[Avodah] Parshat Lech Lecha Question

[Zev Sero]

On 6/11/2011 1:41 AM, Liron Kopinsky wrote:
> I was learning through the Chizkuni on the brit bein habetarim (http://hebrewbooks.org/pdfpager.aspx?req=39852&st=&pgnum=22 <http://hebrewbooks.org/pdfpager.aspx?req=39852&st=&pgnum=22> pasuk zayin) over shabbat and I'm having trouble figuring out the chronology he is describing.

This is the standard chronology, given by the Seder Olam.  It's very
difficult to read into the chumash, but it's almost muchrach.  *Something*
had to have happened 430 years before Yetzias Mitzrayim.


> He says that Avraham avinu came to c'naan 5 years prior to "lech lecha"
> and brit bein habetarim happened then, when he was 70 years old. He then
> says that the war with the 4 kings and the 5 kings happened when Avraham
> was 74 or 75.

I haven't seen Seder Olam inside, but Tosfos (Brochos 7b) says he must
have been 73, because the four older cities of the plain were founded
immediately after the migdal, served Kedorlaomer for 12 years, rebelled
for 13, and the next year was the war.  Then they lived in peace for 26
years and were destroyed when Avraham was 99.  Thus he must have been 73
at the time of the war.


> What I'm trying to figure out is when the Chizkuni says "the war was when
> Avraham was 74 or 75" does he mean that really it happened after Lech
> Lecha, when Avraham was 75, and that the timing allows for that, or does
> he assume that the war could have happened before Lech Lecha.

It must have done.

> If it happened before Lech Lecha, how could Avraham and Lot have already
> separated with Avraham living in Elonei Mamrei?

The easiest places to put the two time jumps are at shlishi and shishi.
That might explain why these breaks are at those places, in the middle
of parshios.  If this is so, then Lot's riches did not come from Mitzrayim.
By the time they went down to Mitzrayim they were already rich, and thus
the sort of good family from which a queen could be taken.


-- 
Zev Sero        If they use these guns against us once, at that moment
zev at sero.name   the Oslo Accord will be annulled and the IDF will
                 return to all the places that have been given to them.
		                            - Yitzchak Rabin