The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; you are strangers and temporary residents with me. (Lev. 25:23) The fate of Abraham’s family, we now discover, will be not temporary but permanent – permanently temporary. They will know no certainty, have no fixed and unconditional home, even in the land of promise. Abraham had been told, in a dark vision of exile, that his offspring would be ‘a stranger in a land not theirs’. That, we thought, meant Egypt. It now turns out to mean Israel as well. This is the central, haunting irony of the Pentateuch.
