
Speaker 1: right here, the whole funnel seems about to break. The
43:12
Speaker 1: great grandson of Abraham, the bearer of the Oath, through
43:16
Speaker 1: the chosen line, ended up as merchandise sold by his
43:20
Speaker 1: own brothers, a slave in a strange country that worshiped
43:24
Speaker 1: other gods. If you wanted to destroy the plan to
43:28
Speaker 1: bless all the families of the earth, this was the
43:31
Speaker 1: perfect moment. And yet listen to what the text repeats
43:36
Speaker 1: again and again in the following chapters like a stubborn refrain,
43:41
Speaker 1: And the eternal was with Joseph in the house of
43:45
Speaker 1: his master, an Egyptian official, who ended up in trusting
43:49
Speaker 1: to him everything he owned, until that man's wife tried
43:53
Speaker 1: to drag him into betrayal, and seeing herself rejected, falsely
43:58
Speaker 1: accused him in the prison where they locked him up
44:01
Speaker 1: for having refused to do evil. At the lowest bottom
44:05
Speaker 1: of his descent, Heaven was still with him. The promise
44:09
Speaker 1: did not travel on a throne. It traveled in a cell.
44:13
Speaker 1: Years passed, and inside the prison something happened that hurts
44:17
Speaker 1: to tell, because any one who has waited in vain
44:20
Speaker 1: recognizes it. Joseph interpreted a dream for a fellow prisoner,
44:26
Speaker 1: the former cupbearer of Pharaoh, and announced to him that
44:29
Speaker 1: in three days he would be freed and restored to
44:32
Speaker 1: his post. He was right, and he asked the man
44:36
Speaker 1: one single thing. When you're back in the palace, remember me,
44:40
Speaker 1: speak of me to Pharaoh. Get me out of here.
44:43
Speaker 1: The cup bearer went out, recovered his life, his cup,
44:46
Speaker 1: his place beside the king, and the text finishes with
44:50
Speaker 1: devastating words. And he did not remember him, but forgot
44:55
Speaker 1: him two whole years. Genesis says two more years Joseph
45:00
Speaker 1: was locked up because of another's forgetting what was promised, again,
45:05
Speaker 1: waiting in the dark, hanging from a memory that failed,
45:09
Speaker 1: until one night Pharaoh himself had two dreams that no
45:13
Speaker 1: sage of Egypt could decipher, and only then did the
45:17
Speaker 1: cupbearer finally remember the boy in the prison. Joseph interpreted them.
45:22
Speaker 1: Seven years of abundance are coming, he told him, and
45:26
Speaker 1: then seven years of a famine so terrible that the
45:29
Speaker 1: land will forget what it is to eat. And he
45:31
Speaker 1: proposed to him a plan to store grain during the
45:35
Speaker 1: good years. Pharaoh, astonished, did something unthinkable. He took a
45:41
Speaker 1: foreign slave out of prison and set him to govern
45:44
Speaker 1: all of Egypt, second only to himself. The one who
45:48
Speaker 1: had been thrown into a pit now administered the largest
45:51
Speaker 1: granary in the known world. And then the famine came,
45:56
Speaker 1: and it did not come only to Egypt, It came
45:59
Speaker 1: to the whole reading, including the land where an old
46:02
Speaker 1: man named Israel was starving with his sons, the same
46:05
Speaker 1: ones who had sold Joseph. And they heard that in
46:08
Speaker 1: Egypt there was bread, and they went down to buy it,
46:12
Speaker 1: and they bowed without recognizing him before the Egyptian governor
46:17
Speaker 1: in front of them, without knowing that it was the
46:19
Speaker 1: brother they had thrown into the pit. Keep that image,
46:22
Speaker 1: because it's one of the most perfect circles in the
46:25
Speaker 1: whole account. Do you remember the dreams of that boy?
