Hello and welcome to the Scriptures or Real podcast, the podcast where we talk about things that make the scriptures real to us so that they come alive to us and so that we get more power out of them.

I'm your host, Kerry Mealstein, and this is one of the shortcast that we do to help us just get a couple little elements that might make the scriptures more real.

And today we're talking about a number of elements in the life of Abraham. I think I'll do a shortcast on the geography and some historical details. And then I'll do another one about some Egyptological details that will help the story as is presented in Abraham Chapter 1 come alive. So we're going to talk for just a moment about some things in the story that have

really made this come to life for me and have really made it feel to me like this is a real

person that I can identify with. Because again, anything that makes them seem more like a real person allows me to

identify with them. At least that's how it works for me. So it's interesting to me that if we get

just a number of historical details in the text that I think just make a whole lot of things come to life for us.

So I'll just give you one example.

We've had questions about where is er of the Chaldees.

Some people, most people think that it's in Iraq, southern Iraq, but some people think

that it is in the kind of northern Syria, southern Turkey kind of area. There are even a recent

publication by a gray scholar that I know and admire named Gary Rensberg. He he argues for that just on biblical knowledge. With some

extra knowledge from the book of Abraham, I'm fairly convinced that that's what happened. Some of that

has to do with the Egyptian influence that we see both in the story and places where we know that

Egyptian influence was. But there's some other interesting little things. So here's just a fun one.

And again, this is all in trying to understand the text and the story better.

So if we go to Abraham chapter 1, verse 10, we see where he talks about the priest of Pharaoh

who offers a thank offering of a child upon the altar, which stood by the hill called

Potipher's Hill at the head of the plain of

Olisham. Now that's interesting because Olysham is a name that we don't find anywhere else in

the scriptures, but not that long ago, some people found, well, we've noticed in a couple of texts. So one of them is from just before

Abraham's time, and one of them is from during Abraham's lifetime. They used the word uly sum.

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