Deacon D

 Walk in the Bible - Genesis 20      In verse 1, Abraham is shown leaving - he's leaving the same place he was when he entertained the angels, under the trees of Mamre and he's traveling to Negeb. This chapter tells us that he's staying for a while in Gerar which is the home of King Abimelech of the Philistines. None of the Torah scholars really know why he left. They state emphatically that there was no famine in the land, so that wasn't it, they just simply don't know why he left.      We do know that in Gerar, we have a replay of what happened in Egypt, namely, Abraham told King Abimelech that Sara was his sister. Most of the Torah scholars believe that Abraham did this because he thought the king might kill him to take his wife. Although we have one scholar, Rabbeinu Chananel who postulated that Abraham had divorced his wife, and because she was his half-sister, wasn't really lying. The Bible doesn't support this anywhere in this story. The Bible d...

  Genesis 19 In verse 1, we see that there are now TWO angels. Before ( in Genesis 18:2 there were three angels and we see that the Lord went on HIS way in Genesis 18:33.  That's lead some of the scholars to believe that GOD was actually one of the angels that met with Abraham, face to face! No one's really sure if it was HIM or not, but in either case, we now see that there are TWO angels going to Sodom and Gomorrah. The angels are said to have arrived in the evening, however, some scholars actually think it was closer to sunset for a few reasons, the first being that the gates would have been closed at night to keep out bandits and secondly, the word used for evening "ereb" could mean "evening", "night" or even "sunset".  When the angels arrived, Lot was said to be "sitting in the gate" and this is absolutely correct. At that time each city had two sets of gates, an outer gate and an inner gate. The space between those two...