Hail Abram, rescuer of Canaan from the invader (Genesis 14:1-16)! For he received the ministrations of Melchizedek, and tithed to him from all the plunder; he surrendered all the remainder as a witness to the king of Sodom (Genesis 14:17-24). And now, his camp brought back together, he's dared to dialogue with the LORD, God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth, who has pledged to make elderly Abram a biological father of his future heir. So that Abram might credit such a tale, God led him outside his tent, beneath the starry skies, and issued a challenge. From these stars, Abram realized the magnitude of God's fecundity. He believed, assenting to the promise as true; he believed God, accepting God as the authority whose every word is truth; he believed in God, leaning on God's own goodness; he believed in God with all his being, committing himself to live in faith with God. All of this God saw, and he credited it to Abram as righteousness (Genesis 15:1-6).
Centuries later, when the zeal of Aaron's grandson Phinehas would save his whole people from destruction, we read that “that was counted to him as righteousness from generation to generation forever” (Psalm 106:30), for “it shall be to him and to his seed after him the covenant of a perpetual priesthood” (Numbers 25:13). And so also now: if Abram's faith is counted as righteousness, it would surely lead to something like that.
Now the dialogue starts up anew, as a new day seems to be dawning; but as for its events, one commentary calls it “perplexing from start to finish,” so if you find it so, you aren't alone.1 “And he said to him, 'I am the LORD who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to inherit'” (Genesis 15:7). He introduces himself in a new way, a fresh 'I Am' statement: 'I am the God of your new birth, I am the one with a purpose on your life.' Everything Abram's been through, from his departure from Ur to Harran to this moment, has been steered by the Lord toward one goal: that Abram should inherit and possess this very land he's now in.
But here Abram pushes back. “He said to him, 'O Sovereign LORD, how am I to know that I shall inherit it?'” (Genesis 15:8). At first glance, we might want to frown here; didn't Abram just get praised for believing God's pure say-so as sufficient? Yes, and so it makes more sense if Abram “did not question if it would come to pass, but asked how it would come to pass.”2 Those are the sorts of questions that are totally natural to the life of faith itself.3 Abram believes, but his faith is eager to be made sight; his is a faith seeking understanding.4 Since Abram is supposed to inherit this land, Abram wants to know what sign he should be looking out for to know that it's time, and he wants to know what the method of its acquisition is meant to be.
God's answer to his question is to prescribe a ritual: “Bring me a heifer three years old and a she-goat three years old and a ram three years old and a turtledove and a young pigeon” (Genesis 15:9). The three mammals are fully grown, more so than the usual offering; but here we have a total of five different creatures. But Abram doesn't complain: “He brought him all these.” And if we're confused, apparently Abram knew what God meant for him to do.5 Abram “cut them in half down the middle,” having slaughtered all the animals, “and he placed each piece of a man toward its companion; but the birds he did not cut in half” (Genesis 15:10). All this careful picking and butchering and arranging would've taken Abram from dawn into late morning or noon, no doubt.6
But Abram wasn't heaping these on a sacrificial altar, where the meat would be promptly shrouded in flame; he's laying these out in the open country, and then waiting on God. Apparently God's in no great hurry, but the birds of prey that scavenge eagerly on this raw mess certainly are. By the time Abram's laid them out, the vultures or buzzards or whatever they are “came down on the carcasses,” probably by the dozens, as was typical then. But “Abram drove them away” (Genesis 15:10). Given their numbers and relentlessness, picture Abram having to work constantly, running back and forth with sticks or whatever else he's got at hand, to keep each animal piece from being picked apart and devoured before God's sign comes. The result is one of the most exhausting days in Abram's life, one which must tempt him hour by hour to give up as his muscles cry for mercy.7 And despite being fiercely outnumbered and kept in constant motion while risking the beaks and talons of predatory birds, “he did not let the birds touch them,” not more than a fleeting scratch here or nibble there.8
Abram kept this up all afternoon as the day dragged on, until “the sun was going down” in the evening, and the birds of prey, all diurnal raptors, were giving up their unsuccessful foraging to go roost for the night. His work was done; the animal pieces were safe for God's plans. Worn out by everything, at sunset “a deep sleep fell on Abram” (Genesis 15:12). It's the same word for the stupor some prophets endured when overwhelmed by a heavenly presence (Daniel 8:18) – “a trance,” one reader commented, “not like derangement but wonderment and the change from visible things to invisible.”9 It's also the same as the “deep sleep” God put Adam in before he built a companion for the man (Genesis 2:21), much as each meat-half faces its companion.10
But this was no restful slumber rewarding Abram for a day's work. “Behold! A great terror of darkness fell upon him” (Genesis 15:12). Silent night, scary night – even the stars that remind Abram of hope have been blotted out. It feels to Abram like he's plunged into a nightmare, the extinction of all things; and yet then came the voice of God, whispering through the inky void to Abram's twitching mind. “Knowingly you shall know,” God begins. Somehow, this experience will resolve Abram's questions (Genesis 15:13), now that Abram has, like a Moses before Moses, entered into “the thick darkness where God was” (Exodus 20:21).
