It is a relief to reach the end of Gen 14:9, which summarizes the conflict simply as “four kings against the five.” Before we learn more about this uprising, though, we must first wade through another confounding list of peoples and lands subdued by Chedorlaomer. A group of these kings served one of them, Chedorlaomer, for twelve years but rebelled in the thirteenth.
It opens with a list of kings with strange names from unfamiliar places. Bewildering Detailsīeyond its incompatibility with the surrounding narrative, the chapter itself presents a number of bewildering details. Speiser also remarks that Abram is portrayed as “a resolute and powerful chieftain rather than as an unworldly patriarch.” The description of Abram as a “Hebrew” in Gen 14:13 has further suggested to some writers that the chapter may have a non-Israelite source, since “Hebrew” is a designation for Israelites by outsiders. The setting is international, the approach impersonal, and the narration notable for its unusual style and vocabulary.” Speiser, for example, observes: “Genesis xiv stands alone among all the accounts in the Pentateuch, if not indeed in the Bible as a whole. Modern scholars have noted a disjunction between the story of the war between the four and five kings in Genesis 14 and the surrounding narrative about Abraham.
“Four Kings against the Five”: A Non-Israelite Story?
