Epher Turned West and Wrote His Name Across Africa

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The Sons Abraham Sent Away

After Sarah died, Abraham took another wife. Her name was Keturah, out of the land of Canaan, and in his old age she bore him six sons: Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, and Shuah. A second household, grown late, under the same tents where Isaac was the only promised heir.

Abraham did not split the covenant among them. He loaded them with gifts instead, silver and beasts and whatever a father hands a son he means never to see inherit the land, and he sent them off while he still breathed. East. Away from Isaac. They went to the mountain of the east and built themselves six cities and settled there, each branch drifting a little farther from the well where their father had cut his covenant with God.

They were Abraham's blood. They were not Abraham's heirs. Every one of them turned his face toward the sunrise and walked.

A Grandson Born in the Valley East of Cush

Midian, the fourth of Keturah's sons, carried his people past the edge of the known country, east of the land of Cush, until he came on a broad valley no king had claimed. There they raised a city and stayed. There Midian's five sons were born and grew and gave their names to the streets: Ephah, Epher, Chanoch, Abida, Eldaah.

Epher grew up a grandson of Abraham who had never once seen Abraham's country. He knew the family story the way a child knows a story that belongs to someone else. Somewhere far to the west lay a land God had sworn to a different branch of the house. His own portion was a valley east of Cush and a name he shared with four brothers.

A man can make his peace with that. Epher did not.

Epher Turns Against the Grain of His House

Every son of Keturah had gone east. The gifts, the cities, the slow drift of the whole clan bent toward the rising sun, as if Abraham's parting hand still pressed on their backs and pushed them that one direction. Epher turned the other way.

He gathered fighting men out of the six cities, sons and grandsons of Keturah's line, and led them out of the valley toward the setting sun, back across the world their fathers had crossed to leave. He was not going home. Abraham's home had been closed to him before he was born, sealed on Isaac. He was going to take a country no one had promised to anyone, and make it wear his name instead.

The war-band came down at last into Libya, the long dry coast along the top of the great southern land, and Epher looked out over it the way his great-grandfather had once looked over Canaan, and decided that it would be his.

The War-Band That Would Not Ride Out

The battles were the short part. Epher took Libya and did not linger over how. What mattered was never the taking but the holding. Kingdoms are won by men who ride in and lost by men who ride out again, and Epher did not ride out. He drove his people down into the land like tent stakes. He parceled the coast among his fighting men and set them to farm and breed and raise sons where they had fought, so that the war-band became a nation and the nation could not be pried loose. He held the coast and then the country behind it. He stayed until Libya forgot whoever had ruled it before and remembered only the warrior out of the east who had come and would not leave.

His grip closed so hard, and lasted so long, that his name soaked down into the ground itself. Not a city. Not a province. The land took him, and then the land beside that land, and the land beyond that, until his name ran clear across the whole of the great continent to the south.

A Continent Wearing a Buried Man's Name

Africa, the old telling says, was Epher. Epher the grandson, loaded with gifts and sent away to keep him clear of Isaac. Epher born in a valley east of Cush, who alone of all his kin wheeled around and marched into the sunset. The dismissed branch of the family had ended up written across more of the earth's face than the promised branch ever ruled.

Abraham's kin kept doing this, leaving their names snagged on the map behind them. A kinsman named Aram founded Aram-Zoba, and another Aram raised Aram-naharaim, the Aram of the two rivers on the Euphrates. The children of Kesed settled across from Shinar and became the Kasdim, the Chaldeans, and their name outlasted every one of them. None of them did what Epher did. None of them swallowed a continent.

The map still says it. The son who inherited nothing wrote himself in letters no heir could scratch out, across a coastline, across a desert, across a full third of the known world. The name he left behind in that conquered ground is the one the whole earth still speaks when it turns south and calls the land Africa.