Genesis 14:1-24 The Battle Belongs to the Lord

Faithful God, Promise, and the Threat from the East

Welcome to the podcast of Recast Church in Madawan, Michigan, where you can grow in faith, community, and service. This is a message from the series, Beginning with God, Walking Through the Book of Genesis, by Pastor of Teaching and Vision, Don Filsek.

If you'd like to learn more about Recast or access our sermon archive, please visit us at recastchurch .com. Here's Pastor Don.

Welcome to Recast Church. Glad that you guys have gathered together to worship our awesome and great God this morning. Be sure to fill out the connection card you received when you walked in. You can turn that in in the black box back there.

And then any offerings that you would choose to give, you can use the envelope you received, and those go in the black box back there as well. Remember that anything that's marked for expansion fund is going to go towards building a building and towards whatever it takes for us to expand out from this current facility when our lease is up in February.

So you can take advantage of that. If you're not going to use that offering envelope, then please recycle that in the white basket next to it. And then also if it's your first time filling out a connection card here at Recast Church and being willing to share, that is, we call it a connection card because it is the primary way that you can connect with us and communicate with us.

And then also if you give us your email address, we do send out a weekly email with all kinds of links and updates and different things that are going on. It's a primary way that we communicate is by email.

And take one of those free coffee mugs back there if it's your first time with us. Just our way of saying thanks and glad that you're here. This morning we're going to observe what appears to be another threat to the promise of God in the book of Genesis.

We're marching through that. We're going to be in Genesis chapter 14. And we're in a section where we're really talking heavily about the promises of God to a specific man named Abram. Remember that God selected a man named Abram out of all the peoples of the earth to make a promise to him.

And ultimately that promise had a couple of different points to it. He promised to Abram to make him into a great nation, that is, to give him offspring and make his offspring a great nation. He promised to give him a great land.

And he promised to make his offspring a blessing to all nations. So there were kind of three prongs to that promise. Last week we saw Abram and his nephew part ways, showing that ultimately Abram is beginning to put his complete, at least at certain points in his life, he's putting his complete trust and weight on the promise of God.

Lot being one who was kind of plan B to the heir to Abram. And he's actually beginning to trust and believe that he's going to actually have a biological heir and biological offspring. But in chapter 14 we find an indirect threat to the promises of God.

In all honesty, if you're reading the flow of scripture, chapter 14, what we're going to be talking about this morning, looks a little bit like a side note. It's kind of like, okay, and then this event happens.

But we're going to see how that ties in. There's going to be a coalition of warrior kings who come out from the east, ransack the promised land, eventually cart off Lot and his family. But God is going to use Abram and some of his allies to defeat the invasion force and bring a settled peace back to the land of promise.

Once again, there might be a level of cultural disconnect between us and the text. We don't tend to have, you know, invasion forces regularly. Do you have that happen consistently at your household where there's invasion?

Well, maybe around the holidays. It feels like sometimes like there's an invasion force that settles in. But that's not something that we necessarily relate to on a cultural level. And I say this, when we're dealing with the Old Testament text, there are times when we need to actually deal with the history, deal with the culture, deal with the geography in order to understand what's going on and what's the meaning of the text.

Because I don't live in Palestine. I don't live in Canaan. I don't really understand the geography super well. Some of you maybe have visited there, so you have some notion of what some of these places look like and things like that.

But when it comes to a text like we're talking about today, it is valuable and important for us to deal with that from a historical and a cultural context. But even though there are cultural differences between us and those times and those places, geographical differences between what we understand and what they understand and what life was like, there are some things that are similar.

I think we have a tendency in our minds to kind of go back in ancient times and depends on what the context is. I don't know what you think of when you think of ancient times and the times of Abram. I don't know if you're thinking they're all like cavemen with clubs or whatever.

But it's very valuable and important for us to think in terms of real people with real emotions. And there are a couple of things that remain true to them, that remain true to us, that I think are valuable as we move forward through this text.

And that is humans were sinful then, humans are sinful now. God was in control then, God is in control now. God was faithful then, and God still remains faithful now. And those theological principles are very valuable for us as we go back into the Old Testament and think through this text.

And so we come to this text this morning, and as the band comes after we read and lead us in praise, please consider the faithfulness of our great God, even to those who are in this room right now, those of us who recognize that we are fallen and broken and jacked up people, and God still is faithful despite our failures, our shortcomings, and the things that we do on a regular basis.

