Genesis 12–21: Abraham and Sarah — Crime, Deception, or Righteousness?

Abraham and Sarah — Righteousness or Deception

The Call of Abraham and the Promise

1 Now the Lord said to Abraham, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.
2 And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.
3 I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
4 So Abraham went, as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abraham was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran.
5 And Abraham took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother’s son, and all their possessions that they had gathered, and the people that they had acquired in Haran, and they set out to go to the land of Canaan. When they came to the land of Canaan,
6 Abraham passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land.
7 Then the Lord appeared to Abraham and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him.

Genesis 12:1–7 ^*

The Almighty does not accept sacrifices.
Offerings are needed by demons, who feed on the energy of the suffering of the slain.

On the Day of Judgment, each soul will receive according to its level. Wake up.

Fear, Profit, and Repeated Deception

The Pharaoh Episode and Material Gain

8 From there he moved to the hill country on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. And there he built an altar to the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord.
9 And Abraham journeyed on, still going toward the Negeb.
10 Now there was a famine in the land. So Abraham went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was severe in the land.
11 When he was about to enter Egypt, he said to Sarai his wife, “I know that you are a woman beautiful in appearance,
12 and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife.’ Then they will kill me, but they will let you live.
13 Say you are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared for your sake.”
14 When Abraham entered Egypt, the Egyptians saw that the woman was very beautiful.
15 And when the princes of Pharaoh saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh. And the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s house.
16 And for her sake he dealt well with Abraham; and he had sheep, oxen, male donkeys, male servants, female servants, female donkeys, and camels.

Genesis 12:8–16

Let us assume that religious defenders are right when they try to excuse Abraham and say that he was not responsible for gaining wealth through Pharaoh’s interest in Sarah.

Still, the text says that Abraham was treated well because of her and received livestock, servants, and camels. In other words, deception was followed by material gain.

Shifted Guilt and Pharaoh’s Punishment

17 But the Lord afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abraham’s wife…

18 So Pharaoh called Abraham and said, “What is this you have done to me? Why did you not tell me that she was your wife?

19 Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her for my wife? Now then, here is your wife; take her, and go.” 

20 And Pharaoh gave men orders concerning him, and they sent him away with his wife and all that he had.

Genesis 12:17–20

In the logic of the narrative, the punishment falls on Pharaoh and his house, even though Abraham created the situation by concealing that Sarah was his wife. The guilt is shifted away from the deceiver and placed on the ruler who had been deceived.

At the same time, the reader is expected to accept that the false deity — the Lord — is just and reasonable. Such logic presents injustice as righteousness and excuses deception.

When a religious servant begins to invent explanations to defend Abraham’s behavior and to justify the false deity, there is little point in arguing with him. A person who replaces conscience with blind loyalty is rarely open to honest reflection.

Later Defenses of Abraham and the Moral Question

As centuries passed, many people began to doubt whether Abraham and Sarah could truly be called righteous if their actions in the Pharaoh episode are read as they appear in the Old Testament narrative. In response, religious defenders claimed that Abraham was a spiritual teacher who preached in different lands, and therefore Pharaoh could not have been unaware of who Abraham was or that Sarah was his wife.

But this explanation does not solve the moral problem. If Pharaoh already knew who Abraham was, then the concealment becomes even harder to justify. And if Abraham was a respected spiritual teacher, why would he need to hide that Sarah was his wife?

The question becomes even sharper when the narrative presents Abraham as a man who possessed male and female slaves. A spiritual teacher who profits through deception and lives among slaves cannot be defended merely by religious titles. The issue is not reputation, but moral sight.

Repeated Deception in Gerar

Later Abraham and Sarah arrive in another land, and the same sequence begins again: Abraham once more suggests that Sarah should hide the fact that she is his wife, fearing that the “local savages” might kill him because of her.

1 From there Abraham journeyed toward the territory of the Negeb and lived between Kadesh and Shur; and he sojourned in Gerar.

2 And Abraham said of Sarah his wife, “She is my sister.” And Abimelech king of Gerar sent and took Sarah.

Genesis 20:1–2

This time, however, the king of Gerar does not take Sarah. He is warned in a dream that she is Abraham’s wife and his half-sister.

3 But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night and said to him, “Behold, you are a dead man because of the woman whom you have taken, for she is a man’s wife.”

14 Then Abimelech took sheep and oxen, and male servants and female servants, and gave them to Abraham, and returned Sarah his wife to him.

16 To Sarah he said, “Behold, I have given your brother a thousand pieces of silver. It is a sign of your innocence in the eyes of all who are with you, and before everyone you are vindicated.”

Genesis 20:3, 14, 16

Sarah’s Age

The question of Sarah’s age sharpens the moral problem of the repeated chain of deception and material gain: after the Pharaoh episode, Abraham again presents Sarah not as his wife, but as his sister; again, a ruler is drawn into the situation; and again, Abraham receives material gifts.

