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Genesis 12:7 (NLT)
Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, “I will give this land to your descendants. [1]” And Abram built an altar there and dedicated it to the Lord, who had appeared to him.

[1]
Hebrew, seed.

DRAWING NOTES:

TIME OF DAY:
Unspecified in Bible narrative, I have made it later afternoon.

LIGHTING NOTES:
The sun is setting in the west, illuminating this scene, casting shadows in front of figures and objects.

CHARACTERS PRESENT:
From left to right: Abram (in his usual blue outer robe), three male servants are bringing rocks to build an altar.

RESEARCH/ADDITIONAL NOTES:
This scene shows Abram supervising some of his servants, who are bringing uncut, rough stones, and building them into an altar. Although the text above reads “And Abram built an altar there…” I imagine that he was credited with building it, but that his servants actually did the work. Abram was about 75 years old at this time and unlikely to have carried large rocks himself!

The little white flowering plant in the left foreground is Allium israeliticum (aka Oriental garlic), a species of onion native to Israel, Palestine and Jordan. Allium are bulbous herbaceous perennials with a strong onion or garlic scent, linear, strap-shaped or cylindrical basal leaves and star-shaped or bell-shaped flowers in an umbel on a leafless stem. The plant flowers in Jan-March. Bulbs are egg-shaped, up to 1.18 inches (30 mm) long. Leaves are thick, recurved, up to 11.8 inches (30 cm) long, tapering toward the tip. Grows in Batha & Phrygana habitats.

The foreground trees are Pistacia terebinthus, known commonly as terebinth and turpentine tree, which is a species of Pistacia, native to Iran, and the Mediterranean region from the western regions of Morocco, and Portugal to Greece, western and southeast Turkey. In the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea – Syria, Lebanon – a similar species, Pistacia palaestina, fills the same ecological niche as this species and is also known as terebinth. The terebinth is a deciduous flowering plant belonging to the cashew family, Anacardiaceae; a small tree or large shrub, it grows to 33 ft (10 metres) tall. The leaves are compound, 3.9–7.9 in (10–20 cm) long, odd pinnate with five to eleven opposite glossy oval leaflets, the leaflets 0.79–2.36 in (2–6 cm) long and 0.39–1.18 in (1–3 cm) broad. The flowers are reddish-purple, appearing with the new leaves in early spring. The fruit consists of small, globular drupes 0.20–0.28 in (5–7 mm) long, red to black when ripe. All parts of the plant have a strong resinous smell.

Here’s the scene without the figures and altar in the foreground.

Click on the colour bar below to view/buy this Background:
Background of Genesis 12 – Call of Abram – Scene 04 – Altar building