In the span of a chapter we cover nearly 2500 years of history and go from Babel to Abram. I am reminded of the Narnia books—the children would leave and return and generations had passed in Narnia, while very little time had passed for them. Just as it took them a little work to understand so much had changed, I have to struggle to recognize the lessons learned by the post-flood generations were probably long lost by the time Abram was born. Those handful of verses surely covered enormous cultural shifts and the context Abram was born into was surely different than Arphaxad’s.