Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies. And it's an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Okay. We'll go ahead and get started, and when we get started here, in just a moment we'll

be picking up at the beginning of Genesis chapter 13.

So we made a lot of progress in the last Bible study compared to the previous one in which we only covered one verse.

But we covered the rest of Chapter 12 last time.

And so most of what we've covered so far is we're the story of Abram.

He's still Abram.

Spoilers. We all know he's going to become Abraham, but that hasn't happened yet. That's a ways down the road.

Abram or Avram has, after God appeared to him, God has now actually appeared to him twice

in the text, was told to leave

the city of Oer, where he had dwelt, which as we talked about in the introduction to Abraham

is the largest city in the world. At this time, the center of world civilization told to leave

it and go to the land that God would

show him, so he didn't even get a destination at first. It was just start walking and I'll tell you

when you get there. We saw him last time in Chapter 12 arrive in the general region of the land

of Canaan, where there were already people.

We saw him build a couple of altars

at a couple of particular sites.

But he was there.

We talked about the altars and the role they play

in the stories of the patriarchs in Genesis.

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