So open your Bibles to Genesis chapter 14. That's page nine. If you take the Bible in the seat back in front of you, you can find the text on page nine. I say this often, but if you don't own a copy of the Bible, you can take that one with you.

We do want everybody to have a copy of the Word of God, but be mindful, a couple of families have returned a stack of about seven of those. They found out that their kids were kind of taking one home every week, and so just kind of be mindful of that.

And I've said before, don't sell them, don't take one every week and sell it on or something like that, but it is for you. Genesis chapter 14, we'll read it in its entirety. This is the Word of God for us this morning recast.

The Kings of the East and the Rebellion of the Canaanite Cities

In the days of Amraphel, by the way, I might butcher a couple of these, but we'll get through these names. In the days of Amraphel, king of Shinar, Ariat, king of Elessar, Kedorlaomer, king of Elam, and Tidal, king of Goim, these kings made war with Bera, king of Sodom, Bersha, king of Gomorrah, Shinab, king of Adma, Shemeber, king of Zeboim, and the king of Bela, that is Zohar.

And all these joined forces in the valley of Sidim, that is the Salt Sea. Twelve years they had served Kedorlaomer, but in the thirteenth year they rebelled. In the fourteenth year, Kedorlaomer and the kings who were with him came and defeated Rephaim in Ashtaroth Karnaim, the Zuzim in Ham, and the Emim in Shavah Kiriathim.

Let's try to say that five times. And the Horites in their hill country of Seir, and as far as El-Paran on the border of the wilderness. Then they turned back and came to Enmishpat, that is Kadesh, and defeated all the country of the Amalekites, and also the Amorites who were dwelling in Hazaz and Tamar.

Then the king of Sodom, the king of Gomorrah, the king of Adma, the king of Zeboim, and the king of Bela, that is Zohar, went out and they joined battle in the valley of Sidim. With Kedorlaomer, king of Elam, Tidal king of Goim, Amraphel, king of Shinar, and Ariat, king of Elessar, four kings against five.

Now the valley of Sidim was full of bitumen pits, and as the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled, some fell into them, and the rest fled to the hill country. So the enemy took all the possessions of Sodom and Gomorrah, all their provisions, and went their way.

They also took Lot, the son of Abram's brother, who was dwelling in Sodom, and his possessions, and went their way. Then one who had escaped came and told Abram the Hebrew, who was living by the oaks of Mamre, the Amorite, brother of Eskel and Aner.

These were allies of Abram. When Abram heard that his kinsmen had been taken captive, he led forth his trained men, born in his house, 318 of them, and went in pursuit as far as Dan. And he divided his forces against them.

By night he and his servants and defeated them and pursued them to Hobah, north of Damascus. Then he brought back all the possessions, also brought back his kinsmen, Lot, with his possessions, and the women and the people.

After his return from the defeat of Kedorlaomer and the kings who were with him, the king of Sodom went out to meet him at the valley of Shabba, that is, the king's valley. And Melchizedek, king of Salem, brought out bread and wine.

He was priest of God Most High, and he blessed him and said, Blessed be Abram, by God Most High, possessor of heaven and earth, and blessed be God Most High, who has delivered your enemies into your hands.

And Abram gave him a tenth of everything. And the king of Sodom said to Abram, Give me the persons, but take the goods for yourself. But Abram said to the king of Sodom, I have lifted my hand to the Lord God Most High, possessor of heaven and earth, that I would not take a thread or a sandal strap or anything that is yours, lest you say I have made Abram rich.

I will take nothing but what the young men have eaten, and the share of the men who were with me. Let Aner, Eschol, and Mamre take their share. Let's pray. Father, as we come to a text, we see again Abram being discussed and talked about in the way that he worked and the things that he did.

And we recognize that he has held up as an example. You're going to share with us some things about yourself and some things about ourselves through using him as an illustration. And yet we know that he's not a perfect man.

We've already established that. He has messed up, and there have been times of distrust in your promises. And so we know that our hope doesn't rest in Abram. We don't read this text so that we can act more like him, so that you like us more.

Ultimately, it is about this promise that you are working out and your protection and your salvation. And Father, we see in this both Abram making some plans and you being sovereign and giving victory.

