Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee:
Now the Lord had said unto Abram. The Septuagint has eipe (G2036)], said; and the continuous course of this history leads to a belief that it was after Terah's death, and not until then, that Abram was honoured with a communication from heaven. From other parts of Scripture (Genesis 15:7; Nehemiah 9:7; Acts 7:2) it appears that a divine revelation was made to him in Chaldea; and hence, Lightfoot, Hales, etc., maintain that there were two calls-the first in Ur and the second in Haran-the latter of which alone is mentioned in Genesis. An attentive consideration, however, will suffice to show, from the close resemblance of the phraseology in this passage and in Acts 7:2-3, 'that Moses refers to one and the same call with Stephen; and that he now only resumes, in his characteristic manner, the subject of Abram's departure from his native land, which had been briefly related in Genesis 11:3, in order to furnish some important details. In fact, the narrative in the first five verses of this chapter is merely an expansion of the short notice in the preceding one; and therefore our translators have properly rendered the verb in the pluperfect tense, "had said."
This revelation is not to be accounted for by representing it, as one writer has recently done, to be only 'the newly increased light of his inner consciousness,' or by saying, with another, that the 'Lord' of Abram 'was as much a creature of human imagination, as a Jupiter or an Apollo.' In whatever way it was made to him-whether in a dream, by a vision, or by a visible manifestation (the language of Stephen (Acts 7:2) implies that it was some glorious theophany, perhaps like the supernatural light and words that suddenly converted Paul-a miracle well adapted to the conceptions of a Zabian idolater) - Abram was thoroughly persuaded that it was a divine communication; and it was probably accompanied by such special instructions as to the being and character of the Most High God, the possessor of heaven and earth," as carried conviction to his understanding and heart.
He had probably been brought to the knowledge and worship of the true God a considerable time before this. It was х Yahweh (H3068)], the Lord, who appeared (Acts 7:2) to Abram; and as we henceforth read of frequent divine appearances being made to the patriarchs, it is necessary to state that these special manifestations were in the person of him who, as the Revealer of God, the Angel of the Covenant, introduced and conducted the opening dispensation.
Get thee out of thy country ... The call is here recorded, comprehending a command and a promise. The command of God was as definite as it was extensive. Abram as a man of human sympathies, which, by the long-cherished associations of childhood and youth, must have strongly attached him to the people and soil of his native land, was required to make a sacrifice which he must have felt to be a great and a painful one. As the first proof of sincere and unhesitating submission, he was called, as God's people are in every age, to deny himself (Matthew 16:24; Romans 12:2), by an entire severance of his existing ties to the world: all was to be relinquished without reserve, although valued as a right eye, and useful as a right hand. He was to leave his "country" - it was "the land of graven images" (Jeremiah 50:38), and his "kindred " - they had become idolaters (Genesis 31:30).
"Father's house" is the circumstance on which is chiefly grounded the theory that there were two calls. Abram had left his country and his kindred upon migrating to Haran. But he sojourned, it is said, with his father there; and Bengel, an advocate of this theory, upholds it in a manner unworthy of himself, by assuming that Abram left his father in Haran, and lived sixty years in Canaan; but being in the habit of visiting Haran from time to time, he thus maintained a sort of connection with his "father's house," which, on the old man's death, was entirely broken off!