I won't lie... Keeping up these posts is getting more difficult. Part of the reason is that the teen chapter of Genesis have a lot less written about them than the first ten chapters, so it's harder to find interesting contextual information.
Take this war that happens in Genesis 14. You'd think it'd be easier to find more information on Google about this war, the many people that are mentioned as being involved in it, and how the Gen 14 story stacks up to historical fact. But the pickings are slim.
Anyway. War. On one side you have four kings. We'll call this the red corner:
1) Amraphel king of Shinar
2) Arioch king of Ellasar
3) Kedorlaomer king of Elam
4) Tidal king of Goiim
In the blue corner we have five other kings:
1) Bera king of Sodom
2) Birsha king of Gomorrah
3) Shinab king of Admah
4) Shemeber king of Zeboiim
5) An unnamed king of Bela (or Zoar)
The kings in the blue corner used to be subjects of Kedorlaomer of the red corner, until the blue corner kings banded together to rebel.
The red corner starts going out and conquering various lands (they're actually listed in the text, but I'll spare you). There's a big battle between the red corner kings and the blue corner kings in the Valley of Siddim. The reds start overtaking the blues, the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah of the blue corner fall back, leaving behind some of their men and possessions. The reds scoop up what Sodom and Gomorrah left behind, including Lot of Sodom (who you will recall moving out that way in the previous chapter)
Abram catches wind of this, gathers a small army of his men and proceeds to march into the red corner's territory. Here the text gets a little vague. Without going into what the details of what would have to be the most daring, against-all-odds victory of all time, Abram defeats all the kings of the red corner, rescues Lot, and takes back all the possessions and people the red corner had claimed.
Bera, the king of Sodom, goes to Abram and asks to have his people back, but tells Abram that he can keep the goods he captured. Abram tells Bera that he made an oath with God to not keep anything of his, so that he, Bera, would never be able to say, "I made Abram rich". Abram gives everything back to Bera.
Again, supplemental information on this chapter is scarce. However, Wikipedia does give us this insight into when these events may have taken place (though it is not well cited):
In the biblical account, the text begins in the days of, but the remainder of the sentence is missing, and is not found in any surviving manuscript (some modern translations run this sentence together with the next to bridge the gap)[4]. The missing text would have helped to identify the date range for the events described by the narrative, and, aside from deliberately obscuring the date (perhaps because it proved inconvenient), it is unclear why the text would be missing. The tentative identifications of Tidal, however, enables the date period to be somewhat determined:
* Assuming Tidal is the proto-Hittite Tudhaliya, this would place the events of the narrative in the 18th century BC, shortly prior to the rise of the Hyksos Empire
* Assuming Tidal is Tudhaliya I (of the Hittite New Kingdom), this would place the events of the narrative in the 14th century BC.
* Assuming Tidal is Tudhaliya IV this would place the events at the end of the Late Bronze Age.
* Assuming Tidal is one of the Neo-Hittite kings by that name, he dates to the period of the Neo-Hittite period, at the time of the Aramaean states, just prior to the rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.
Just For The Heck Of It
The king of Sodom was named Bera. Here are some other famous/semi-famous Beras:
Bera, Count of Barcelona.
BERA (Branford Electric Railway Association).
Berra, municipality in the Province of Ferrara, Emilia-Romagna, Italy
Steve Berra (born 1973), American skateboarder
Tim Berra, American biologist and author
Yogi Berra (born 1925), American baseball player and manager
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