And that credit goes to you for the actions of Abram. And we think about our lives and ask, Father, that you would help us to recognize your hand and to see you working in our midst. Father, as we have an opportunity to sing praises to you, I ask that you would be present here with us in our hearts to ignite our worship with fire.

Father, that we would be passionate about you and your glory. Father, that we would rejoice that a provision has been made for us. That you have made true your promises and you have fulfilled them through Jesus Christ.

And these promises in the Old Testament, they're awesome to read and they're cool stories and there's a lot of interesting tidbits in here. But when it really comes down to it, it's about you fulfilling the promises that you made to Abraham and doing so for our benefit.

And I praise you for Jesus Christ. I thank you for salvation in his name. And I ask that you would help us as we hear your word, as we sing praises to you, to glorify you this morning together as Recast Church.

Thank you in the name of Jesus Christ, my Lord. Amen. Thou my best thought by day or by night. Did you catch that in there? The best thoughts that we can have are thoughts, accurate thoughts of God. Would you guys agree with that?

So I love that line in that song. I'm really grateful for the band leading us. Go ahead and make sure you have your Bibles open to Genesis chapter 14 as we walk through this. So you can kind of just see the flow of the text as I kind of walk us through it and then draw some applications at the end for what this all implies for us and what does it have to do with us.

Remember you can get coffee, juice, donuts, whatever is still left there at any time during the message and men's bathroom back there. Women's up here if you need that. I'm going to start off by explaining what we're going to do this morning because sometimes I think anybody in the room like history?

You like history? You like geography? A handful of you? And then there are some of you, I'm not going to ask you to raise your hand, but you just flat out don't like it. And so it's like there's, thank you, I still saw a couple hands go up anyways.

So it's kind of like you just volunteered that, didn't you? So there's a little bit of that going on this morning. There's a lot of history, geography in this text. Like if you noticed when I was reading it, were there a couple kings you'd never heard of mentioned in the text?

A couple locations that you heard as I was reading and kind of go, I don't have a clue where that is and I'm not quite sure why that matters. Like some of you might just kind of be there like, I don't know what that's got to do with me.

I mean there's really two types of people in the world. There's people who hate history and geography and then there's people that I want on my trivia team. Okay, so those are the two different types of people in the world.

But I honestly, I mean, I think it's a legitimate question to ask, is there value in understanding who these kings are? Is there value in understanding where they come from and why they conquered or where they conquered?

Can't we just get to the main point and get this done with and kind of go, okay, well we can maybe even skip over this passage and get to the meaty stuff of Abram, right? We could skip over 14 and just head on to 15 with the covenants and different things that are going on and more explanation of that.

Some of you might be sitting here and saying to me, Don, I have real issues. I'm struggling with parenting my kids. My marriage is on the rocks. I'm lonely or my faith is holding on just by a thread and then here I'm going to talk to you about kings in ancient times and what does that have to do with us.

So let me encourage you as we dive in that we're doing more than just a history lesson this morning. We are encountering a God who has seen fit to show himself in the lives of real messed up people in history and in context and in time and in geography.

He's not a God who's removed from us, who wound up the clock and then left, but he's concerned with geography. He's concerned with kings and with politics and with those kinds of things. He's actually active in the world.

Do you get what I'm saying? And so he's seen fit to demonstrate and to show us and in all honesty, I think if we're honest, we probably prefer, most of us at least, prefer a story to propositional truth.

Just give me facts versus tell me a story. How many of you like stories? You prefer stories to, and so the majority of scripture, yes, there is propositional truth in here. You get into Paul and he's going to give argumentation and this and then this and then this, but the majority of scripture is found in the context of narrative.

It's stories that God tells us so that we can understand and see him and the way he interacts with history, the way that he does things in real people's lives, and then in turn the way that people respond to him, and there's value in that.

So let's dive in and find out what God wants us to know about himself and what he wants us to know about ourselves from this account in the life of Abram. We start off in verses one through four with kind of a sweeping perspective on Middle Eastern politics, and I've got a PowerPoint presentation here for you.

The clicker may be faithful to me, maybe not. We'll see if it rebels this morning. We are going to be talking about rebellion here. There's a little bit of a rebellion in these first four verses, so we'll see if this thing behaves.

But what we find is a coalition of four kings from the area, and I'll give you the areas here. There's Shinar, which is also equivalent to Babylon in that area there. There's Elessar, which is in eastern Turkey, southeastern Turkey.

