8-15-21
Looking Back:
Play A Game: Divide the class up 1st grade and kindergarten: Ask questions and keep score!
We have been in the book of Genesis.
We have covered the first 11 chapters.
Let’s talk about some events in the book of Genesis?
1. Where do we find the book of Genesis in the bible?
2. Who have we been talking about? (Who’s family? Noah!)
3. What was The Garden of Eden Genesis 2:8-17?
4. Who lived there? (Adam and Eve)!
5. What happened to them?
6. What were there sons names (Cain and Abel)?
7. What happened to them? (Cain killed Abel)?
8. What was special about Enoch? (He was faithful and walked with God and God took Him.)
9. What did God tell Noah to build? (Noah Builds the Ark)
10. Why? (The earth was wicked)
11. Who was in the Ark? (Noah and his family and two of every animal. Male & female.)
12. What did God send? (A great flood)
13. How long did it rain on the earth? (40 day’s and nights)
14. What did God send out of the Ark? (A raven and a dove)
15. What did we study last week? ( The Tower of Babel)
16. What was the Tower of Babel? ( A tower to reach higher than the heavens.)
17. What was the earth like? Was there one speech?
(Yes one)
18. When the Lord came down who came down with Him? (the Trinity)
19. When the Lord came down, what did he do to the speech? (Confused it)
20. What ells did God do? (Scattered the people all over the earth.)
GOD CALLS ABRAM (Gen.11:26- 12:9)
Today we are looking at the beginning of the story of ABRAM who will become Abraham.
The Family of Terah
27 This is the account of Terah’s family. Terah was the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran;
and Haran was the father of Lot.
28 But Haran died in Ur of the Chaldeans, the land of his birth, while his father, Terah, was still living. 29 Meanwhile, Abram and Nahor both married. The name of Abram’s wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor’s wife was Milcah. (Milcah and her sister Iscah were daughters of Nahor’s brother Haran.) 30 But Sarai was unable to become pregnant and had no children.
31 One day Terah took his son Abram, his daughter-in-law Sarai (his son Abram’s wife), and his grandson Lot (his son Haran’s child) and moved away from Ur of the Chaldeans. He was headed for the land of Canaan, but they stopped at Haran and settled there. 32 Terah lived for 205 years and died while still in Haran.
The Call of Abram
1 The LORD had said to Abram, “Leave your native country, your relatives, and your father’s family, and go to the land that I will show you. 2 I will make you into a great nation.
I will bless you and make you famous,
and you will be a blessing to others.
3 I will bless those who bless you and curse those who treat you with bad.
All the families on earth will be blessed through you.”
4 So Abram departed as the LORD had instructed, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he left Haran. 5 He took his wife, Sarai, his nephew Lot, and all his wealth—his livestock and all the people he had taken into his household at Haran—and headed for the land of Canaan. When they arrived in Canaan, 6 Abram traveled through the land as far as Shechem. There he set up camp beside the oak of Moreh. At that time, the area was inhabited by Canaanites. 7 Then the LORD appeared to Abram and said, “I will give this land to your descendants.” And Abram built an altar there and dedicated it to the LORD, who had appeared to him. 8 After that, Abram traveled south and set up camp in the hill country, with Bethel to the west and Ai to the east. There he built another altar and dedicated it to the LORD, and he worshiped the LORD. 9 Then Abram continued traveling south by stages toward the Negev.
So we have the background story and the call to Abram in the first part of this in chapter 11 it tells us of Abe’s Genealogies.
That is a big word that describes parents, grand parents, and siblings.
What does genealogies mean? (word that describes parents, grand parents, and siblings.)
Who was Lot’s father? (Haran)
So God called Abe and commanded him to Leave your native country, your relatives, and your father’s family, and go to the land that I will show you.
Where did God tell him to go?
4 So Abram departed as the LORD had instructed, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he left Haran. 5 He took his wife, Sarai, his nephew Lot, and all his wealth—his livestock and all the people he had taken into his household at Haran—and headed for the land of Canaan. When they arrived in Canaan,
God told Abram to go, He did not say take Lot and your servants but he took them with him. We are going to see some of these people will be trials later.
