Lech Lecha: acquiring the Heritage

Lech Lecha: acquiring the Heritage

I a reading  The Evolution of Beauty, a book about the role of arbitrary mate selection in the development of species.  In my mind, this is very much like the origin of tribes and nations. A group decides to limit mate selection to its own kind.

 In this book, I was introduced to the word "lek", how a person unfamiliar with Hebrew would pronounce the first word of this weeks parsha.  A lek is a collection of male birds competing for mates in a given territory.  It is competing over a territory that will become a heritage.  Our parsha is about establishing the Abrahamic homestead.

Gd tells Abraham to leave his birthplace.  Terach, Abraham's father had already left  the old country, Ur Casdim, and moved toward Canaan, but Terach did not quite make it, he only got to Haran.  Abraham was to complete the journey to Canaan.  

When Abraham gets to Canaan, he does not have a place to settle because the Cannanites are still in the land.  The original inhabitants of the land are still there,  and Abraham does not consider displacing them.  He camps between settlements, in the mountains east of Beth El.

When Abraham returns from Egypt, there is a world war.  The four kings of the Northeast,  the armies of the land that Terach and Abraham left, attack the decadent nations of Sodom and the five towns.  The land of Canaan has now been conquered by invasion, the population plundered and decimated and displaced.  The old claims to the land are now considerably weakened.  Abraham  and his allies overpower the invaders and now Abraham has a claim to the land.  But after the battle, Abraham does not stake the claim he pays a 10% tax to Malchizedek, confirming the prior claim to the land. 

It is possible that the war of  the four Northeastern ( Babylonian/Persian)  kings explains part if the reason that Terach/Abraham family left that region.  The text says that these kings enslaved the people for 12 years.  Perhaps the migration was to escape the servitude.  Perhaps they wanted to disassociate themselves from the aggression . 

When does an immigrant have the right to settle in the new land?  What constitutes a rightful deed? Where  can a people rightfully set up their lek? 

The story of the Promised Land has prevented the full integration of Jews into the lands of their sojourns.  Perhaps the details of the story will help us fulfill our part of the Promise in the land.