“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.” (2 Timothy 3:16)

There are probably times when you open certain passages of the Bible, like chapters containing lists of genealogies and we often don’t immediately see how they fit within the bigger picture of Scripture. Such is the case with Genesis 11, a chapter that contains a repetitive cadence of unfamiliar names and their families, such as Shem, Shelah, Eber, Nahor, and Terah. I’m sure most of us often are tempted to gloss over these sections and skip to a part that contains something that feels familiar and fits more easily into our “window” of understanding of the Bible’s narrative.

Since “all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful”, the Holy Spirit can help us better understand how a fragment fits into the whole, opening our eyes to see, for example, how Shelah is related to Abram, the ancestor of David and, more importantly, Jesus. He delights in surprising us with the treasure of a perfectly intact window where even the smaller parts reveal the story of God’s mission throughout the Bible.

Daily Questions

1. Why is it important to recognize each portion of Scripture as a fragment of God’s bigger story?
2. How can you let the Holy Spirit to guide you to see this more clearly?

Daily Thoughts

Father, please help us to see You and Your work more clearly.

Genesis 11: 26-32

After Terah had lived 70 years, he became the father of Abram, Nahor and Haran.

This is the account of Terah’s family line.

Terah became the father of Abram, Nahor and Haran. And Haran became the father of Lot. While his father Terah was still alive, Haran died in Ur of the Chaldeans, in the land of his birth. Abram and Nahor both married. The name of Abram’s wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor’s wife was Milkah; she was the daughter of Haran, the father of both Milkah and Iskah. Now Sarai was childless because she was not able to conceive.

Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, the wife of his son Abram, and together they set out from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan. But when they came to Harran, they settled there.

Terah lived 205 years, and he died in Harran.

Bonus Information

In the ancient world, genealogies weren’t always simply a straight forward record of “who begat whom.” Instead, they were sometimes used to show legitimacy of relation or position. This is particularly true when it came to tracing the lineage of royalty. Ancestry was intended to show that the person with whom the lineage ended was the rightful and true heir. For example, the genealogy of Jesus in the book of Luke traces Jesus’ human lineage back to God Himself.

Ancestry records often provided key information as well, as we see in today’s text. In Genesis 11: 26-32, Sarai’s childlessness is one of the striking features and becomes one of the important elements of the story later on.