We can not do half of what the bible scripture says we have to listen to God and do exactly what he tells us to do.
The bible say’s to love God with all your heart soul and might right? But is that all we need to do?
(No we need to love our niebor as our self.)
So Abram and Sari and everyone moved and went to Canaan.
6 Abram traveled through the land as far as Shechem. There he set up camp beside the oak of Moreh. At that time, the area was inhabited by Canaanites.
Abram set up camp in Shechem and it was populated with Canaanites.
7 Then the LORD appeared to Abram and said, “I will give this land to your descendants.”
And Abram built an altar there and dedicated it to the LORD, who had appeared to him.
8 After that, Abram traveled south and set up camp in the hill country, with Bethel to the west and Ai to the east. There he built another altar and dedicated it to the LORD, and he worshiped the LORD.
9 Then Abram continued traveling south by stages toward the Negev.
From Ur, Abraham traveled 700 miles to the borders of present-day Iraq, another 700 miles into Syria, another 800 down to Egypt by the inland road, and then back into Canaan - what is now Israel.
700 + 700= 1400 + 800=
2200 miles
2200 miles from Hesperia CA. going East= 2200 miles: Flint, MI.
How Far Did Abram Travel
From Ur, Abraham traveled 700 miles to the borders of present-day Iraq, another 700 miles into Syria, another 800 down to Egypt by the inland road, and then back into Canaan - what is now Israel. It is a journey that today's pilgrim, for reasons of international polity, cannot easily replicate. But even though much of the route is difficult of access, and although many of the cities Abraham knew are now only ruins, there are nonetheless rewards for today's traveler, spiritual monuments to the man and his faith. Begin, then, in the Ur of history and imagination, and end at Hebron, where, under Israeli protection, the faiths, however briefly, meet.
When Abraham strode upon the stage at Ur, he was by Semitic reckoning already a man of 75. And Ur was then a capital city of more than 100,000 inhabitants, a place of beauty, graced with towers, palaces, temples, law courts, market squares, statues, shrines, gardens, mosaics, friezes, reliefs and monuments. It was divided into rectangular blocks by paved streets lined with two-story houses. It had its own seaport and man-made canal giving access to the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, opening it up to lucrative foreign markets in the areas we call Africa, India, Malaysia and the Arabian peninsula. Ur was, in fact, part of an empire ruled by a written code of law drawn up by King Hammurabi. The civic order and public glory of that empire, Babylonia, were legendary.
We know some personal details about Abraham. He belonged to a race of Semites who traced their ancestry back to the dawn of human existence, and who had settled at Ur some 1,000 years before his time, a race the local Sumerians called Chaldeans. His was probably a family of merchant traders, buying and selling in Ur's rich markets. All his long life, Abraham loved one woman, Sarah. He spoke four or five of the main languages of his time. He was a skilled rider, hunter and fighter. Fiercely independent and an inveterate haggler (he even bargained with God), he had one central quality: faithfulness. And, if even one quarter of the words ascribed to him are authentic, he must have had as large a mind as any man ever born.
By the same Semitic reckoning of age, we are told that when Abraham was 75, his father, Terah, was over 200 years old. Yet it was Terah, the Bible records, whom God rather suddenly impelled to move on with his son and family toward an ancient promise of land and blessing for his race. That promise would not be found at Ur, where more than 500 different gods and goddesses were worshiped. Terah and Abraham and their fellow Semites worshiped one god - the only god, they said. God.
If not at glorious Ur, then where? To the west, in the land named after its marvelous purple dye: Canaan. Terah and Abraham knew their route. Then, as now, there was only one way by land to Canaan, an arc of fertile terrain, a long finger of rice and cotton and citrus and melon, corn and dates, figs and grapes, a curving miracle of green, arching its way in the midst of impassible desert wastes: the Fertile Crescent.
And so, one fine day, when the winter rains were almost over, they packed all their goods and chattels onto a few dozen four-wheeled carts drawn by oxen. They liquidated their merchandise, or most of it probably, and converted it into chits of value and exchange, made of baked clay. All along their route they could obtain funds and food and every material necessity with those chits.
