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 Sarahi'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.

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

husband because then if the servant had a child, Serai owned it.

Sarah was tired of waiting. She wanted to take a shortcut. Have you ever been there?

Let me give you cause to reconsider. Sarah's fear and impatience has yielded

millennia of war and destruction that's still happening

...