The first place Abram stops in the land of promise is Shechem. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 12:6) preserves a sobering detail that the Hebrew Bible states simply and the Targum refuses to let you miss: the Kenaanites were then in the land.
This is not a footnote. It is the whole problem of the covenant in one clause. The land that has just been promised to Abram's descendants is currently populated. Someone else's cattle are already drinking at its wells. Someone else's children are already sleeping in its houses. The promise does not erase the present.
The Targum adds a line that softens nothing but explains everything: for the time had not yet come that the sons of Israel should possess it. The Aramaic is patient theology in six words. The promise is real. The timing is not yet. Between promise and possession there is a long, inhabited silence, and during that silence Abram must simply pass through — Abram passed through the land unto the place of Shekem — walking over ground he has been given but does not yet own.
This is one of the hardest lessons the Hebrew Bible teaches. God does not deliver into empty rooms. The promises come to places where other people are already living, and the covenant asks its first carrier to walk the ground without seizing it. Abram does not conquer Shechem. He visits it. He looks. He moves on.
The patience of the patriarch is the patience required of anyone who has ever been promised something that the world is not yet ready to hand over.