We, in our unpeaceful world, are apt to imagine all sorts of dangers that Terah and Abraham must have faced - bands of roving robbers, murderous cave-dwellers, ravenous wild beasts. What is hard for us to understand is the reality: the remarkable security in which they actually made the trek. In fact, they traveled every inch of the long way by established trade routes complete with milestones, armed patrols, river fords, guardhouses, food depots and secure cities. The only serious enemies they might face were disease and the dreaded dust storm, the idyah, that came every spring and summer from the western desert, bearing a fine powder that blocked eyes, nostrils, ears and mouth, ultimately choking the unprotected. It was the same idyah that helped doom the effective use of helicopters in the abortive American attempt to rescue the Embassy hostages in the Ayatollah's Iran.
When he left Ur, then, and traveled up through the territory of modern Iraq, Abraham set out upon a ''royal highway'' through an area governed by civil law, bristling with trade and communications, inhabited by populations who enjoyed music and painting and sculpture and a written literature of plays, poems, epics, songs and novels. And, as he passed slowly on the road northward, at the sufferance and under the protection of great imperial authorities, he was carrying destiny away with him in his very person, as surely as he was carrying his worldly possessions in his ox-drawn carts.
As long as the caravan was on the first leg of its journey north over what is called Mesopotamia, the travelers never lost sight of the works of man. Apart from cities, they could always see at least one of those most visible objects in that land, the zigurrats. Each zigurrat soared skyward from a gigantic broad-based pedestal of brick and asphalt, rising sometimes to hundreds of feet, and always topped with a shrine to a god upon its pinnacle. Traveling through what we know as the Iraqi provinces of Muntafiq, Diwaniya, Hilla, Baghdad and Mosul, Abraham passed at least 35 of these monuments gleaming in the sun on either side of his route. Today, only squat piles of ruins are to be seen.
Their first important stop after leaving Ur was Babylon. Abraham knew it as Bab-Ilu, the most renowned of ancient royal cities. Its site lies just north of the town of Hilla in southern Iraq. Rectangular in shape, it was protected then by moated walls with nine gates. It was bisected by the great Euphrates River. It had eight urbann and seven suburban districts whose paved streets were everywhere enlivened with many-colored friezes and reliefs and lined with palaces, temples and luxurious houses. Abraham and Terah led the way through the Litamu suburb and, as all northbound travelers did, entered central Babylon through Urash Gate. They went up Nabu Street, turned east at the temple of Ninurta, then north by the main street and past the sacred area of Esagila where the royal palace stood. There, two extraordinary buildings loomed: the Temple of Marduk, with its frightening gold-sheathed, winged statues of that god, and the Eteme-an-ki (House-of-the-Foundations-of-Heaven-and-Earth ) zigurrat, which rose to a height of 296 feet. All of Abraham's descendants down to our day would remember it as the Tower of Babel.
Most of Abraham's Babylon lies buried today beneath a deep bed of silt, some of it beneath the water table. Of the original zigurrat, only one small island of worn brick surrounded by a moat remains. But you can still see enough to imagine the glory, and a smaller-scale reconstruction stands nearby. You will marvel even today at the remains of the huge fortifications, the skillful use the Babylonians made of water channels to enclose the city, the still awe-inspiring remains of temples and palaces and statuary. Even the piles of rubble mixed with sand and broken mudbrick set the imagination whirring.
After Babylon, there would have been nothing remarkable for many weeks of travel. Some 50 miles north, they might have stopped just beyond a wide curve of the Tigris River, at a little village of mud huts called Baghdad; but that place became a great city only some 2,500 years later; and it is far more likely that the caravan paused at such big, busy, prosperous cities as Sippar, Agade, or Tikrit, now in ruins. About 90 miles from Babylon, Abraham and his family tramped over a spot in the road where the pipeline now passes, bringing oil from the Iraqi fields of Kirkuk south and west to Dulaim and beyond.
