Gen 9.4

"But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood."
I see three possible explanations:

Possibility 1. Drinking blood is prohibited because of what's not happening; i.e., it's a sin of omission. In other words, it's wrong simply because the blood needs to be used for some other purpose. Maybe he should pour it on the ground as some shadowy type of sacrifice. I don't know. {{shrugs}} The ground cries out for our blood, so we give it animal blood instead. Something like that.

Possibility 2. Drinking blood is prohibited because of what is happening; it's a sin of comission. This is a bit more straight-forward: the act itself of imbibing blood is sinful. But I can't think of why that would be. Perhaps drinking nephesh symbolizes an attempt to obtain "life" illicitly, outside of God's provision.

Possibility 3. Both of the above.

Lot the Prophet

The NT explicitly calls Lot "righteous."
The OT implicitly calls Lot "righteous," because God saved him from Sodom's destruction.

Lot is compared to Noah twice:
2 Peter 2.5-8
Luke 17.26-29

Noah and Lot apparently preached against the perverse generation of their day, calling them to repentance, judging them for their crimes.

Compare this to Genesis 19.9--was Lot acting as a judge of some kind in the city?
(Also, in vs. 1, notice that Lot was sitting in the gate for some reason)

Mohar

If you wanted a wife in the OT, you paid a "bride price" for her. She received this and kept it as her insurance ever after. She was expected to invest her "mohar", manage it, use it to buy fields, spin cloth, and do Proverbs 31 stuff. It was sort of like having her own separate bank account. And remember, a wife lived in her own separate tent. (Note: I'm not saying marriage should still work like this; I'm just pointing out the way it used to be.)

A concubine is simply a wife who never received a bride-price. She has no separate bank account, no independent source of income, no insurance, no protection in times of danger. Concubine = wife with no mohar. A second-class wife, if you will.

My brother Evan today suggested that perhaps we could think of Canaan as Israel's "mohar." God chooses a wife for Himself, not a concubine. Accordingly, he provides a bride-price: a land full of vineyards, flowing with milk and honey. God gives Israel her own bank account.

Mamre the Amorite

Upon translating Genesis 14, I discovered the following:

Verse 13, "...v'heym bah'ley berit Abram."
Verse 13, "...and they were owners/partners of the covenant of Abram."

Perhaps Mamre and his brothers had converted to worshipping the true god!

Compare this interpretation with Genesis 15:16, "...for the sin of the Amorite is not yet complete." Why did God specifically mention the Amorites? Was He using them as a rhetorical representative of the Canaanites, or was there actually something special about the Amorites? In either case, why wasn't the party in question sinful enough yet? Answer: our god is a merciful god, sparing a city if even 10 righteous men live there. And some of the Amorites were righteous.

Q.E.D. (perhaps)