God speaks: “Your seed will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and they will serve them” (Genesis 15:13). If what Abram wants to know is how he'll recognize that he's entering his inheritance of the land God planned for him, God's answer is, “It all starts with your descendants finding themselves lost in somebody else's land; it begins in the wrong place.” God doesn't tell Abram which foreign land it's supposed to be, though we know in hindsight that Abram is hearing the fate of “the sons of Israel who came to Egypt” (Exodus 1:1), becoming resident-alien strangers in the Egyptians' midst (Leviticus 19:34). There the Egyptians eventually exploited them, “ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves, made their lives bitter with hard service” (Exodus 1:13-14) – it was an even baser servitude than Sodom had to the emperors of the east (Genesis 14:4). Abram doesn't need a map to realize that this whole sentence is a bunch of bad news.11
But God goes on, informing Abram that “they will afflict them four hundred years” (Genesis 15:13), for four generations of the maximum human lifespan (Genesis 15:16).12 And that's what later books will tell us, that “the time that the people of Israel lived in Egypt was 430 years” (Exodus 12:40). This is even worse news. Abram's seed which he's waiting for will contain whole generations born in the belly of oppression, who will toil and slave for foreign masters in a land that's not theirs, and then will die without ever so much as glimpsing the place that ought to be home. What Abram's hearing through this oppressive darkness is a horror, a tragedy, that his seed will slave from womb to tomb and still not inherit what they're born for!13
But on the heels of these forty decades of woe, “the nation whom they serve, I will judge!” (Genesis 15:14). In the last chapter, to save a relative who wasn't his seed, Abram “went in pursuit as far as Dan” (Genesis 14:14), though it wasn't really called that yet; now, for Abram's seed, God declares, 'I will judge,' 'I dan!'14 God will run in pursuit to at last put down the captors who've made slaves of Abram's seed. With hindsight, of course, we know God's promise to “strike Egypt with all the wonders” (Exodus 3:20), to “redeem you with... great acts of judgment” (Exodus 6:6), that “on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments” (Exodus 12:12). There's a rather famous list of them. The first judgment: turning water to blood (Exodus 7:20-21); a second judgment: a sudden swarm of frogs from the river (Exodus 8:6); third and fourth acts, swarms of gnats and flies (Exodus 8:17, 24); fifth and sixth acts, diseases killing off livestock and afflicting people with boils and sores (Exodus 9:6, 10); a seventh act, a thunderstorm bringing lightning and heavy hail (Exodus 9:23-25); an eighth, a swarm of locusts to devour what's left of Egypt's crops (Exodus 10:13-15); a ninth, “pitch darkness in all the land of Egypt three days” (Exodus 10:22); and then the tenth and final act of judgment: “at midnight, the LORD struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 12:29). Judgment was complete. Centuries of Egypt's casual acceptance of Israel's victimhood would be balanced out in a single devastating season, and those who oppress the seed of Abram would understand that those who curse him, God will curse (Genesis 12:3).