It was not until they reached Ashur that they saw another extraordinary city. Ashur, on the bank of the Tigris, was as holy in the eyes of the Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian people of Abraham's day as Rome, Mecca and Jerusalem are for modern Catholics, Moslems and Jews. Abraham would have entered the city by Gurgurri Gate, and ridden over paved streets through rich bazaars, past glorious temples and the huge royal palace. His progress would have been interrupted by nearly constant religious processions. But, tradition tells us, he refused even to dismount from his camel there, for in the 34 temples dedicated to the god Ashur, and in the 16 dedicated to the goddess Ishtar, abominations were taking place daily: sacred male and female prostitution; sexual orgies in honor of Ishtar. Abraham ate and drank briefly, always in the saddle, and left the city as quickly as he could.
Within another four or five weeks, by overnighting at such minor cities as Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta and Nimrud, Abraham's family would have arrived at the most northern reaches of today's Iraq, and entered the city of Nineveh on the east bank of the Tigris. Travelers along the trade route that followed the Fertile Crescent, as surely as a river flows its course, had to pass through Nineveh to replenish supplies of food, water and medicines, because the next leg of the journey was the hardest.
It was inevitable, therefore, that Nineveh grew later to be the capital of the Assyrian empire - a place so large that the prophet Jonah reckoned three days to cross it on foot. Today, its site is near the small town of Kuyunjik. And, even though most of the old city is now mounds of dust and sand with some remaining brickwork and soaring walls, the restoration of the original gate, with its fearful winged guardian deity, instills an immediate sense of the whole's original greatness.
From Nineveh, Abraham's little band at last took a westward turn, for a trek of 200 miles. Along this stretch, the vegetation was thinner, the water scarcer, the road bleaker and rougher and less well protected. Sixty miles along the way, the route left what we call Iraq, passing into Turkey. There was only one adequate restingpoint, the city of Gozan - modern Tell el Halaf in Turkey -before Haran. Gozan covered 150 acres, was guarded by high mudbrick walls on three sides and by the River Khabur on the fourth. You can walk around the city limits today, noting the remains of houses and streets, and the remnants of a once beautiful building that rested on pillars fashioned in the shapes of divinities mounted on lions. You can still see samples of Gozan's painted pottery, decorated with animal and geometric designs - Abraham and his party surely traded for some of it, for it was renowned all through the Middle East. Gozan was welcoming; but still, having rested there, when travelers made it across from Nineveh to Haran, even the hardiest were generally as much in need of rest as of supplies.
It was at Haran that old Terah died, at the age of 205. The family mourned him and buried him there; and, tradition tells us, the caravan spent the winter there. But, as soon as the monsoon rains were finished, early in the new year, it was to Abraham that God spoke now: ''Get thee out of this country ...into a land that I shall show thee.''
The way was still westward from Haran, and it was 50 miles to the high-walled, 250-acre city of Carchemish, near a place in modern Syria called Jerablus. There were huge defense towers in the walls of Carchemish. The city had a powerful police and security force, and a monopoly in the transshipment of copper and timber; merchants from all over the north willingly paid the upkeep for that protection. Pausing at Carchemish today, we can admire still the statuary of lions, the reliefs of wild boars, of charioteers and archers, of soldiers in battle; and we can trace the outlines of the ancient sawmills and warehouses and examine the remains of Carchemish's great palace and temple, its citadel surrounded by moat, fosse and towers.
Carchemish was a dual turning-point in Abraham's journey. From here, the way was south. And from here, the caravan traveled among Semites.
Some time in the late spring or early summer, the caravan entered a long descending valley. Whoever leaves Syria for the south must pass through this valley. From remotest antiquity, it had been called The Womb, and so it is called today: the Bekka. One spring season, a shade less than 4,000 years ago, the Bekka valley, where in recent months Israelis and Syrians have fought with missiles, supersonic jets and tanks, was happier witness to the caravan of carts and camels that bore Abraham and his household southward.
Their first important stop was Aleppo, where Abraham grazed his herds of cows. Today, the Islamic citadel sits on the central hill, and beneath it are the streets where Abraham walked. On the spot where now you see the minaret of Jami Zakariyah mosque, named after a descendant of Abraham, there once stood a zigurrat. After Aleppo, it was on to Kadesh, today called Tell Nabi Mand. When Abraham entered this fortress-city, Kadesh was the center for all the throbbing, hyperactive Syrian confederacies of his day. The buildings he saw were made of basalt; there are now few traces of them. After Kadesh, he traveled in a south-easterly direction; and so he reached Damascus.
