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12 Abram had settled in the land of Canaan, Lot in the cities of the prairie.
אַבְרָ֖ם יָשַׁ֣ב בְּאֶֽרֶץ־כְּנָ֑עַן וְל֗וֹט יָשַׁב֙ בְּעָרֵ֣י הַכִּכָּ֔ר
Buckle up for a deep dive into the grammar and syntax of this phrase. As always, the purpose is to try our best to understand what the biblical writer was trying to express.
Why did I not write “then Abram settled in the land of Canaan,” as NETS translates the Greek version of our phrase? It’s because of the warning bells that go off whenever you see a phrase of this kind where the subject precedes the verb. That’s not Biblical Hebrew’s story-telling technique. For a quick refresher, let’s take a look back at this verse from the story of Cain:
Gen 4:16 Cain went forth [וַיֵּ֥צֵא קַ֖יִן] from before YHWH and settled down [וַיֵּ֥שֶׁב] in Restlessstan to the east of Xanadu.
That second verb, וַיֵּ֥שֶׁב va-yéshev ‘he settled’, is exactly what we would expect at the beginning of our verse. When the subject comes first, you must disconnect it from that vav and use a simpler form, the same that’s the normal past tense in Hebrew to this day: יָשַׁב yashav ‘he sat’. You must also ask why the writer avoided the standard form, the “consecutive” — meaning that it’s the next thing that happened in the story. The Gesenius grammar explains:
[§ 142b] The particular state represented in the [simple past] verb may consist—
(a) Of an act completed long before, to which reference is made only because it is necessary for understanding the sequel of the principal action;
[§ 142c] (b) Of a fact, contemporaneous with the principal events or continuing as the result of them.
Our verse is given as an example of the second kind:
Abraham accordingly continued to dwell in the land of Canaan, but Lot dwelt, &c.
What they’re really suggesting (in the early 20th-c. English translation of Gesenius’ late 19th-c. German) is that our verb is in the middle of a sequence that started in the previous verse:
Lot chose (va-yivḥar) the prairie;
Lot traveled (va-yisa) eastward;
they detached themselves (va-yippardu);
after which, “as a result,”
Abraham “continued to dwell [yashav] in the land of Canaan.”
When Lot does exactly the same verb, though, we’re can’t say that he “continued to dwell” in his new location. It would have been easy enough to contrast what they did, showing them as “contemporaneous,” by using the verb pattern we saw way back on Day One of Creation, first biblical, story-telling va-yiqra and then plain-Jane qara:
Gen 1:5 God named the light Day and the darkness Night.
וַיִּקְרָ֨א אֱלֹהִ֤ים ׀ לָאוֹר֙ י֔וֹם וְלַחֹ֖שֶׁךְ קָ֣רָא לָ֑יְלָה
Since our author avoided that easy solution, it seems to me that he is really describing what Abram did as “an act completed long before.” When Terah settled the whole family in Harran in 11:31, we pointed to the different ways one can “live” somewhere in Biblical Hebrew. ישׁב is the most permanent of them. Our verse has Lot settle in the cities of the prairie, so I suggest it is telling us that Abram had settled in Canaan already, perhaps when he first built an altar back in 12:7.
It’s worth remembering also — though I used a different English word back then — that precisely this verb ישׁב y-sh-b was the cause of their dispute, the reason they had to settle in two different places:
Gen 13:6 But the land could not support them to dwell [לָשֶׁ֣בֶת] together, for their acquisitions were so many that they could not dwell [לָשֶׁ֥בֶת] together.
Don’t be confused by the disappearance of the י at the beginning of this word and the appearance of a ת at the end; that’s simply how this sort of word works. ⇥ See Lesson 24 of my Hebrew course for the technical details. ⇤ Our verse is presenting the solution: If you can’t ישׁב together, you must ישׁב separately.
As far as where they settled, Abram had (already) settled in the land of Canaan, right where we (and YHWH) want him. Lot, however, has moved to “the cities” of the prairie, raising the question of how many cities one man can live in at the same time. BHQ discusses the problem:
The plural construct ערי strengthens the impression, made in the previous verses, that Lot is a kind of a nomad figure, wandering within the Jordan valley from city to city, with no definitive domicile (Qimḥi: “wandering from city to city, until he settled in Sodom”). Of course, this contradicts the description of his fixed dwelling in Sodom in ch. 19, where he is presented as an ordinary inhabitant, living in a house with his family. To harmonize the two texts, G changes the plural to singular, ἐν πόλει, and renders the following עד סדם as ἐν Σοδόμοις.
Indeed, NETS tells us that “Lot settled in a city of the regions [or peoples] round about.” Wevers’ commentary on the LXX expands on this. I transliterate the Hebrew and Greek in his comment:
According to the Hebrew Lot dwelt in the cities of the plain and tented up to (as far as) Sodom. This further stresses the seminomadic way of life in which herds are regularly on the move as it were in search of pasture. But [the Greek], fully aware of the later account about Lot and his fate, disregarded the flocks and their needs and concentrated on getting Lot into Sodom. Accordingly arei ha-kikkar [“the cities of the plain”] is changed into the singular polei tōn perichōrōn “a city of the regions about (the Jordan).” Then ad-s’dom [“toward Sodom”] becomes eskēnōsen en Sodomois i.e. “he tented in Sodom.” This agrees with the account of ch. 19 where Lot was sitting near the gate of Sodom, and invited the divine messengers into his home, a house with a prothyron [“vestibule”] as well as a thyra [“door”] which the messengers apekleisan [“close”] (w.6,10).
We’ll talk more about this next time, when we add the last few words of our verse, including that notorious city of Sodom.
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