Abram’s Walkabout (Gen 13:17)

¹⁷ Up, walk around in the land

קוּ֚ם הִתְהַלֵּ֣ךְ בָּאָ֔רֶץ

This is not the simple form of הלך h-l-k — the Qal conjugation, which means “go,” and occurs more than 1400 times in the Bible — but the reflexive (Hitpael) conjugation, which occurs just 64 times. ⇥ See Lesson 15 of my Hebrew course for the technical details. ⇤ Yet this is already the fifth time we’ve seen it. Enoch has done this verb twice את et ‘with’ God (5:22, 24) and Noah did the same thing once (6:9).

Our phrase, however, is more reminiscent of this one:

Gen. 3:8 They heard YHWH God walking around in the garden [מִתְהַלֵּ֥ךְ בַּגָּ֖ן] …

Share The Bible Guy

And here once again is the Hebrew of our phrase, with the same highlighting to show you what I am comparing: קוּ֚ם הִתְהַלֵּ֣ךְ בָּאָ֔רֶץ. You remember from last time that YHWH has just casually dropped the word עפר afar ‘dirt’ into the conversation. That word was used previously only in the very same garden story, first when humans were made of it in 2:7, and then in the curses of the snake and the earthling in 3:14 and 3:19 respectively. This is starting to look less and less like coincidence!

Allow me to push the envelope for a moment before we go back to our detailed reading. (That, after all, is the purpose of this kind of reading: not to miss an important detail that might tell us something about the big picture.) I’m thinking here of Nahmanides, the 13^th-c. Spanish physician, talmudist, commentator, mystic, and representative of the Jews in the famous debate with Pablo Christiani. He makes clear in an essay in between his Genesis and Exodus commentaries — in my Commentators’ Bible version, you will find it at the beginning of the Exodus volume — that Genesis and Exodus are a diptych.