Damascus was the home of warrior-princes and rich merchants who lived in buildings of fairy-land architecture, enjoying the plethora of food and luxury goods that poured into this place from every direction. The city (its name means Sackful of Blood) grew to glory on waves of perpetual strife and war. Then, as now, the city appeared suddenly in the middle of the desert, beckoning to the traveler like a distant jewel glistening on brown velvet. In Abraham's day, it was almost 3,000 years old. Buildings we moderns regard as ancient marvels - the 7th-century Ummayad Mosque, the 16th-century Suleimanieh Mosque, the 18th-century Azem palace - had of course not yet been built, nor the reasons for their existence even dreamed of. Still, Abraham made both dreams and buildings possible by his obedient journey of hope and belief.
Abraham and his caravan would have stayyed in Damascus for some time, even wintering there. The old city, where Abraham tarried, lies south of the Barada River; its center - containing citadel and palace and temple - was on the escarpment overlooking the river. Take some time to walk along Suk al-Tawilah (The Long Bazaar) until you come to that street called Darb al-Mustakin (Straight Street). Beneath the stones your feet tread lies an older street, but with the same name; Abraham walked that more ancient street called Straight - it existed in his time - where, centuries later, his fiery descendant, Paul of Tarsus, was cured of his blindness. The squat houses and archways and tiny shops of today stand above those Abraham saw and perhaps entered.
God is patient; but still Abraham would have left Damascus at the end of the rains, passing over the Bashan road, across the Golan Heights that are today manned by watchful Israeli troops, east of the Sea of Galilee, covering terrain that, it seems, has never been unknown or unimportant in the destinies of men and nations.
Slowly, Abraham led the way down the eastern bank of the River Jordan, past the place where the fortress-city of Beth-Shan peered across the water; 1,000 years later, on its walls the bodies of King Saul and his son Jonathan would be nailed as trophies by the Philistines. Finally, where the River Yarmuk joins the Jordan, an ancient ford carried the caravan across to the land of Abraham's very great destiny: Canaan.
The Canaan of that time corresponded very closely to the present boundaries of Israel and the territories it controls. The land was 50 miles at its broadest points, and stretched almost 120 miles south, from The Wheel of Galilee's mountains to The Bag of Sand - the Sinai.
It was at Shechem that Abraham first stopped, and he made of it the most venerated shrine of his race. He built an altar - his first, but far from his last in that land. Five centuries later, Joshua stood where Abraham had; he built another altar from a pile of stones, and spoke his final words of commendation and exhortation to the gathered tribes of Israel. And, after 15 centuries more, not far from there, Jesus met the woman of Samaria at the well dug by Abraham's grandson, Jacob. Today, it is the remnant - only the merest signs are visible - of Joshua's pile of stones that marks the place where Abraham's altar had stood. Surely, though, it is not stones, but Shechem, the place itself, that will speak to you of all of Israel's dreams, all of its promise, all of its pain.
Though he had entered Canaan at last, Abraham's traveling was not yet over. In a sense, it had only begun. He was in the promised land, but not yet of it. This land did not possess him, nor he it. ''Walk through this land in its length and its breadth.'' the Ancient Voice told him. ''All of it will be yours.'' Early on, he judiciously picked out a spot as his permanent home: Hebron, in the fertile, sunny south. And then he did again as God said; he traveled his land, as if the very condition of its belonging to him and his descendants was that he cover every square inch of it, live in every quarter of it, journey to the lands bordering it -Egypt, the territories of modern Jordan, of the Gaza strip, of Lebanon, of Syria.
