Home is where your altar is

Photo courtesy of Premasagar

In this post, I will look at how altars are used in Genesis 12 & 13. Avram builds altars to mark places of power, to invoke God's name to help him through difficult situations, and to help him establish a home.

After the Sacrifices in the story of Noah, the next time we encounter them are in Genesis 12:7. God appears to Avram and Avram build an altar to mark the spot. The word for altar is מזבח which derives from the root זבח which means sacrifice or slaughter for sacrifice. An altar in biblical Hebrew is a place where sacrifices happen.

In this case, we are not told if he actually made a sacrifice, but only that he "built there an altar to God". It's interesting that he did not build an altar when God first appeared to him in Ur (Genesis 12:1) and told him to go to Canaan, but only when he arrived there and God showed him the land. In this case, the altar is used as a place marker for a place of power.

There are two general ways of contacting the spiritual world. The first is when the souls or God intrude upon us and they initiate the contact. I don't use intrude in a negative way. The second is when we do some sort of ritual or practice that opens us to the spiritual world. In the traditional metaphor, the first type is that heaven descends upon us and the second is when we ascend. One aspect of places of power in the world is that Heaven is closer to the earth at those points and contact is easier. Avram's altar is marking the place where contact is easier.

The narrative continues and Avram continues to travel through Canaan. He builds another altar when he is in the mountains between Bethel and Ai (Gn 12:8). His innovation here is that instead of a sacrifice, he "invokes the name of God". He has discovered that the name of God is itself powerful and can bring him into the spiritual world. For those of us in the modern world who are averse to animal sacrifice (and I hope most of you are), this has important implications.

It's easy to see his intention for making the altar by looking at the literal translations of his locale (thanks to my chevruta for this insight): Bethel בית אל means the house of God and Ai עי can be translated as destruction or ruin. עי comes from עוה which means distortion or ruin. Avram is in a hard place and doesn't know which direction to go. He sees that one way leads to God and another to ruin, but he's unsure of the path to take so he builds an altar to ask. In the verse immediately following the altar, Avram moves forward on his journey, so clearly he got an answer.

After a brief sojourn in Egypt, Avram returns to the altar and again invokes the name of God. This time, there is strife between his herdsmen and the herdsmen of his nephew Lot. He is looking for a good solution, and invokes the name of God to help lead him to peace between his people and Lot's. Lot goes one way and Avram another.

The last altar in this section is built when Avram moved his tents to Mamre in Hebron. In this case, there is no clear reason given for building an altar. He moves, sets up camp, builds the altar, and then the narrative moves on in another direction entirely. In this case, Avram is setting up his camp and knows that a strong spiritual connection to God is central to creating a good home.

Altars are used in three ways: to mark a place of power, to get direction from God, and to create a home. The commonality is that each use is about creating or noting a connection to God. In the two cases where Avram creates the connection himself, he invokes God's name to do it. This is a little bit different from the next mention of sacrifice in Genesis 15 which involves no altar but cutting animals in half. Stay tuned!