Then, “afterward they shall come out with great possessions,” God tells Abram now (Genesis 15:14). After ten acts of judgment, “the Egyptians were urgent with the people to send them out of the land in haste,” and so, when the Hebrews did as Moses said and asked for valuables as reparations, “they let them have what they asked; thus they plundered the Egyptians” (Exodus 12:33-36). They'll end up with more, I'd wager, than Abram himself would have had if he'd kept the plunder from his great victory instead of giving it up.15 And so Abram's Hebrew seed will pass on “from desperate straits to optimistic prospects.”16
What's more, “they shall come back here in the fourth generation” (Genesis 15:16), and – as a Jewish historian added – “they would overcome their foes, vanquish the Canaanites in battle, and take possession of their land and their cities.”17 This whole prophesied process, generations of humiliation leading to eventual liberation and triumphal entry, is how God means to fulfill his pledge to turn Abram into a great nation (Genesis 12:2).18 John the Baptist's dad recalls this as a prophecy “that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies, might serve [God] without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days” (Luke 1:74-75); and Stephen also paraphrases God's promise as, “They shall come out and worship me in this place” (Acts 7:7). Abram's call was for the sake of giving them land, and the land is for the purpose of worshipping God in holiness and peace as a great nation. But Abram's seed would have to wait for that land until they'd suffered. Only through peril and persecution could they prepare to prosper as a people. Only through humiliation would they conquer, only through darkness would they see light, only by suffering could they know and love peace.
Later in the dialogue, God sketches out the shape of their inheritance in two ways. First is by borders: “this land... from the river of Egypt to the great river, the River Euphrates” (Genesis 15:18), showing “how far his descendants would be distributed.”19 It sounds a lot like how God describes it to Joshua, as “from the desert and this Lebanon as far as the great river, the River Euphrates” (Joshua 1:4). But the other way is by a list of ten people groups: “the Kenite and the Kenizzite and the Kadmonite and the Hittite and the Perizzite and the Rephaim and the Amorite and the Canaanite and the Girgashite and the Jebusite” (Genesis 15:19-21). It's a big list of ten peoples, though Moses will later sum them up as “seven nations more numerous and mightier than you” (Deuteronomy 7:1). Compared to the geographic version, these peoples only live in the parts where Israel will mainly settle,20 and by the end of Joshua's days, he preached that “the LORD drove out before us all the peoples, the Amorites who lived in the land” (Joshua 24:18).
But “as for you,” Abram, “you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age” – that's the message God reserves for him out of the darkness (Genesis 15:15). “He himself,” in his days on the earth, “would experience none of this” that he's just heard.21 Abram will live a long life, and his eyes will be spared all these discomforts as well as their eventual joyful fruits; the same will be true of his immediate children and grandchildren.22 Where his seed will triumph only through enslavement and affliction, Abram will close his life as a gray-haired and happy man, dying in peace and trusting that his heir will give him an honorable burial. The promise here of dying 'in peace' is interesting, since Abram was just speaking with Melchizedek king of Salem, 'king of peace'; leaving this world, Abram will join his ancestors 'in Salem' beyond this life.23
But why does Abram have to wait? Why can't Abram himself inherit now, bypassing this sojourn of slavery for his seed? Because, God adds, “the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete” (Genesis 15:16). Abram knows it can't be, since he's had good relations with the three Amorite brothers with whom he's in covenant (Genesis 14:13). What God is telling him is that he won't give the land over to Abram's seed in a way that's unfair to the people who are already there; he will not deprive them of their tenancy until they've forfeited it. God will not make a way for Abram's seed to take the land except by “the wickedness of these nations” who are presently in it (Deuteronomy 9:4).24 And they aren't there yet, they aren't ripe yet. Until that day arrives, the locals get a few more centuries to live full lives in the land, to make of it what they will; for, as earlier readers remarked, “it is after reproving, encouraging, and doing everything towards repentance that God inflicts punishment.”25
But equally certainly, the Amorites will fill up the measure of their iniquity, making the rod for their own back.26 And the word God uses for 'complete' here is shalem again, same as 'peace,' same as Melchizedek's Salem.27 In the very land where Melchizedek reigns over the City of Completeness, Abram is destined for one kind of shalom, a peaceful afterlife gathered to his loved ones; but the Amorites are destined to a different shalem, a wholesale corruption, a perfect fitness to punishment that leaves no further grounds for delay. And then – only then – will the seed of Abram enter “peace in the land,” finding untroubled rest in their inheritance (Leviticus 26:6), until they too journey onward to be gathered to the bosom of Father Abraham in peace (Luke 16:22).