There's Elam, which we're going to find that the king there, his name is Qador Laomer. He factors in as the most powerful king of this era in this time, and so you've probably heard Babylon, and you think Babylon, oh, super powerful, but that's later.

Currently, Elam is the most powerful empire on the face of the planet. Goyim, which is the Hittites. You see the title of the king is actually title, T-I-D-A-L, and that is actually kind of calling Pharaoh king of Egypt.

It's a title for the Hittite empire, and we find that in inscriptions throughout that area. We've actually seen his name engraved on markings over multiple spans of time. He's the ruler of the Goyim or the Hittites.

Then we see, just to put you in perspective, there is Canaan there, and that's the area where Abram is living. We're going to zoom in on that here in just a second. That's what's going on is there's these four kings that have aligned themselves together under the leadership of Qador Laomer, the king over Elam, and they have conquered basically the entire Middle East.

These four kings are the head honchos. They are the bullies of the region. They are in charge, and everybody for 12 years running are paying tribute to them. Now, you probably don't relate to tribute very often, but in the 13th year, the area of Canaan rebels against these four and begins to refuse to pay tribute.

Now, you use that word a lot, tribute. How many of you have paid a tribute in your life? Have you ever done that? Probably not, but maybe, because I think there's something we can relate a tribute to.

A tribute is the ancient equivalent to the lunch money that a bully demands to protect you from his fist. That's tribute. Maybe some of us have paid a tribute, if we're honest and we kind of think back to our later elementary days or something like that.

Maybe at some point you paid tribute. Maybe you were that guy who received tribute. I don't know, but you get the point. I mean, it's to protect the lunch money that protects everybody from your fist, and these four bullies make good on their promise.

Okay, so they're receiving tribute, and then in the 13th year, everybody in this area says, you know what? No more of this. We're not sending the caravan with the gold or with all of the wood or with all of the things, the grain or whatever you're demanding of us, whatever that tribute looked like for each of these areas that we're going to look at in Canaan.

They said, we're not sending it anymore, and so in the 14th year, the fist comes out. Okay, I promised you that if you don't pay, this isn't going to go well for you. You're not paying. Let me demonstrate what that looks like, and so the fist comes out.

The war machine begins to roll, and in verses 5 through 12, we see them begin to conquer the area of Canaan once again, and it's implied that at some point, they must have rolled through their previous to basically subjugate those people, and now they're going to come through again.

Now, the specifics of the people that they conquer along the way matter little to the story except to show that this is indeed a very powerful force. These four kings aligned together are extremely powerful, and it's highlighted by the people that they conquer, so along the way, if you see the group there, I put a little skull there to say they're conquered.

The Rephaim are mentioned by name. The Emim are mentioned by name, probably really significant names to most of you. They're like, oh, the Rephaim, yeah, or the Emim, uh-huh. Probably not so much a people group that you've studied a lot, but they are two of the most notorious tribes in the land during this time.

The Rephaim were one of the most feared. When Joshua is going to come into the land and conquer, one of the most terrifying group of people in the land, they're scared to death of this group called the Rephaim.

They're actually referred to as giants. They're taller than the average person. They just come across throughout scripture. Whenever you see Rephaim, they strike terror in the hearts of those around them.

This coalition of four kings rolls through and rolls right over the Rephaim. Are you getting, I mean, so do you see how understanding the culture and understanding the tribes and understanding what's going on in politics at this time matters?

They are just, they're just a number. They're just a name in a list of people that these four kings conquer. The name Emim in Hebrew, E-M-I-M, actually means terror, okay? That's what the word means, terror, fearful, feared.

These are scary people to the Hebrews, and yet these four kings, are you getting what I'm trying to say? The text is going over the top to say this is a fearful, I mean, a terrible invasion force that's coming in.

This is significant what's going on here. The kings then take a southerly tack as they continue to conquer. You can see the red line, that's the approximate route. They conquer the Horites. Then they go down to this place called El-Paran down there on the Gulf of Aqaba, and then it says that they turn back probably because they got to the southernmost extent of civilization.

Everything south of there is basically desert anyways. They turn back. They conquer, again, a feared group that the Hebrews had to conquer when they came in later. By the way, conquer doesn't mean they decimate.

