Leave, and I will show you

After Babel, God narrows his work to one man in a city of idol-makers. The call is almost all verbs of leaving — your country, your relatives, your father's house — and the destination is withheld: a land that I will show you. What is given instead of information is a promise, and the promise is not private. Abram will be blessed so that he becomes a blessing, and through him every family on earth. He is seventy-five. He has no children, and the promise is about children. He goes anyway, building altars as he travels, marking a land he does not own with the name of the God he cannot see. Everything from here to the last page of the Bible grows out of this one man packing up.