When God told Abraham, "Go to the land that I will show you" (Genesis 12:1), He was deliberately vague. Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev reads this vagueness as a divine instruction in itself: follow your God-given reason wherever it leads.
God did not name the destination. He said "the land that I will show you," leaving Abraham free to use his judgment about where circumstances pointed. So when Abraham arrived in Canaan and a famine struck, he reasoned that God was directing him further south, to Egypt. He was not disobeying. He was doing exactly what God had intended by giving open-ended instructions.
Rabbi Levi Yitzchak offers a deeper reading as well. Abraham had been fleeing from Nimrod's persecution in Mesopotamia (Bereishit Rabbah 38:13). God's words were meant to reassure him that this next journey would be different. He would no longer live as a fugitive. He would have a true destination, a place of spiritual rootedness.
The command "from your land, from your birthplace" (me'artzekha, mi'moladtekha) carried a mystical dimension. Normally, when a person relocates, they bring with them the spiritual "sparks" connected to their previous home. But God told Abraham that this move was different. He was to leave behind everything that tied him to his past. His true spiritual roots lay ahead, not behind. His destiny was to restore the scattered sparks he would encounter on his journey to their proper places.
The verse about the prophet Samuel, "and he returned to Ramah, for that was where his home was" (1 Samuel 7:17), seems redundant. Of course he returned home. But the deeper meaning is that Samuel, like Abraham, recognized that his true "home" was wherever his spiritual mission placed him. Abraham's journey was not a wandering. It was a homecoming to a place he had never been before, guided by the principle that God can be found everywhere, if you have the wisdom to look.