Nowhere can you travel there that he didn't. Nowhere do modern Israelis live that he didn't. Nowhere do they fight today for survival that he didn't. He talked with God, with angels, with Pharaoh, with kings, with princes, with bedouins, in palaces, in towns, in huts, in tents, in the open fields. He could use honeyed words, the subtle understatement of bargaining, the diplomatic lie, the threat. He arbitrated the division of vast properties. He accumulated gold, silver, copper, real estate, herds of cattle. He led his own army, fought pitched battles, asked for no quarter from lethal enemies and gave them none, although he pleaded naggingly with God to have compassion on men whose vile wickeness he deplored. For he hated human waste. At the age of 100, he fathered a famous son, Isaac, and fetched a bride, Rebecca, for him from 2,000 miles away. When his own wife, Sarah, died, for the sake of more children he took a second wife and fathered whole tribes that still live on today in Jordan, Syria, Libya and North Africa.
Yet there are no monuments or shrines of the usual sort to Abraham along the route he followed from Ur to the land of Canaan. There are several wadis - dried-up river beds - named after him. One of the Anatolian foothills in modern Turkey bears his name. An ancient mosque in Aleppo and a very old synagogue in Damascus were named after him, but they were both destroyed in the latter-day hostilities between Arab and Israeli. All through Iraq and Syria and Lebanon, there are certain places where local tradition has it that Abraham rested, or fought a battle, or built an altar, or spoke with God.
But the realization that overtakes you finally is that Abraham's ''shrine'' is of a different sort: Every place he built an altar to God, there some of his illustrious descendants would later plant a memory still living today for us - Joseph in Egypt, Joshua in Shechem, Samson in Philistia, Ruth and Naomi and Booz in Jordan, Samuel at Shiloh, Jacob and Saul at Bethel, David on Moriah, Solomon in Jerusalem, Jesus at Sichar, Paul at Damascus - as if he had presanctified all these places for all of them, for Israelite holy man and warrior, for modern kibbutznik and sabra and pilgrim.
For Sarah's burial, Abraham had purchased an expensive plot of land, the field of Mamre, in the shade of the immemorial oak trees at Machpelah near his chosen Hebron. When he, too, finally died at age 175, there beside the wife he had loved uniquely they buried this man who had never made a mistake with God, and who had traveled so far, so long, so boldly, to seal promises and blessing, land and destiny, race and religion.
Should you visit Hebron today, appraching from the north, you will pass through a ring of Israeli settlements surrounding what is now a densely populated city of 70,000 people, most of them Arab Moslems. The Israelis who live in the city itself -about 100 of them - are in the old Jewish quarter where they returned in 1967 for the first time since they were expelled in the bloody riots of 1929, when 67 of their number were killed and many more were wounded. Whether in settlements or in the old quarter, Israelis are protected now round the clock by armed reservists.
To the east, you will find the Capital Vista, as it is called, and it is a perfect place from which to get your bearings, to survey in a moment of relative serenity, and in one sweep, the monuments of Hebron that you came here to see. They are scattered over tens of acres that seem to breathe history as we breathe the air. From the vantage point of the Vista, you can see Ramath el-Khalil's oak trees where Abraham pitched his tent. The oak where Abraham accosted the Three Angels -the Moslems say that the Holy Family rested in its shade during the flight into Egypt. The pool of Hebron over which King David hanged the murderers of Ishbosheth, the son of his beloved Jonathan. Eshtemoa village, where the probable remains of David's treasure were found not long ago. And there, straight ahead of you, the deceptively plain limestone walls that enclose Hebron's central monument. It is in reality a magnificent shrine - compound would be a better word -built over the caves where three patriarchal couples are buried: Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah.
If Israel and Judaism have a central shrine anywhere on the face of this earth, surely it is here. It is the only standing structure that exhibits today the Herodian architecture of some 2,100 years ago. Later, when you enter, you will be in the only religious edifice in this world within whose walls Jews and Moslems worship at their respective synagogues and mosques. The great Isaac and Rebecca Hall is an ornate mosque often filled with Moslems, barefoot, kneeling on prayer-mats, facing Mecca, eyes closed, hands outstretched, barely audible Arabic syllables pouring from their lips. The Abraham and Sarah Chamber and the Jacob and Leah Chamber are synagogues where modern bronze Arks house the Torah Scrolls and Jews come in endless numbers to stand, heads covered, bodies bending and bending, over and over again, in reverence, as their lips move to the rhythm of Torah verses and their faces seem misted over with ancient memories and the ever-present hope. Dark steps lead to the cave where Abraham and Sarah are buried; one imagines descending into a space hallowed by the intangible and eternal sleep of Abraham, but reverence and tradition bar the visitor and pilgrim alike from penetrating there.