Confronted with the frightful darkness of death, Abram can now give up his fear, assured his seed will inherit on the timetable set forth by God.28 Abram will rest in the grave, gathered to his fathers in the darkness, but “have you not read what was said to you by God: 'I am the God of Abraham...'? He is not God of the dead, but of the living!” (Matthew 22:32). So Abram may “die in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar” (Hebrews 11:13). All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
Looking back at the ritual actions during the day, now we can see how the slain animals probably “represent the nation of Israel” during their condition of vulnerability as strangers in a strange land.29 The birds of prey, then, were “a figure” of the multitude of people “wanting to afflict” the seed of Abram,30 first and foremost showing “the murderous intention of the Egyptians” who pursued Moses and the Hebrews to the sea.31 Egyptians in fact identified the living pharaoh with the god whose symbol was a bird of prey, the falcon.32 But the birds of prey couldn't do more than peck at the meat, because Abram kept chasing them away. Early readers of the story took this as a sign that “through the merit of that man, Israel was often freed from trials,”33 for when “the kingdoms of the earth... plot evil counsel against the house of Israel, in the merits of their father Abram they find delivery.”34 Even at their worst, Paul said, they'd be “beloved for the sake of their forefathers” (Romans 11:28), and so even in their stay in Egypt, they would find “rescue through the merit of the patriarch.”35
As for the dreadful darkness that then fell, Israel was shielded by “the cloud and the darkness” when backed up against the sea (Exodus 14:20), and on the other side, they'd sing how “terror and dread fall upon [the Egyptians]; because of the greatness of your arm, they are still as a stone, till your people, O LORD, pass by” (Exodus 15:16). And the foreshadowing goes on as we get deeper into the vision. “When the sun had gone down and it was dark,” what did Abram see? “Behold, a smoking oven and a flaming torch” (Genesis 15:17). If all these things have been allegory and prophecy of Israel's enslavement and exodus, we know that once they made it to the mountain, “the LORD descended on it in fire; the smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln” (Exodus 19:18), “while the mountain burned with fire to the heart of heaven, wrapped in darkness and cloud and gloom” (Deuteronomy 4:11). The smoke and flame Abram now sees is the same divine presence his seed, Moses and the people, behold on the desert mountain.36
And what will they hear from that mountain? “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Exodus 20:2) – the opening line to the Ten Commandments. It neatly fits its counterpart for Abram: “I am the LORD who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans” (Genesis 15:7). That very preamble should have clued Abram in to expect that covenant time was coming.37 At the mountain, the fire and gloom issued in animal sacrifices and “the covenant that the LORD has made with you”; and so here, the same fiery presence shows that “on that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram” (Genesis 15:18). John the Baptist's dad refers to it as “his holy covenant, the oath he swore to our father Abraham” (Luke 1:72-73). So far, the only covenant Abram's known is with three human brothers; now, he'll enter covenant with God himself.
But to make it happen, they'd have to “pass through the pieces” (Genesis 15:17). Dividing animal parts and then walking between them was a common element of rituals in Abram's world. If an army lost a battle, there was a ritual where they'd cut prescribed animals in half – plus a human being – and then line up the halves facing each other, burn fires on both sides of a gate, and march through it, purifying themselves in a river.38 It was also used in treaties between kings. We have one where the junior king, Mati'el, had to cut a calf in half and say, “Just as this calf is cut in two, so shall Mati'el be divided and his nobles be divided.”39 In another treaty granting land, the senior king slew an animal and proclaimed, “If I take back what I gave you!”40 The idea was, the ceremony was a visual self-curse: “May the fate of this split animal by my fate if I don't keep the covenant!” We know the Jews knew this ritual because Jeremiah tells us they used it, having sworn to free their slaves, a covenant they signed with “a calf they cut in two and passed between its parts” (Jeremiah 34:18). But since they then betrayed that covenant, God pledges through Jeremiah that “I will make them like the calf that they cut in two..., and their carcasses shall be food for the birds of the air” (Jeremiah 34:18-20).