46:28
Speaker 1: The one of the sheaves that bowed, the one of
46:31
Speaker 1: the Sun and the stars, prostrating themselves. His brothers had
46:35
Speaker 1: hated him precisely for daring to dream that one day
46:38
Speaker 1: they would kneel before him. And now there they were,
46:42
Speaker 1: on their knees, begging for bread before the very brother
46:46
Speaker 1: whose dream they had tried to bury in a cistern.
46:49
Speaker 1: They didn't know it. The dream was being fulfilled to
46:52
Speaker 1: the letter, and it had been them, with their own hands,
46:55
Speaker 1: who pushed it until it became reality. The one they
46:58
Speaker 1: had tried to erase from the earth was now the
47:01
Speaker 1: only one who could keep them alive. I'm not going
47:05
Speaker 1: to tell you here every tier of the reunion, because
47:08
Speaker 1: that scene deserves its own space. There is, though, a
47:12
Speaker 1: detail I can't skip because it closes another perfect circle. Joseph,
47:18
Speaker 1: still without making himself known, subjected his brothers to a
47:22
Speaker 1: final test. He hid a silver cup in the sack
47:26
Speaker 1: of Benjamin, the youngest, the only other son of his
47:30
Speaker 1: same mother, and threatened to keep him as a slave.
47:33
Speaker 1: And then one of the brothers stepped forward to plead
47:37
Speaker 1: for the boy. It was Judah, the same Judah who
47:40
Speaker 1: years earlier had been the one who proposed selling Joseph
47:44
Speaker 1: to the merchants, and he offered himself as a slave
47:48
Speaker 1: in place of the youngest, so as not to see
47:51
Speaker 1: his father lose another son. The man who once sold
47:55
Speaker 1: a brother was now selling himself to save another, And
47:58
Speaker 1: on seeing that transferm Joseph could no longer hold the mask.
48:03
Speaker 1: What matters for our journey is the sentence Joseph said
48:06
Speaker 1: to them when he finally made himself known, trembling, weeping
48:10
Speaker 1: so loudly that they heard him in the palace. His
48:14
Speaker 1: brothers expected revenge, and Joseph told them instead the sentence
48:19
Speaker 1: that sums up the whole funnel, one of the most
48:22
Speaker 1: profound sentences in all the Bible. You thought evil against me,
48:27
Speaker 1: but God directed it to good to do what we
48:30
Speaker 1: see to day, to keep many people alive. You thought it.
48:34
Speaker 1: God directed it the betrayal of men and the plan
48:37
Speaker 1: of heaven running down the same river bed, without the
48:40
Speaker 1: one canceling the other. The pit, the sail, the prison.
48:44
Speaker 1: All the pain had been the long road by which
48:47
Speaker 1: God kept the family of the Promise alive in the
48:50
Speaker 1: middle of a famine that should have killed it. And
48:52
Speaker 1: so old Israel, who had left Canaan as a single man,
48:56
Speaker 1: following a voice, went down to Egypt, turned into a family,
49:00
Speaker 1: stops to count them, one by one, all the souls
49:02
Speaker 1: of the House of Jacob who entered Egypt, and it
49:05
Speaker 1: gives a number seventy seventy souls. It's worth noting to
49:09
Speaker 1: be honest, that there's a difference between the versions. The
49:13
Speaker 1: Hebrew tech says seventy while the ancient Greek translation, the
49:17
Speaker 1: one the Book of Acts in the New Testament quotes,
49:20
Speaker 1: says seventy five. The difference comes from which descendants are
49:24
Speaker 1: included in the count. But the point is the same,
49:27
Speaker 1: and it's astonishing if you stop on it. The funnel
49:31
Speaker 1: had reached its narrowest point. Of all the humanities scattered
49:35
Speaker 1: at Babel, the blessing promised to the whole world was
49:39
Speaker 1: now concentrated in barely seventy people refugees from the famine
49:44
Speaker 1: in a corner of Egypt. Seventy people who carried, without
49:49
Speaker 1: fully knowing it, the destiny of all the families of
49:53
Speaker 1: the earth. And you remember the number I asked you
49:56
Speaker 1: to keep at the very beginning, Seventy nations that old
50:00
Speaker 1: tradition counted had come out of the sons of Noah
50:04
Speaker 1: and had covered the earth after Babel, and now seventy
50:08
Speaker 1: souls went down to Egypt carrying the promise made to Abraham.
