Anonymous · 1400 BCE · overland

Genesis 11 to 22. A man of Ur is told to leave his country and his father's house for a land he will be shown, and goes without being told where it is. The route runs the length of the Fertile Crescent - two of the greatest cities of the ancient world at one end, and a hilltop with a knife at the other.

1. 1
   Ur

   A city of a hundred thousand people in Sumer, with a ziggurat and a school of scribes. Terah takes his household out of it toward Canaan and gets as far as Harran, where he settles and dies - the journey stalling for a generation.

2. 2
   Harran

   The caravan city on the upper Euphrates, where Abram is seventy-five when he is told to go on. He takes Sarai, Lot, and everything they have accumulated, and leaves for a country he has never seen.

3. 3
   Shechem

   The first stop in Canaan, at the oak of Moreh - he is told this is the land, and builds an altar. The Canaanites, the text notes drily, were then in the land, which is the whole difficulty in one clause.

4. 4
   Bethel

   He pitches between Bethel and Ai and calls on the name of the Lord - and then a famine comes, and the man who has just been promised the country leaves it almost immediately for somewhere with food.

5. 5
   Egypt

   In Egypt he passes Sarai off as his sister, she is taken into Pharaoh's house, and they are expelled with more livestock than they arrived with - the first of three times this story is told in Genesis.

6. 6
   Hebron

   Back at the oaks of Mamre for the rest of his life: the covenant, the three visitors, the argument with God over Sodom, Isaac born to a woman of ninety, and eventually the cave of Machpelah bought for a burial.

7. 7
   Moriah

   Three days' walk with wood, fire and a boy asking where the lamb is - the passage that has troubled every reader of it for three thousand years, and which the text delivers in nineteen verses without comment.