But notice that, when it comes to this covenant, Abram doesn't pass between the pieces. In fact, he can't pass between them, because he's in that deep sleep (Genesis 15:12)!41 It's ironic, because a chapter ago we heard about “Abram the Hebrew” (Genesis 14:13), and 'Hebrew' comes from the word for 'pass through.'42 So Abram the Hebrew suddenly can't 'hebrew' when he most needs to! Immobilized, he's 100% passive, 100% receptive. Instead, only “a smoking oven and a flaming torch passed between these pieces” (Genesis 15:17). Abram has no skin in the game in this covenant, but God steps down into it. “For when God made a promise to Abraham,” the New Testament chimes, “since he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself” (Hebrews 6:13). “When God desired to show more convincingly... the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath, so that, by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie,” Abram “might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before” him (Hebrews 6:17-18).
That's what's going on here. And think about the magnitude of this sign! God – Being itself, the Ground of all existence, the Creator of heaven and earth, the One Who Is, the Life of Life – is swearing an oath on his own infinity, his own eternity, his own being. He's saying to Abram, “I'm not asking anything of you in this; I am setting forth no conditions. I am promising. I'm more than promising. If I'm overstepping my bounds in this, if I should fail in anything I've just said to you – in other words, Abram, if I the Lord God am lying to you (which is impossible), then may that be the death of me. May I die, may I be butchered, may I be ripped piece from piece (which is also impossible), if I don't keep my word to you, Abram!” How seriously does God take this covenant he's making? God would sooner commit divine suicide than fall even one percent short.43 Abram has no mandate to go between the pieces; God declares that this covenant is more certain than the skies above or the earth below, because these things are contingent, but this covenant is sworn on the very life of Life Itself!
And it'd be easy to see these prophesies and promises as all neatly wrapped up in what we can read unfolding from Exodus through Judges. But later readers yearned to get more out of it, especially since only arguably in the days of David did Israel actually have control over even most of the land from Egypt to Euphrates, and never yet since.44 So ancient Jews expanded the prophecy to cover “God's plan in its full, completed form,”45 an introductory sketch of the kingdoms of world history.46 They rewrote the story as if God had pledged that “in this sacrifice I will place the ages; I will announce to you the guarded things,” even “what your tribe will encounter in the last days.”47 No wonder early Christian teachers advised us to “give a thought to the question as to whether this passage touches on the sojourn of the saints.”48
When the covenant mediated by Moses proved all too breakable, God sent a prophet to urge people to look for a future “new covenant” which would be much different (Jeremiah 31:31-32). But little more could be said until the arrival of “the mediator of a new covenant,” Jesus Christ (Hebrews 9:15), the Son who's the exact imprint of his Father's nature (Hebrews 1:3). At table with his disciples, Christ announced that the new covenant was then on the verge of being cut – only the flesh and blood would have to be his (Mark 14:24). As Abram plunged into the terrible darkness, so Christ accepted “the power of darkness” at his arrest (Luke 22:53), and as he hung on the cross, “there was darkness over the whole land” (Mark 15:33). There, in that darkness, the Lord God incarnate entered into death, “becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). He accepted the fate of the animals torn asunder. In some mysterious way, the new covenant is cut by the death of God in the flesh and blood of man.
As the fleshly seed of Abraham was persecuted by that vulture Pharaoh, the New Testament makes clear that “all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2 Timothy 3:12), treated like prey by the worldly powers that peck at our vulnerabilities. But as if that weren't enough, Jewish readers sometimes saw the bird of prey as “an unclean bird..., Azazel,” the devil coming to tempt and deceive Abram.49 Christians saw the vultures as symbolic of “the spirits of this lower air, seeking their own kind of food from the division of carnal creatures.”50 That kind of talk comes from St. Paul, who warns against “the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience” (Ephesians 2:2), and “against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12), “seeking someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8).
But by now, Christ has risen from the dead, he “whom heaven must receive until the time for restoring all the things about which God spoke... long ago” (Acts 3:21). Christ, having resurrected and ascended, “always lives to make intercession” for his people remaining here below – that's how Christ reigns as a royal priest in heaven (Hebrews 7:25). Meanwhile, those who've persevered in sharing Christ's suffering “came to life,” in spirit if not yet in the body, “and reigned with Christ” as “priests of God and of Christ” in heaven – the New Testament says so (Revelation 20:5-6). So it's no wonder Christians always expected that our fellow saints who reign with Christ as his co-priests in heaven would also reign by interceding for the Church below. St. Paul, while yet on earth, celebrated that “in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his Body, that is, the Church” (Colossians 1:24), that somehow his suffering would merit to be of benefit for the Church after St. Paul had departed to be with Christ above. Maybe it's a strange and unfamiliar idea, but Abram is a picture: Christ and his heavenly priests defending the Church from spiritual attack by their merits and prayers.
