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Outline:

One of my favorite T.V. shows of all time was without a doubt Breaking Bad written by Vince Gilligan and staring Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul. Not only was the narrative fascinating and the cinematography beautiful, but the way the story was told was truly masterful.

While there are any number of things about this show I could discuss, for our purposes I want to highlight one specific technique Gilligan used throughout the show in order to speed up the narrative. Over the course of five seasons the Time Compression Montage became a signature of Breaking Bad often occurring at the beginning of an episode or season.

For those unfamiliar with this technique, Time Compression Montage is used to quickly show a specific time sequence, either in the life of a character or group of characters, covering a period of a few weeks or several months. What this technique allows the storyteller to do is fill in certain plot gaps in order to advance the story without dedicating a whole lot of time.

For example… There is a point in Breaking Bad where the main characters Walter White and Jesse Pinkman begin cooking meth in homes contracted out for extermination, but since the next major plot development doesn't happen until they’ve been at this job for a few months…

Instead of simply skipping over what this season of their lives looked like, Gilligan shows a quick, truncated version of those months by speeding up and splicing together footage of Walter and Jesse going about their daily routine in order to demonstrate how they eventually get into the situation when the story slows back down to the meat of the narrative.

Here’s why I bring this up… I can fully admit we haven’t exactly been working our way through Abraham’s life at a break-neck speed mainly because the subject matter we’ve been looking at is essential to the larger story Moses is telling. However, setting Genesis 22:1-19 aside (a story we looked at last week) the last few verses of Genesis 21, 22, and all of chapters 23 and 24 Moses uses this Time Compression Montage to move the story forward.

As such this morning, instead of unnecessarily slowing things down in order to dig deep into the text, because these sections are largely narrative-driven designed to transition the audience into new material we’re going to move through them as quickly as Moses intended.

Genesis 21:22-32, “And it came to pass at that time that Abimelech and Phichol, the commander of his army, spoke to Abraham, saying, ‘God is with you in all that you do. Now therefore, swear to me by God that you will not deal falsely with me, with my offspring, or with my posterity; but that according to the kindness that I have done to you, you will do to me and to the land in which you have dwelt.’

And Abraham said, ‘I will swear.’ Then Abraham rebuked Abimelech because of a well of water which Abimelech’s servants had seized (“violently taken away”). And Abimelech said, ‘I do not know who has done this thing; you did not tell me, nor had I heard of it until today.’ So Abraham took sheep and oxen and gave them to Abimelech, and the two of them made a covenant (the process was similar to the covenant God made with Ab in Genesis 15). And Abraham set seven ewe lambs of the flock by themselves.

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