It’s night at the Jabbok, a river that cuts through a gorge east of the Jordan, and a man has just sent his wives, his children, and everything he owns across the ford in the dark. Tomorrow he has to face the brother he cheated twenty years ago. Then someone grabs him in the dark, and they wrestle until dawn, and he walks away with a new name and a limp he’ll carry for the rest of his life. How does God keep a promise when the people carrying it are this compromised, this frightened, and this much like us?

In this episode, Graham walks through Genesis 12 to 36, the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and asks whether God’s promise can survive the family carrying it. He traces the promise from the call of Abram and the covenant between the pieces, through Hagar naming God as the one who sees her, the hospitality at Mamre and the bargaining over Sodom, to Jacob’s stolen blessing, the stairway at Bethel, and his tearful reunion with Esau, showing how the promise is threatened on almost every page and kept by God every time. He faces the hardest story in the section, the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22, alongside Kierkegaard, Kant, Jon Levenson, and Phyllis Trible, and handles the stories of Hagar, Sodom, and Dinah directly. He engages with voices like Martin Luther, Andrei Rublev, Delores Williams, Kenneth Kitchen, and the Bethlehem pastor Munther Isaac on the historicity of the patriarchs, Paul and James on Abraham’s faith, and the promise of the land. And reading these chapters against an age of estrangement and a culture that only knows how to celebrate or cancel its heroes, he gives a four-week plan for reading them yourself and asks what it means to walk away from God blessed and limping at the same time.

This is the second of three episodes on Genesis, part of a series on the podcast that takes whole books of the Bible one at a time, and the first covers Genesis 1 to 11.

Book recommendations: “Africa Bible Commentary” edited by Tokunboh Adeyemo, “Genesis 12-36” by Claus Westermann, and “The Theology of the Book of Genesis” by R. W. L. Moberly.

Email us at GrahamPodcast@icloud.com

See my Substack: https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/

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