But “what if,” asks St. Paul, “God, desiring to show his wrath” against our persecutors “and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction” for the sake of his plan (Romans 9:22)? For the New Testament explains the delay of the end in three ways: first, it's “until the fullness of the nations has come in” (Romans 11:25); second, it's until sinners “fill up the measure of their sins” (1 Thessalonians 2:16); third, it's until the number of martyrs “should be complete” (Revelation 6:11). But at last, when the world's “sins are heaped high as heaven,” then “her plagues will come in a single day... and she will be burned up with fire, for mighty is the Lord God who has judged her” (Revelation 18:5-8). Some Jews said that in his vision, “Abram looked while... thrones were erected, and behold, Gehenna which is like a furnace... into which the wicked fall... – all was thus shown to Abram.”51 Early Christians likewise took Abram's fearful darkness as “the mighty terror of judgment day,” whose “nightfall signifies the end of the world,”52 when – as biblically expressed in the vivid language of apocalypse – “the sun shall be turned to darkness” (Acts 2:20). If the darkness in the land of Egypt long ago was a sign, however, that deliverance for the captives was at hand, then all this suggests that “salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed” (Romans 13:11).
And if the road remaining is hard and the scavengers are many, what is Abram's vision but the way of the cross? Only by toiling as slaves could Israel become a great nation; only by carrying our crosses can Christians receive the crown of life, if we but live as the undivided turtledove and pigeon which “represent spiritual persons” who “do not splinter into schisms and heresies,”53 but are “being rooted by the immense power of charity upon the solid rock of unity.”54 This long delay has a purpose, “to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy which he has prepared beforehand for glory” (Romans 9:23), “for this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Corinthians 4:17).
Here, then, is the fuller “promise to Abraham and his seed that he would be heir of the world” (Romans 4:13), the worldwide “land given to the holy man's spiritual descendants.”55 “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5), and when we're reborn as Abram's spiritual seed through Abrahamic faith, when we share in his meekness by waiting patiently on the covenant promises of God, then we have a certain hope of inheriting “a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13).
There lies a final peace, a Perfect Salem, where “many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham... in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 8:11), and shall be made complete forever. There, together with our father Abraham, we will stand up in the land of the living for eternal days. There, together with our father Abraham, we will worship the same LORD God Most High in holiness and righteousness, never again to know fear or dread. Like Abram, in the present we cannot see the vision of this ultimate deliverance unless we first step into the frightful, dreadful darkness of the cross of Christ and open our ears to the night. But that's just what Lent is for. Beholding the gracious entrance of God into profound covenant with us at the cross, making the fact of the Church's inheritance firmer than creation, may we make much of this holy opportunity! Amen.
1 Jonathan Grossman, Abraham: The Story of a Journey (Maggid Books, 2023), 80.
2 Ephrem the Syrian, Commentary on Genesis 12.3.1, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 91:153.
3 Terence E. Fretheim, Abraham: Trials of Family and Faith (Fortress Press, 2024; reprint from University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 37.
4 Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Zondervan, 2001), 243; R. R. Reno, Genesis (Brazos Press, 2010), 160.
5 Bill T. Arnold, Genesis (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 159.
6 Shaul Bar, Daily Life of the Patriarchs: The Way It Was (Peter Lang, 2015), 94.
7 James McKeown, Genesis (Eerdmans, 2008), 92.
8 Jubilees 14:12, in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha 2:85.
9 Didymus the Blind, Commentary on Genesis 15:12, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 132:203.
10 Seth D. Postell, Adam as Israel: Genesis 1-3 as the Introduction to the Torah and Tanakh (Pickwick Publications, 2011), 91; Jonathan Grossman, Abraham: The Story of a Journey (Maggid Books, 2023), 81.
11 Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 277.
12 Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-17 (Eerdmans, 1990), 436.
13 Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 307.