The chronology of Genesis 17–21 makes this second episode even harder to explain. It shows that the events in Gerar take place shortly before the birth of Isaac, when Sarah was already about ninety years old.

15 And God said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name.

16 I will bless her, and moreover, I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall become nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.”

17 Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed and said to himself, “Shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Shall Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child? ”

Genesis 17:15–17

10 The Lord said, “I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife shall have a son.” And Sarah was listening at the tent door behind him.

11 Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in years. The way of women had ceased to be with Sarah.

12 So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, “After I am worn out, and my lord is old, shall I have pleasure? ”

13 The Lord said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh and say, ‘Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old? ’

Genesis 18:10–13

As shown in the Gerar episode above, Genesis 20 presents the same chain of events again: Abraham says that Sarah is his sister, Abimelech takes Sarah, a warning comes to Abimelech in a dream, and Sarah is returned to Abraham together with material gifts.

1 The Lord visited Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did to Sarah as he had promised.

2 And Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age at the time of which God had spoken to him.

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5 Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him.

Genesis 21:1–2, 5

This means that Abraham and Sarah set off for the land of Gerar when Sarah had not yet given birth to a son, but was already 90 years old.

Then a natural question arises:

What made Abraham think that anyone would be seduced by his wife, considering that Sarah was already about ninety years old at that time?

Yet readers are asked to believe that a king might have been tempted to drag a ninety-year-old woman into his bed.

And they are made to believe it through threats of eternal damnation in the fire of the “merciful” false deity — the Lord.

Abraham in Islamic and Biblical Tradition

In the Quran, Abraham is described as righteous and possessing true faith. He is presented as a moral example whose life reflects integrity and spiritual responsibility.

In the Old Testament, however, Abraham is often portrayed in a very different light. His actions are frequently associated with deception, fear, and moral compromise. This contrast raises an important question.

If Abraham and Sarah were truly as immoral as they are presented in the Old Testament narratives, it is difficult to explain why Mohammed would have included them in his teachings at all. The same applies to Moses. If Moses had been as morally questionable as he appears in some biblical passages, he would hardly have been honored as a great prophet in Islam.

The Old Testament appears as a writing in which figures from ancient sources of teaching are shown through immoral actions, yet are then declared holy and righteous.

In the Quran, there is no such moral stain placed on these ancient figures. This means that the information received by Mohammed did not come from the Old Testament in its present form, but from ancient sources that preserved a purer image of these figures.

The Old Testament and the Distortion of Ancient Figures

It is strange that many adherents of Judaism and Christianity do not see the mockery and distortion within such writings. When a figure is described through deception, slavery, cruelty, or moral compromise, it is not enough to call that figure holy merely because the story appears inside a sacred book.

The texts later used for the Old Testament were originally taken from fragments of ancient stories, from a time before the Jews or other peoples of our civilization existed in their present form. Names were attached to those figures, the stories were reshaped for later purposes, and then they were presented to the world as sacred history.

There is no need here to prove whether Abraham, Sarah, Moses, and others existed exactly as described. Even if such figures were invented, they still should not be called holy when immoral actions are attributed to them.

The Spiritual Exam of Humanity

When you read the life stories of these figures, you begin to recognize the spiritual level of those who wrote them. The same level can be seen today in religious servants who enthusiastically repeat these narratives in churches and temples without questioning their meaning.

This leads to an even more serious question: what is the spiritual level of a world that follows such a false deity into the abyss, while rejecting God’s true gift of salvation?

Many people do not realize that they are not merely refusing this gift. They are failing the most important exam — the exam between dust and eternity.

The problem is not only false teachings.
It is not only thieves, traitors, or those who drag nations into war.
It is not even those who openly lead the world toward destruction.

The real problem is that most people lack the will to listen to the voice of God within them — their conscience.

This is the time of examination for every soul and for all humanity.

Wake up.

Conclusion — True Faith Cannot Silence Conscience

The story of Abraham and Sarah, when read carefully and honestly, reveals a deep contradiction between sacred authority and moral conscience.

Deception, fear, and manipulation are repeatedly presented as acceptable when they serve religious purposes. Guilt is shifted away from the deceiver, injustice is justified, and human suffering is explained as “God’s will.” In this way, actions that would be condemned in ordinary life are transformed into “righteousness” through sacred language.

This chapter does not deny faith. It challenges blind obedience.

True faith cannot be built on fear, lies, or moral compromise. It cannot require the silencing of conscience. It does not excuse wrongdoing by appealing to divine authority.

The real question raised by these narratives is not whether Abraham was “chosen,” but whether readers are willing to think, judge, and trust the voice of conscience within themselves.

Faith without conscience becomes submission.
Belief without reason becomes vulnerability.
Religion without independent thinking becomes a tool of control.

Only when conscience, reason, and inner honesty are restored can faith return to its true purpose — the growth of the soul, not its enslavement.

* The text of the Bible is quoted from the “English Standard Version“. ↑ back

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