What do these four kings want more than anything? Tribute. What are they doing? They're making an example of these people as they come through. They're coming through with, I'm sure, some significant punishments for the rebellion, but they're not trying to totally wipe them out.

That's why we're going to see these people up here down through history. They're not wiped out. They're just subjugated and being brought back into line to get the lunch money back. You see the Amorites there.

The Amorites get conquered by them. Now we get down to some area that we're actually familiar with from the Book of Genesis, if you've been going through this. We get down to the place where you can see the little bubble there, possible location of Sodom, Gomorrah, Zeboiim, Admah, and then Zohar is mentioned there, and these kings are there.

The king of Sodom's name is Berah. Then we've got the king of Gomorrah, the king of Admah, the king of Zeboiim, the king of Zohar, and they all join forces. I want to highlight that we don't know the exact locations.

That's why it says possible locations of Sodom and Gomorrah in those places. Notice that Zohar isn't mentioned there because we actually have a fairly good handle archaeologically on the location of Zohar.

You actually see that placed on the map because we pretty much know where that is. I haven't done a lot of research to know exactly why archaeologists, but archaeologists are pretty convinced that that's the location of Zohar.

But then these other places, like how many of you know, you might be able to think of something from your knowledge of the Bible, why we might not be able to discover where Sodom and Gomorrah are? Is there something there that you kind of go, yeah, that kind of makes sense that we don't know where that is.

Some people have speculated it's actually under the Dead Sea, and there have been all kinds of archaeological expeditions down at the bottom trying to figure out there is some kind of structures down there that make them curious about whether or not there was an ancient civilization that cities were down there.

But those places we don't know definitively, but we know that they were in the Jordan Valley because that's where Lot settles. These people all align themselves, so we have five kings that are going to align themselves against these four kings that come down through the area.

It's five, remember, five wicked kings. They were declared to be wicked, Sodom and Gomorrah, declared to be wicked last week, and so now we get to this account, and they haven't changed. They're still, so now we have five wicked kings against four wicked kings.

There's not really a team to root for in this. I mean, this is like, I mean, some of you have watched the, you know, you watch the final four, and it's like, I mean, I don't even know what to root for at this point.

It's like Notre Dame playing Ohio State for me. I mean, I don't know, what do you do in that situation? Hope they both lose. I don't know. Tie? I don't know. Both scoreless at the end of the fourth quarter.

What do you do? So that, I mean, you don't know who to root for in this situation. It's not necessarily a good thing, but they gather for battle at this place called the Valley of Sidim on the south side of the Dead Sea, and this is going to be a battle royale.

You look at verse 10 now. Okay, now we get down to the battle, and you're geared up, and you're like, okay, this is facing off and all this stuff. There's going to be this battle, and how many of you guys kind of enjoy like a little bit of a battle scene?

Like you enjoy kind of like, maybe you study World War II history or something like that, or you, nobody? Nobody else? Okay, six of us get into that. But so you're ready, and you're geared up, and you're keyed up for a battle, and then you get to verse 10, and it's like, it is pretty unclear from the text whether or not there was ever a battle that takes place here.

It's unclear whether this actually turns to battle, because the next thing that you see, look at verse 10. This is the accounting of the battle. Now, the valley of Sidim was full of bitumen pits. Now, wait a minute.

What's this got to do with a battle going on? Like, all of a sudden, it's just giving us a little bit of a geology lesson about the geography of the area. Like, what's going on here? I thought we were talking history and geography.

Now, we're talking geology. There's bitumen pits. Like, this is the lowest place on the planet, and so things bubble up to the surface, because it's really hot, you know, underground, and the surface of the magma is not very, not very, it's pretty shallow there and stuff, and so there's bitumen pits.

And the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah, what's it say? Fled. Before we even get to the battle, I wonder if they didn't line up in the valley, and then they see the enemy approaching, and they go, bye. We out, okay?

And so they just turn, tail, and run, and they are on, I mean, immediately, the first thing we see in this battle is they are fleeing. Now, I think that it's pretty clear, at least from my understanding of verse 11, that, I mean, from verse 10, that Sodom and Gomorrah, the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah, all of those kings, all five of those kings are represented by just mentioning them.

They all basically blow the trumpet for retreat, and they all turn, tail, and run. The mention of the bitumen pits, some fell into them, and the rest fled to the hill. There's a little bit of disagreement in the pronoun some, enough to basically lead us to believe that it's not the kings that fall in.

