Do you have the idea that when Abraham made his way to Egypt it was just a small family group that came into Egypt with him? Well, I think not. Let me give you some sort of an idea of how large Abraham’s retinue was.
Genesis 14 took place only a few years after the events of chapter 12. Now we see that Abraham's trained servants, in this particular case he was fighting a small skirmish, he had 318 trained servants. Now because of the circumstance, I take that to mean that this was a personal bodyguard, a retinue of soldiers that he had with him, you might say his crack troops. This would be the ones that surrounded a man of position, the patriarch, and protected him and others that were on the journey with him. Three-hundred and eighteen who were born in his house.
Let us just make some assumptions to that. These are all soldiers, 318 soldiers. Now suppose each one of those soldiers had a wife. If they were soldiers, I would say they were probably about 20 or 30 years old of age, it is very likely that they had wives, and I think just for the sake of counting here, let us say each one had two children. Now by this time we are multiplying four times three-hundred and eighteen. We are now in the neighborhood of twelve hundred people that may involve just his crack troops, the bodyguard that surrounded the patriarch that protected him and his party as they went along.
Now what about cooks? What about people who took care of the herds and the flocks, the shepherds, the caretakers of one kind or another? What about household servants? We know that Abraham did not have a house per say, but I am sure, when we get into chapter 13 where it says Abraham was very rich, even though he lived in a tent it was probably one of the nicest tents you will ever see. Maybe a ten, twelve, or fourteen room tent. I do not know. At any rate, I get the picture of a man who led a group of somewhere in the neighborhood of at least one-thousand people and maybe up to two thousand people.
We are talking about a large portion of Terah’s family, Lot’s family, all of that group of people, all of their possessions, and the people whom they had acquired. These are not, I get the impression here, those born in his house, the three-hundred and eighteen, but the people he had acquired. Remember that I was on that verse the last week. These could have represented people that he hired to be carriers, scribes, whatever, mule drivers, donkey drivers, you name it, whatever they needed in the way of beasts of burden. They could have been people who were convinced by the teaching of Abraham and decided to attach themselves to him and made the pilgrimage with him down into Canaan and down into Egypt.
Now, if you are in Egypt and a group of one-thousand or so people come into your nation, I think that you would notice it. Because surely the Pharaoh of Egypt had people on the borders guarding the areas, the roadways, keeping him apprised of what was going on, what was passing down the road.
So when Abraham came into town, it was not a single nomad and his wife who was sneaking in under the cover of darkness, but rather we find someone with a very large retinue of people with him and it was not possible for him to sneak into … . . .
God Almighty had to lead through many forked roads our forefather Abraham, in many of which he took the wrong fork. In Genesis 12:11-20 (before the Pharaoh in Egypt) and also in Genesis 20:1-2 (before King Abimelech), events in Abraham's formative years (lessons placed there for our contemplation and admonition), Abraham compromised with God's law—at least that part dealing with bearing false witness. God Almighty allowed Abraham to take the wrong fork in both situations, and then in His mercy bailed him out of a bad situation, but not before Abram stewed in his predicament for awhile, learning some hard lessons about taking the expedient, faithless way out.
Now I'm going to throw one in here. This was the second time that it happened! Look back at Genesis 12:10-20 and the same thing happened between Abraham and Pharaoh fifteen or twenty years before. How long was God's forbearance now? Fifteen or twenty years.
But He had given Abraham time to repent of this sin, but he never did it. Eventually I'm sure that he did, but here we have a fifteen or twenty-year period of time where God tested him on the same problem in order to help him grow in character. I thought that was kind of interesting.
