What Does Genesis 20:18 Mean?

For the Lord had kept all the women in Abimelech's household from conceiving because of Abraham's wife Sarah. The closing verse of the chapter is the narrator's explanation of the healing's necessity: the Lord had closed all the wombs in Abimelech's household because of Sarah. The divine action of closing wombs was the God-side of the crisis management that the chapter has documented: the king was warned in a dream, Sarah was protected from violation, and the household's fertility was closed as the divine response to the king's taking of the covenant woman. The whole package, dream, prevention, closed wombs, was the Lord's active management of the situation.

The closing of all the wombs in Abimelech's household as a consequence of the taking of the covenant woman is the most sweeping divine intervention in the chapter. It was not only Abimelech who was affected; every woman in his household experienced the consequence of his action. This communal impact mirrors the communal threat that Abimelech referenced in his dream: "will you destroy an innocent nation?" The nation's fertility was indeed affected by the king's action, even if the king acted in ignorance. The leadership principle that the actions of the head affect the community is embedded in the mechanism of the divine response.

The reopening of the wombs through Abraham's prayer completes the theological arc of the chapter: from the covenant patriarch's deceptive protection of himself at his wife's expense, through the divine management of the situation to protect both Sarah and Abimelech's innocence, to the pagan king's correct and generous response, to the covenant patriarch's prayer that heals the household his deception endangered. What Abraham's fear put at risk, Abraham's prayer restores. The chapter that began with the patriarch's inadequate self-protection ends with the patriarch functioning in the one role for which he is specifically designed: the prophet who prays for the nations and through whose prayer the nations are blessed. Jesus is the prophet, priest, and king in whom all three roles function without the fear-driven failures that characterized the patriarchal version of the prophet's office.