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והרגו אותי, because they do not expect me to agree to give you to them.

והיה כי יראו אותך המצרים, It will be that as soon as the Egyptians will set eyes on you, etc. Abraham explained the reason he was going to engage in deception before he asked Sarah to lie. He wanted Sarah to speak about her brother Abraham not merely in response to questions about their status. He wanted her to make it plain even before they entered the land of Egypt that they were travelling together as brother and sister. In the event that Sarah would object to telling lies when none had as yet been called for, he told her that if they merely awaited developments it would be too late. The Egyptians would automatically assume that Abraham was Sarah's husband and they would get rid of him. They would not even bother to ask about her status.

והיה כי יראו אותך המצרים, the Egyptians themselves are physically not as attractive as the Canaanites, their relative ugliness being due to their living in a southerly extremely hot climate. Moreover, they are steeped in sexual licentiousness that makes them disregard moral mores and causes them to ignore obstacles to satisfying their lust. Avram therefore was concerned that when such ugly people see as beautiful a creature as Sarai, and they find out that she is married, they will simply dispose of the husband to remove him as an obstacle to satisfy their lust. Had Avram been aware of this situation, he would never have set out on his journey towards Egypt, but would have been content to endure the famine just as did most of the other inhabitants of the land of Canaan. He most certainly would not have put his wife at risk. Even now, Avram was not concerned that Sarai might be exposed to many rapes, something which would have been considered as ongoing violence and not have been tolerated even in Egypt. He was afraid that the Egyptians would commit only a single act of violence, namely to murder him, which would make Sarai a widow, and anyone sleeping with her would not violate the local laws of the sanctity of marriage. As to why he did not trust G’d, Who had promised to make him into a great nation, a promise that had not yet begun to be fulfilled, and preferred to resort to subterfuge, this is not surprising. We find that Yaakov also took extreme precautions in spite of having been given many assurances by G’d. The promises by G’d are based on man having taken every reasonable precaution not to require a miracle to save him from danger. When one is aware that one finds oneself in a situation where danger to one’s life is likely, one must first take every precaution at one’s disposal to counter such danger. Our sages (Pessachim 64) have told us that it is inadmissible to sit with one’s hands in one’s hands, waiting for G’d to perform a miracle to save one’s life. They base this advice on the verse in Deut. 6,16 לא תנסו את ה' אלוקיכם, “do not put the Lord your G’d in a position of having to perform a miracle for you.” When the prophet Samuel went to anoint a son of Yishai (David as it turned out) as replacement for King Sha-ul (Samuel I 16,2) he told G’d that he was afraid to do this as King Sha-ul would kill him if he heard about this, G’d did not criticise him for being afraid, but instructed him to use subterfuge so as to avoid suspicion of traitorous conduct. We learn from these examples how a righteous person must behave when he faces danger in carrying out what he knows to be G’d’s will. One must not leave matters to miracles.

והרגו אותי ואותך יחיו, “they will kill me while allowing you to live.” They will let you live thanks to your physical beauty. As a result they will feel that they have to kill me. As to why they would rather kill Avraham instead of simply sleeping with Sarai while her husband was alive, even though all of mankind had been warned not to commit murder, no less a sin than to commit adultery with someone else’s wife, the reason is psychological. Murder is committed only once on the same person, while illegal sexual intercourse and the desire to perform it is an ongoing temptation, one that will recur again and again. It was therefore easier for them to live with the knowledge of having killed than to live with the knowledge that every time they slept with someone’s wife they committed a mortal sin. Furthermore, if they were to rape Sarai while her husband was alive, they might have to face the King after Avraham had complained about his wife being violated. Once Avraham was dead, who would complain? Nachmanides writes that he does not understand what Avraham was afraid at this point more than at any time in his life previously. If it was that the Egyptians were black-skinned and more immoral than other tribes, we know that even at Avimelech’s court there was no respect for someone else’s wife if the King desired her sexually. In spite of such fears being reasonable, G’d had commanded Yitzchok not to leave the land of Israel and to proceed to the land (province) of the Philistines to wait out the end of the famine! Perhaps Avraham and Yitzchok were afraid only when they took up residence in a city, as the inhabitants of those cities were in the habit of offering any especially attractive woman to their King. They would kill that woman’s husband so that their King would not be guilty of an adulterous relationship with such a woman. This approach would be supported by what Avraham explained to Avimelech in Genesis 20,13 “when G’d caused me to wander from my father’s house, I said to her, (Sarai) ‘do me this favour: at every place we come to, say about me: ’he is my brother.’” The Torah had not mentioned this stratagem previously, except when for some reason they had to fall back on an agreement which had been practiced already repeatedly. As long as that agreement forestalled any problems, there had been no need to mention it. Yitzchok had not been afraid in his own country and had resorted to a similar stratagem only when forced to move to the land of the Philistines. When Avraham explained the planned deception as designed to benefit him personally, i.e. as potentially saving his life, (verse 13) he had in mind the entire period of the famine when he and Sarai would be forced to be strangers in a land unknown to them. He thought that this would be the way by which G’d would enable them to survive the famine which raged at that time, until a time when they could return to the land of Canaan or to flee that region altogether. It appears that the plain meaning of the text is that Sarai did not agree to the deception Avraham demanded of her. However, the Egyptians were so depraved that before even giving Sarai a chance to explain her relationship to Avraham they already abducted her, having praised her beauty to their King. They never bothered to enquire how Avraham was related to her. This is what enabled the King to exclaim afterwards: “how come you have not even told me that this woman is your wife? Why did you say “she is my sister?” The King accused Avraham of having misled both his men and himself by not revealing that Sarai was his wife. He accused Avraham of treacherous conduct after Sarai had already been abducted to his palace. According to Pharaoh, Avraham should have protested Sarai’s abduction from the very first moment instead of describing her as his sister. It was most unseemly for her to deny that he was her husband.

והיה כי יראו אותך המצרים והרגו אותי ואותך יחיו, “assoon as they will see me (your husband), they will kill me and let you live;” The Egyptian laws respected the inviolability of a man’s wife. If they wanted to get hold of his wife, their only legal way was to kill the husband on some charge. [One of the perverted concepts of Egyptian morality was that sleeping with another man’s wife is a sin which they are guilty of each time they do so, whereas killing her former husband is a sin that they would commit only a single time. Source: one of the Tossaphists. Ed.] An alternate explanation: Avram feared that he would be killed before he had a chance to appeal to the Egyptian king for justice.

ואותך יחיו, they will only let you live in order to use you as a sex object for their gratification. We encounter a similar situation when certain girls who were saved in the punitive campaign by the Israelites against Midian, were permitted to remain alive (Numbers 31,15) [all of the girls who had been too young to lose their virginity. Ed.] (compare also what the angel said to Bileam in Numbers 22,33)