Читать книгу Hebrew Life and Times - Harold B. Hunting - Страница 22

About the time of Hammurabi's reign, if we follow the account related in the book of Genesis, there lived among the nomads on the plains west of the city of Ur a man named Abraham. If Hammurabi ever heard of him, which is improbable, he looked down upon him as of no account. Yet Abraham wielded a greater influence for the future welfare of humanity than all the princes of Babylon. For, discontented with Babylonian life, he was the earliest pioneer in a movement toward a civilization of a different and better type. And the sons of Hammurabi have yet to reckon with Abraham and his ambitions.

Discontent among the shepherds.—Many of Abraham's people, no doubt, were discontented in Babylonia. A shepherd's life is monotonous and hard. When they went to market they saw comforts and luxuries on every hand. Yet the money they received from the wool merchants of Ur gave no promise of larger opportunities in life for any shepherd boy. So, at length when Abraham said to them, "Come, let us leave this country," they were ready to answer, "Lead on, and we will follow!" So it came to pass that Abraham's clan set out northwest, toward Haran, in what is now called Mesopotamia, and finally after some years of migration found themselves camping on the hillsides of Canaan, southeast of the Mediterranean Sea.

Ideals represented in Abraham.—But it is not as a leader of fortune hunters that Abraham is pictured in the Bible. No doubt he and his clansmen hoped to better their condition. But Abraham was a dreamer and a man of deep religious faith. He believed that he was being guided by his God. And he believed that in accordance with God's plan his descendants in the land to which they had come would become a great nation. Best of all, it seems probable that he dreamed of a nation different from Babylonia. Certainly he is described as a different kind of a man from the typical Babylonian. In some respects, to be sure, judging by our Christian standards, he had serious shortcomings. He did not scruple to deceive a foreigner, nor to treat harshly a slave. His ideas as to the character of God were far below those revealed by Christ. Yet he had the Hebrew gift for home and family life. He was a good father to his son. And he put a higher value on personal friendship and kindly family relations than on property interests. When his herdsmen quarreled with those of his nephew, Lot, he said to the latter with dignified generosity and common sense, "Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee … for we are brethren. Is not the whole land before thee? Separate thyself, I pray thee, from me: if thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to the right; or if thou take the right hand, then I will go to the left." Just what Abraham looked forward to, we, of course, do not know. Probably his ideas were vague. Yet it seems that such men as he must have dreamed of a nation great in faith as well as in material wealth; a nation in which money would not be considered more important than justice and kindness; in which home life might be sweet and loving, free from the fear of want or the blighting influence of greed; and in which the door of opportunity would always be kept open even for the humblest.

At any rate, some centuries after the time when Abraham is supposed to have lived, we find a group of shepherd tribes living in and around Canaan, who believed themselves to be descended from the twelve sons of Jacob, Abraham's grandson, and among whom there was the tradition of a divinely guided pilgrimage from Babylonia to Canaan under Abraham's leadership just as we have described. It is a great thing to have memories of noble parents and traditions of heroic ancestors. These the Hebrews had from the very beginning.