Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible recap.

Today is going to be longer than usual because this text is packed, and I'm still going

to barely skim the surface.

So buckle up, and if you're listening faster than 1x, you might want to slow this down to

normal speed.

In fact, you may even want to listen to this one twice.

Yesterday, we ended with God making a covenant with Abram, and today we picked up to read a

little bit of Sarah's story.

By this point, she's at least 75 years old, and she still has not had a child, even though

God had promised Abram a child when he visibly appeared to him.

So she does what many of us do when we feel like God is holding out on us.

She takes matters into her own hands.

In those days, servants were considered possessions, which, let me pause here to say this very important

thing.

This is one of those things in Scripture that is descriptive, not prescriptive.

It's telling us what is happening, not what should happen.

This is not condoning treating people like possessions.

But in that ancient culture, that's what was happening.

And basically, anything a servant owned, the master owned, so the child of a servant

was considered the property of the master.

Sarah used that cultural norm as her logic behind making her servant have sex with her

husband.

...