50:12
Speaker 1: That same tradition saw in that coincidence something deliberate, almost
50:18
Speaker 1: written on purpose. The whole world had burst into seventy peoples,
50:22
Speaker 1: and the sea destined to bless those seventy people's fit
50:25
Speaker 1: itself in another seventy people. The funnel, at its narrowest
50:30
Speaker 1: point still kept the shape of complete humanity, like a
50:34
Speaker 1: drop that preserves shrunk down the whole map of the
50:38
Speaker 1: sea it came from. Israel embraced Joseph again after believing
50:42
Speaker 1: him dead for twenty two years. He lived his last
50:46
Speaker 1: years in Egypt surrounded by his children, and before dying
50:50
Speaker 1: he blessed each one. And when he died, Joseph ordered
50:54
Speaker 1: the Egyptian physicians to embalm him according to the custom
50:58
Speaker 1: of that land, a process that the text itself says
51:01
Speaker 1: took forty days, and all Egypt mourned him seventy days.
51:07
Speaker 1: Then Joseph went up with a great caravan to Canaan
51:10
Speaker 1: and buried him in the Promised Land, in the cave
51:13
Speaker 1: that Abraham himself had bought generations earlier, the one who
51:17
Speaker 1: had stopped half way in Haran terror never reached the
51:21
Speaker 1: land Israel. His descendant at least returned to it dead
51:25
Speaker 1: on the shoulders of his sons, And in the end
51:28
Speaker 1: Joseph remained the last of the great ones, the one
51:32
Speaker 1: who had been sold, imprisoned, raised to the very top.
51:37
Speaker 1: Joseph lived one hundred ten years. He saw his great grandchildren,
51:42
Speaker 1: and when his hour came, he gathered his brothers and
51:45
Speaker 1: his family and told them some last words that closed
51:48
Speaker 1: the entire book of Genesis, and that change the whole
51:51
Speaker 1: meaning of what seemed a happy ending. He told them,
51:56
Speaker 1: I am dying, but God will surely visit you and
51:59
Speaker 1: will bring you up from this land to the land
52:01
Speaker 1: he swore to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob. He
52:05
Speaker 1: will visit you, he will bring you up. Joseph knew something.
52:09
Speaker 1: He knew that Egypt was not the destination. He knew
52:13
Speaker 1: that that comfortable corner full of grain, where the family
52:17
Speaker 1: was finally safe, was actually another Haran, another waiting room.
52:22
Speaker 1: And that's why he asked for something strange. The last
52:25
Speaker 1: thing the Bible says of him in Genesis. He did
52:28
Speaker 1: not ask to be buried in Canaan. Immediately, like his father,
52:31
Speaker 1: he made the children of Israel swear, made them promise
52:35
Speaker 1: that when God visited them and brought them out of Egypt,
52:38
Speaker 1: they would carry his bones with them. And then Joseph
52:42
Speaker 1: died at one hundred ten years, and they embalmed him,
52:46
Speaker 1: and he was put in a coffin in Egypt. There
52:48
Speaker 1: Genesis ends not with a wedding, not with a throne,
52:52
Speaker 1: not with a glorious nation. It ends with a closed
52:55
Speaker 1: coffin in a foreign country. Do you remember the promise
52:58
Speaker 1: of that night of fire and terror, when the eternal
53:01
Speaker 1: passed alone between the split animals, four hundred years of servitude,
53:06
Speaker 1: he had said, and afterward they will come out. Joseph
53:10
Speaker 1: had just died, and between his death and the day
53:13
Speaker 1: that people would come out of Egypt turned into a multitude.