Discreetly behaved but well-armed Israeli guards and Moslem overseers keep a sharp eye at every turn and tourists shuffle through, gathering in all there is to see. But for worshipers, those jarring elements seem not to be there at all as they lose themselves in prayer to the God who called their common father, Abraham, out of distant Ur of the Chaldeans to claim this land for his faith and for his race of believers.
When, from the Capital Vista, you have surveyed all the monuments and are ready to descend to visit each one in turn, pause for just a moment more. Raise your eyes. Gaze in any direction - and you will be looking where Abraham walked. He didn't merely cover the territory as a matter of course. He stamped it indelibly by an activity that was as dazzling in its variety and prodigious in its extent as his hopes and ambitions had been far-reaching and unstoppable. For he had not quit his beloved Ur and come all of 2,000 miles to see any obstacle overturn his God-given destiny to be the father of millions in this land. ''Look up!'' God commanded him once in the silence of a far-off midnight. ''Count the stars in the sky! As numerous will be your progeny in this land!''
And, still today, be they Israeli or Arab, Christian or Moslem or Jew, whether living in Israel or in its surrounding countries from Algiers in the west to Iran in the east and beyond, all claim Abraham as their prophet, their archpriest, their patriarch. Indeed, we all do. And that is Abraham's enduring shrine.
FOLLOWING IN THE FOOTSTEPS Although borders and politics impede the casual traveler who wishes to follow the whole of Abraham's route today, Hebron, the historic and cultural culmination of the journey, is easily accessible. Here is the shrine of all the People of the Book, the common heritage of Jew, Christian and Moslem. GUIDANCE
Hebron is not noted for touristic comforts, and visitors will prefer to make their base in Jerusalem. Several companies in that city can supply chaffeur-driven cars and English-speaking guides for the excursion to the Tomb of the Patriarchs. Three of these are Eschcolot Tours, 36 Keren Hayesod Street (telephone: 665-555); Travex, 8 Shamai Street (223-211), and Yehuda Tours, 23 Hillel Street (227-740). All charge a rate of about $86 for a five-hour trip for four people, or about $145 for ten hours. It is about a 45-minute drive from the heart of Jerusalem to Hebron. LODGINGS FIT FOR A KING
Jerusalem's most opulent hotel is the King David, with its huge lobby and decor reminiscent of a Cecil B. de Mille epic, overlooking the walls of the Old City. Rates range from about $98 for a standard double to about $122 for a deluxe room with a view of the Old City, breakfast included. Telephone: 221-111.
The more modest American Colony Hotel on Nablus Road was once a pasha's palace; double rooms, with breakfast, are about $46 to about $97; the former are merely adequate but the latter are enormous, high-ceilinged chambers facing a cool and verdant courtyard. Telephone: 285-171. SHIRT-SLEEVE DINING
Most Jerusalem restaurants are casual; the local cuisine reflects its Middle Eastern origins, and fresh fish is always a good bet. Some recommended establishments, in addition to hotel restaurants, are:
For seafood, especially the local St. Peter's fish, the Dolfin Restaurant, Alrashid Street (reservations: 282-788), is open daily for lunch and dinner, with entrees in the $8 range.
For dinner only (and never on Fridays), try Fink's, at 2 Histradrut Street in West Jerusalem (reservations: 234-523), which features seafood and steaks (beginning at about $10). The atmosphere is informal, even for Israel, and there is a bar popular with visiting journalists.
The view of the Old City is the thing at Mishkenot Sha'ananin, just below Montefiore's Windmill on King David Street (reservations: 233-424). Open daily; closed Friday evening and mid-day Saturday. A la carte specialties with a Continental accent include beef stroganoff and veal with mushrooms; dinner for two with wine averages about $60.
A version of this article appears in print on March 13, 1983, Section 6, Page 33 of the National edition with the headline: FOOTSTEPS OF ABRAHAM; BY MALACHI MARTIN