Leave Your Country, and Be a Blessing

Genesis twelve, verses one through three, records God's call to Abram to leave his country, his kindred and his father's house for a land God will show him, paired with a set of promises attached to the departure. God promises to make of Abram a great nation, to bless him, to make his name great, and to make him a source of blessing, adding that those who bless Abram will be blessed and the one who curses him will be cursed, and that in Abram all the families of the earth will be blessed. The passage marks a deliberate narrative turn within Genesis, moving from the preceding chapters' account of humanity in general to a single called individual through whom the text's subsequent chapters trace a specific line of descent. The promise's final clause, extending blessing outward to all the earth's families rather than confining it to Abram's own descendants, ties his particular call to a universal scope from its very first statement, a pairing of the particular and the universal that the rest of Genesis continues to work out across Abram's descendants, first through Isaac and later through the twelve tribes descended from Jacob, a line of descent Genesis traces in detail across the chapters that follow this initial call.