The Talmud in Nedarim asks an uncomfortable question: why did the children of Abraham, the father of faith, endure two hundred and ten years of Egyptian bondage? What did Abraham, of all people, do to earn his descendants such a sentence?
The rabbis offer two answers, and both cut close to the bone.
The first: when Abraham went to war to rescue his nephew Lot, he “armed his instructed” (Genesis 14:14) — and the rabbis read this to mean that he pressed his Torah students into military service. Even for a righteous rescue, you do not drag scholars from the study hall into battle. The soul of Israel is nourished by study, and to conscript it for war, even a just war, sows slavery into the future.
The second, from Samuel: Abraham doubted. When God promised him the land, Abraham replied, “Whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it?” (Genesis 15:8). For that flicker of distrust, Samuel says, the covenant was delayed and his descendants learned faith the hard way, in Egyptian brick-pits.
The teaching is severe because the rabbis loved Abraham. They wanted later generations to know: even the greatest soul pays for small missteps, and the consequences ripple into history.