14 Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis (Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 115; John Goldingay, Genesis (Baker Academic, 2020), 251.
15 Zvi Grumet, Genesis: From Creation to Covenant (Maggid Books, 2017), 167.
16 John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 37.6, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 82:345.
17 Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 1.185, in Loeb Classical Library 242:93.
18 Scott W. Hahn, Kinship by Covenant: A Canonical Approach to the Fulfillment of God's Saving Promises (Yale University Press, 2009), 104.
19 John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 37.12, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 82:349.
20 Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Zondervan, 2001), 245-246.
21 Theodoret of Cyrus, Questions on Genesis 66, in Library of Early Christianity 1:135.
22 Shaul Bar, Daily Life of the Patriarchs: The Way It Was (Peter Lang, 2015), 94; Jonathan Grossman, Abraham: The Story of a Journey (Maggid Books, 2023), 84.
23 Joshua G. Mathews, Melchizedek's Alternative Priestly Order: A Compositional Analysis of Genesis 14:18-20 and Its Echoes Throughout the Tanak (Eisenbrauns, 2013), 71-72.
24 Bill T. Arnold, Genesis (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 160.
25 Didymus the Blind, Commentary on Genesis 15:15-16, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 132:206.
26 Brian Neil Peterson, Genesis: A Pentecostal Commentary (Brill, 2022), 145.
27 John Goldingay, Genesis (Baker Academic, 2020), 252.
28 Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis (Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 115; Zvi Grumet, Genesis: From Creation to Covenant (Maggid Books, 2017), 169.
29 Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-17 (Eerdmans, 1990), 434.
30 Cyril of Alexandria, Glaphyra on the Pentateuch 3.1.4, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 137:138.
31 Theodoret of Cyrus, Questions on Genesis 67, in Library of Early Christianity 1:139.
32 Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis (Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 115.
33 Jerome of Stridon, Hebrew Questions on Genesis 15:10-11, in C.T.R. Hayward, Jerome's Hebrew Questions on Genesis (Clarendon Press, 1995), 48.
34 Targum Neofiti Genesis 15:11, in Aramaic Bible 1A:96.
35 Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis (Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 115.
36 Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Zondervan, 2001), 244.
37 Kenneth A. Kitchen and Paul J.N. Lawrence, Treaty, Law, and Covenant in the Ancient Near East (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2012), 1:249.
38 Hittite Ritual Between the Pieces, in The Context of Scripture 1:160-161.
39 Bar-Ga'yah of KTK, treaty with Mati'el of Arpad, in Kenneth A. Kitchen and Paul J.N. Lawrence, Treaty, Law, and Covenant in the Ancient Near East (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2012), 1:923.
40 Abba-AN of Aleppo, treaty with Yarim-Lim of Alalakh, in Kenneth A. Kitchen and Paul J.N. Lawrence, Treaty, Law, and Covenant in the Ancient Near East (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2012), 1:233.
41 John C. Lennox, Friend of God: The Inspiration of Abraham in an Age of Doubt (SPCK, 2024), 129.
42 Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis (Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 112.
43 Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Zondervan, 2001), 247; Bill T. Arnold, Genesis (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 159; Tremper Longman III, Genesis (Zondervan, 2016), 203-204; John Goldingay, Genesis (Baker Academic, 2020), 253.
44 Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-17 (Eerdmans, 1990), 438.
45 R. R. Reno, Genesis (Brazos Press, 2010), 162.
46 Targum Neofiti Genesis 15:12, in Aramaic Bible 1A:96.
47 Apocalypse of Abraham 9.5-6; 32.5, in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha 1:693, 705.
48 Didymus the Blind, Commentary on Genesis 15:13-14, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 132:204.
49 Apocalypse of Abraham 13.4-6, in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha 1:695.
50 Augustine of Hippo, The City of God 16.24, in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century I/7:214.
51 Targum Neofiti Genesis 15:17, in Aramaic Bible 1A:96-97.
52 Augustine of Hippo, Expositions of the Psalms 103.3.5, in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century III/19:145.
53 Augustine of Hippo, Expositions of the Psalms 103.3.5, in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century III/19:144.
54 Augustine of Hippo, On Baptism 1.17 §26, in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century I/21:415.
55 Didymus the Blind, Commentary on Genesis 15:18-19, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 132:207.
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