And it came to pass when I was come near to enter into Egypt, the Lord said unto me: Behold, Sarai, thy wife, is a very fair woman to look upon; therefore it shall come to pass, when the Egyptians shall see her, they will say She is his wife; and they will kill you, but they will save her alive; therefore see that ye do on this wise: Let her say unto the Egyptians, she is thy sister, and thy soul shall live. And it came to pass that I, Abraham, told Sarai, my wife, all that the Lord had said unto me Therefore say unto them, I pray thee, thou art my sister, that it may be well with me for thy sake, and my soul shall live because of thee. (Abraham 2:22-25)
Some have argued that this is an instance of “divine deception.” However, as we learn in Genesis 20:12, Abraham and Sarah were indeed siblings—they shared the same biological father.
Furthermore, while Genesis does not tell us that God was the ultimate source of this plan to save their lives, ancient texts discovered after the time of Joseph Smith, when recounting the Abrahamic narrative from Genesis, presents Abraham as the recipient of a prophetic dream instructing him to tell the Egyptians that Sarah was his sister, not wife.
The text discovered at Qumran, the Genesis Apocryphon (1Q20), column 19, lines 17-20, reads thusly:
Then I awoke in the night from my sleep, and I said to my wife Sarai, "I dreamt a dream (and) on acco[unt] of this dream I am afraid." She said to me, "Tell me your dream, so that I may know (about it)." So I began to tell her this dream, and I said to [her], " . . . this dream . . . . . . that they will seek to kill me, but to spare you. Therefore, this is the entire kind deed th[at you] must do for me: in all cities (?) that [we will ent]er s[a]y of me, 'He is my brother.' I will live under your protection, and my life will be spared because of you. (Daniel A. Machiela, The Dead Sea Genesis Apocryphon: A New Text and Translation with Introduction and Special Treatment of Columns 13-17 [Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah vol. 79; Leiden: Brill, 2009], 71-72)
Note the
following from Joseph McDonald who agrees that the Genesis Apocryphon attributes
this to revelation (here, a prophetic dream):
[Abraham’s] interpretation of his dream makes it clear that he
conceives it, or at least characterizes it, as a prognostic and admonitory
allegory, with himself
represented by the cedar and Sarai by the date palm. Noah is also depicted as a
cedar in the context of a dream in the Apocryphon (14.9, 11, 14, and perhaps
line 27, according to Machiela’s text), and Esther Eshel points out that both
of these dreams share notes of “prediction and warning,” in addition to their
employment of arboreal symbols. (Joseph McDonald, Searching for Sarah in the
Second Temple Era: Images in the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, the Genesis
Apocryphon, and the Antiquities [Scriptural Traces: Critical Perspectives
on the Reception and Influence of the Bible24; Library of Hebrew Bible/Old
Testament Studies 693; London: T&T Clark, 2020], 148)
Interestingly,
there is also evidence of Egyptianisms in this pericope. As John Gee noted,
[this pericope] takes advantage of an ambiguity in the Egyptian
language: the Egyptian word for wife (hime) means only wife,
but the Egyptian word for sister (sone) means both sister and wife.
Thus, the term that Abraham used was not false, but ambiguous. It was also
necessary: since numerous Egyptian texts discuss how pharaohs could take any
woman that they fancied and would put the husband to death if the woman was
married, this advice saved Abraham’s life. (John Gee, An Introduction to the
Book of Abraham [Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Centre, Brigham Young University,
2017], 102, italics in original)
For those interested in the relationship between the Book of Abraham and Abrahamic traditions found in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic texts, one should try to track down a copy of John A. Tvedtnes et al., Traditions about the Early Life of Abraham (FARMS, 2001). Sadly, the book is out of print, but Jeff Lindsay has a very good summary of the book at:
One can also download a PDF of the book itself
here.