The kings call for the retreat, and then some of the soldiers fall in to the tar pits in the retreat, and they basically lose, even to the geology, they're losing some of their soldiers, even in retreat.

There are still tar pits there to this day, just in case you're curious. Is that geography still the same? It actually is. So the enemy easily rolls over Sodom and Gomorrah, and their allies plunders the cities in verses 11 and 12, and you'll never guess who's found to be living within the walls of Sodom at this time.

Who shows up living inside the city of Sodom? A lot. Well, last week we saw him take the choices of the land. He took the fertile valley, and he goes down there, and we saw some foreshadowing in the text that he was going to go down there and live close to these wicked people, but at least he was staying in his tent outside the city, and kind of hanging out there for the agriculture and stuff, and the next thing we see is him living actually in the city.

We saw that the people of Sodom sinned greatly against the Lord last week, and yet Lot has now become one of them. He's numbered among the people of Lot, and of course he and his family and his belongings are all carted off, just like everybody else in the city.

The conquering force has done what conquering forces do. They roll into town, they conquer, and they take everything without even so much as a thank you. My goodness, and we find out that one person escaped to report all of these events to Abram, who is still living by the oaks of Mamre that we saw last week, and that's where we left Abram.

Abram musters a coalition of his own, using his own personal military force, and then his friends, three brothers, Mamre, Eskel, and Aner are his allies, and they are actually all going to form a coalition together, where you might read through this at the beginning and think that there's only 318 soldiers going up against this huge military force.

We don't know the number. We know that Abram supplies 318, but it's quite possible that maybe Mamre, Eskel, Aner, all of them like supply soldiers as well, and they end up going off to battle. The detail of the account shows that it's intended to be historical, and even down to the detail of how many soldiers did Abram bring to battle?

318, a pretty specific number, showing that it's not just rounding off for us or something like that, but it's a very specific number, and it once again highlights the wealth of Abram, okay? This guy isn't fooling around.

He's not playing. He's got his own personal military force of 318. Do you guys have, some of you have a couple of, you know, a couple trained soldiers that you have, you just keep, you know, out back just in case or something, or, you know, okay.

Ray does? I didn't know that about you. I wanted you to raise your hand. I wanted you to know if you have that, okay? I mean, I'm not going to toilet paper your house, but you know what I'm saying. I mean, you got trained military there.

That's not going to happen, but he's not fooling around. He's got flocks spread far and wide. We know that he's an extremely wealthy person, and that the land around Bethel was having a hard time supporting his flocks with lots of flocks, and so you got to picture he has spread far and wide, and he's got a military force that probably accompanied his flocks to basically make sure that raiders and all of that, that was pretty common during this era in this time.

You didn't have a police force. You didn't have government, you know, protection, and so he's basically vigilante, got his own force here. Probably trained by Blackwater. I mean, these guys are it, but honestly, the terminology that's used here indicates that these are not shepherds giving clubs, okay?

This isn't like he's got his shepherds out there, and he supplies them with a gun or something. These are special forces group. I mean, the words that are used, it goes over the top to say these are trained military soldiers, 318 men who are trained militarily, and that's what they do.

They're not like, well, we kind of got dual purpose here. These guys are trained specifically. They were raised up in the house of Abram for the purpose of security force, and they are now going to pursue in conjunction with Mamre Eskel and Aner, the invading kings, up to the northernmost city in Canaan, the city of Dan.

And here we find that Abram and company employ wise military strategy, so there's this battle that maybe battle that goes on there, and then we get over here, and here's Hebron. You can see that that's about halfway up the Dead Sea to the west there, and that's where Abram is at this time.

Somebody escapes, comes and talks with him, and then they send this military force all the way up here to Dan, 120 miles away. This is a far-ranging battle for the time and the day, so 120 miles up to Dan.

He employs, like I said, wise military strategy. They divide to surround the enemy at night, lower the night vision goggles, and fall on the enemy in the darkness. Probably not so much the night vision goggles, but I just added that for dramatic effect.

They defeat them. They defeat this military force. I mean, this is a pretty significant thing. We don't know how the battle, what the battle looked. We don't get their numbers. We don't get a full counting of Abram, but remember that these are people who conquered the Rephaim.