The indication from verse 26, if one took it just the way it was said, it looks as though Abram, Nahor, and Haran were triplets, all born in the same year when Terah was seventy years. However that is not the case. Abram is listed first, although he was not the eldest of the three. Haran was the oldest and Nahor was the youngest, putting Abram in the middle.
Abram was 75 years old when he was called. If Terah died at the age of two-hundred and five years, and if he died just prior to (and that is what the context seems to imply), Abram’s leaving his land, then Terah was one hundred and thirty years old when Abram was born. We can deduce then that Haran was born when Terah was seventy and that Nahor was born at some unspecified time after Abraham.
We find that Abraham was a descendant of Shem, who was the son of Noah. I think all of us understand that. If we look down in verse 15 we find in a couple of generations after Shem that Salah begot Eber. We find therefore that Abraham’s genealogy is in the line of Noah through Shem through Eber. So this was the line through which God was preserving His truth, and indeed I think we can say that they, this line of men, represented His government on earth since the time of the Flood. We also find then that Jesus Christ, if we want to go to Luke the 3rd chapter, you will see all of these men’s names there, and you will see that Jesus came from the same line—Noah, Shem, Eber, Abraham, Judah, David, and on to Jesus Christ.
Genesis 11 is laying the foundation for Genesis 12. There are three important topics that are covered in Genesis 11. Beginning in verse 1 through verse 9, is the building of the Tower of Babel and the confusing of tongues, resulting in the spread of mankind over the whole earth. Then beginning in verse 10, we have the generations of Shem, which shows the line which God chose to preserve His truth. Then beginning in verse 26 or 27, somewhere right around there, the call of Abraham, which laid the foundation for the continuing preservation of God’s truth and established the line through which the Savior would come.
Let us look a little bit further into Lot's background because his pedigree, as we traced Moses’ last week, is even in a way more interesting than Moses' was.
Very early Lot is associated directly with what the scholars call the holy line. That holy line came through the flood in Shem. Remember from last week’s sermon that Adam's life overlapped Methuselah's by 243 years. So we start all the way at the beginning. Adam, we jump to Methuselah, and Adam still lived another 243 years. Now Methuselah lived right up to the flood. He died in the flood, but while he was alive that last 98 years Shem was alive. Shem, then, was a direct connection, along with his father Noah, from the beginning with Adam all the way through the flood.
Now Shem lived for another 500 years after the beginning of Arphaxad who came when Shem was 100 years old. Shem lived to the ripe old age of 600 years. The last 150 years Abraham was alive. Now we have a direct connection from Adam to Methuselah to Shem to Abraham, and 150 years that Shem could relate things directly to Abraham that took place even before the flood. All of that experience, all of that personal history could be passed on directly to Abraham who was the uncle of Lot.
Haran died and Abram became Lot's adopted father, I guess you might say his guardian. But do not think that Lot was young, because I have calculated that even if Lot was only 25 years younger than Abram (and he might have been very close to his age), when they left his own land and went to Canaan, Lot was already 50 years old, and for 100 of those years he had lived side by side with Shem. So the righteous Shem could pass on the history and the purpose of God right to Abraham and right to Lot directly.
Moses was a couple of generations removed and yet his faith was far greater than was Lot's who lived right during those times. We are not dealing with somebody who had no background and had no access to hearing these things directly.
These two chapters show very clearly that Israel, who came out of the line of Shem through Arphaxad, through Eber, through Terah, through Abraham, had its roots in the world. However, chapter 11 interjects something between verses 1 and 10 showing the alienation of these nations of mankind from God. These are all the nations that came from Noah through Shem, Ham, and Japheth, who were caused to live under a curse, being scattered across the face of the earth, indicating that they were away from the presence of the God, and therefore, the blessings of God.
