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Nor was Abram left in that hour without consolation. As most he needed it when
alone, and with apparently nothing but the comparatively barren hills of Judaea
before him, Jehovah once more renewed to him, and enlarged the promise of the land,
far as his eye could range, bestowing it upon Abram and his "seed for ever." For the
terms of this promise were not made void by the seventy years which Judah spent in
the captivity of Babylon, nor yet are they annulled by the eighteen centuries of
Israel's present unbelief and dispersion. The promise of the land is to Abram's "seed
for ever." The land and the people God has joined together; and though now the one
lies desolate, like a dead body, and the other wanders unresting, as it were a
disembodied spirit, God will again bring them to each other in the days when His
promise shall be finally established. So Abram must have understood the word of
Jehovah. And when, so to speak, he now took possession by faith of the promised
land, he was directed to walk through it. In the course of these wanderings he reached
Hebron, one of the most ancient cities of the world, where in the wood of one,
Mamre, he pitched his tent under a spreading terebinth, and built an altar unto
Jehovah. This place seems through the rest of his life to have continued one of the
centers of his movements.
Meanwhile Lot had taken up his abode in a district which, like the rest of Canaan at
the time of Joshua's conquest, was subdivided among a number of small kings, each
probably ruling over a city and the immediately surrounding neighborhood. For
twelve years had this whole district been tributary to Chedorlaomer. In the thirteenth
year they rebelled; and, in the fourteenth, the hordes of Chedorlaomer and of his three
confederates swept over the intervening district, carrying desolation with them, till
they encountered the five allied monarchs of the "round of Jordan," in the vale of
Siddim, the district around what afterwards became the Dead Sea. Once more victory
attended the invaders - two of the Canaanitish kings were killed, the rest fled in wild
confusion; Sodom and Gomorrah were plundered, and their inhabitants - Lot among
them - carried away captives by the retreating host. This was the first time -at least in
Scripture history - that the world-kingdom, as founded by Nimrod, was brought into
contact with the people of God, and that on the soil of Palestine. For Chedorlaomer
and his confederates occupied the very land and place where afterwards the
Babylonian and Assyrian empires were.^34 It became necessary, therefore, that Abram
should interfere. God had given him the land, and here was its hereditary enemy; and
God now called and fitted him, though but a stranger and a pilgrim on its soil, to
become its deliverer; while alike the mode and the circumstances of this deliverance
were to point forward to those realities of which it was the type.
One who had escaped from the rout brought Abram tidings of the disaster. He
immediately armed his own trained servants, three hundred and eighteen in number;
and being joined by Aner, Eshcol, and Mamre, the chieftains to whom the district
(^)