53:17
Speaker 1: Those four hundred years were going to pass, four hundred
53:21
Speaker 1: years in which that coffin stayed there, waiting. Generation after
53:26
Speaker 1: generation of Israelites were born and died, knowing that somewhere
53:30
Speaker 1: there was a casket that could not be buried yet,
53:33
Speaker 1: because its owner had sworn that it would only move
53:36
Speaker 1: on the day God fulfilled his word that coffin was
53:39
Speaker 1: a promise in the shape of a box. Every time
53:42
Speaker 1: someone looked at it, they remembered, we're not staying. God
53:46
Speaker 1: is going to visit us. We're going to leave. And
53:50
Speaker 1: they left. Centuries later, when at last that people came
53:54
Speaker 1: out of Egypt. In the middle of the chaos and
53:57
Speaker 1: the haste of the departure, the text of Evs Exodus
54:00
Speaker 1: stops to note a single small detail, easy to overlook,
54:04
Speaker 1: and Moses took with him the bones of Joseph. Someone remembered,
54:10
Speaker 1: someone kept a four hundred year oath, and that coffin
54:13
Speaker 1: at last began to move toward the promised land. And
54:17
Speaker 1: look at the contrast we opened with. The book began
54:21
Speaker 1: with the almost mute death of a man who saved
54:24
Speaker 1: the whole world, and it ends with the death of
54:27
Speaker 1: another man who saved only his family, with his bones
54:31
Speaker 1: kept in a box, waiting the greatest thing of heaven,
54:36
Speaker 1: all the families of the earth resting on the smallest thing,
54:40
Speaker 1: a single family, seventy people refugees from the famine in
54:44
Speaker 1: a corner of Egypt. That was the answer to why
54:47
Speaker 1: him God never set Abraham apart from the world to
54:52
Speaker 1: abandon the world. He set him apart, to have within
54:55
Speaker 1: the world a single line of people through whom, one
54:59
Speaker 1: day the blessing promised in that tent in er would
55:02
Speaker 1: pour out again over all the families of the earth.
55:06
Speaker 1: The funnel did not narrow to leave people out. It
55:09
Speaker 1: narrowed to aim better. And an old man from Er,
55:12
Speaker 1: a laugh called Isaac, a trickster renamed at the bank
55:16
Speaker 1: of a river, and a slave raised to a throne
55:19
Speaker 1: with the names through which that aim of heaven passed.
55:23
Speaker 1: Joseph's coffin waited four hundred years, and it moved. That
55:28
Speaker 1: box that waited in Egypt is telling you something, and
55:31
Speaker 1: I'm not going to explain it to you. The promises
55:34
Speaker 1: God cuts alone one night between the fire and the
55:37
Speaker 1: darkness do not expire because they are delayed. They only
55:41
Speaker 1: wait for the day of the visit. Joseph died without
55:44
Speaker 1: seeing the land, but he made them swear his bones
55:48
Speaker 1: would arrive. Because there are people who cling to a
55:51
Speaker 1: promise with such force that they refuse to let go
55:54
Speaker 1: of it, even in death. On the screen, another video
55:59
Speaker 1: has just appeared. It's not a second part of this one,
56:02
Speaker 1: nor the continuation of anything. It's a different story that
56:06
Speaker 1: I chose because I think it converses with what you've
56:09
Speaker 1: just heard. I'm not going to promise you it will
56:12
Speaker 1: change your life, nor that it's the most striking thing
56:15
Speaker 1: you'll see to day. I only tell you that it's there, waiting,
56:20
Speaker 1: just as that coffin waited. If you want to keep
56:23
Speaker 1: going a little longer, click it and let's go. And
56:26
Speaker 1: if you prefer to stay a moment in silence with
56:29
Speaker 1: all this, close your eyes and let it settle, that's
56:32
Speaker 1: fine too. You decide when