Chapter Fifteen

God encourages Abram

Genesis 15:1. After these events A common enough chronological reference, though at the same time too general. the word of the Lord came to Abram Exegetes draw attention to this passage as the first instance in the Bible where the term dabar “word” prefigures the mysterious foretelling of the God-incarnate Word, that is, of our Lord Jesus Christ (Exod 9:20; 1 Sam 3:21, Ps 32:6 and others). in a vision [by night], The reference in brackets appears in the LXX (not in all manuscripts; see Holmes), whereas the Hebrew original does not have it, and most commentators regard it as a later addition. But even if we allow that this theophany occurred at night, it is nonetheless clear from the entire context that Abram, as he received this revelation, was in a waking state, not a sleeping one (Gen 15:2). Defining this state more precisely, the historian calls it a “vision”—that is, a peculiarly ecstatic, exalted, and, so to speak, rapturous state, similar to that in which the prophet Isaiah found himself at the moment of his call to prophetic ministry (Isa 6), or the Apostle Paul when he was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible words (2 Cor 12:3-4). and He said: Do not fear, Abram; I am your shield; Do not fear, above all, retaliation from those enemies over whom you have just won such a brilliant victory, nor fear the ill-will and envy toward your military success and growing prosperity from the Canaanite lords around you. Fear nothing of the sort, says the Lord: “For I am your shield”—that is, your protector and defender (Ps 3:4 and others). your reward will be very great. As a reward for all the elevated and noble qualities of Abram’s high soul, especially for his obedience and faith, the Lord not only granted him a series of promises of both temporal and eternal blessings, but also honored him with special nearness to Himself, which moved the Apostle James (Jas 2:23) to call him even a friend of God—a distinction that cannot be seen otherwise than as the highest reward for mankind.

Abram grieves over the absence of offspring

Genesis 15:2. Abram said: Lord God, This address in the Hebrew text is expressed in the words “Adonai-Jehovah” (with “Jehovah” following “Adonai,” pronounced not with the vowels of the first name but with the vowels of “Elohim”); this is the first instance in the Bible of such a rare combination of two divine titles (Gen 15:8, compare Deut 3:24), of which the first indicates God as supreme judge (dan—to judge), and the second as providential sustainer and redeemer. This further proves the complete error of interpreting the words Jehovah, Elohim, Adonai: these words are used for reverent emphasis of the Creator’s Greatness and Glory. In this case, following the Hebrew text, the phrase may have the following meaning: “Abram said: O Providential and Merciful Judge!” This is evident both from the context of the scriptural references already cited and stands in direct connection with the following part of the verse, as among the Hebrews childlessness was considered a punishment for sins, and Abram was entirely justified in addressing the Lord as Judge. what will You give me? I remain childless; “When the Lord promised Abram a reward—and a great reward, a very great reward—then he, revealing the sorrow of his soul and the constant dejection that had tormented him because of his childlessness, said: Lord, what will You give me? For I have already reached a great age and I am departing without children” (John Chrysostom). the steward of my household is this Eliezer of Damascus. In the Slavonic Bible this phrase begins differently, with the words: “but the son of Masek, a servant of my house,” which changes its meaning. This difference is explained by the fact that the first word of this phrase in the Hebrew text—“Ben-Mesek”—was understood and translated by the LXX as a proper name: “son of Masek”; whereas the correct translation of these words gives the sense of “steward, manager of the household or property” (a Hebraism: “son of possession,” just as “man of possession” simply means a person who possesses or manages something). The name “Eliezer” itself means “to whom God helps”; by his place of origin he is called an inhabitant of Damascus.

Genesis 15:3. And Abram said: Behold, You have not given me offspring, and behold, my servant shall be my heir. Being childless already in his old age, Abram, though he pours out his sorrow before God over this, is far from sinful despondency and complaining against God; he hastens to adopt his beloved servant and make him a sharer and heir of all the promises given to him by God.

God promises him a son and numerous offspring

Genesis 15:4. And the word of the Lord came to him, saying: He shall not be your heir, but he who shall come from your own body shall be your heir. In the Greek, Latin, and our Slavonic Bibles, this verse begins with the adverb: “immediately,” regarding which Chrysostom says: “Note the precision of Scripture: it says ‘at once,’ meaning the Lord did not allow the righteous man even to grieve for a short time, but gives comfort quickly and eases the weight of sorrow through conversation with him.” God grants His faithful servant the strongest comfort, healing his main heart’s wound, inflicted by the lack of his own, natural offspring: He solemnly announces to Abram that not a foreign servant, but his own, biological son will be his true heir.

Genesis 15:5. And He brought him outside and said to him: Look up at the sky and count the stars, if you are able to count them. And He said to him: So shall your offspring be. For greater clarity and force of His assurance, the Lord brings Abram out under the open sky and directs his attention to the myriads of stars scattered across it, saying that his offspring shall be just as numerous. The sense and meaning of this comparison are already familiar to us from an analogous image in the history of the preceding theophany (Gen 13:16). But in the unfolding of the promise itself, an important new element appears: earlier it was said in general about Abram’s offspring; now it is added that this offspring will be personal and direct, for it shall come from his own son.

Abram is justified by faith

Genesis 15:6. Abram believed the Lord, Amid the connected historical narrative that forms the substance of this chapter, the verse we are considering represents a kind of digression—namely, an introductory remark from the historian himself; clearly, Moses attached great importance to it if, for its sake, he resolved to interrupt the flow and coherent structure of his epic narrative. And indeed, here we are speaking of the chief religious virtue of humanity—the faith that justifies and saves it. The primary meaning of the Hebrew verb “aman,” which means “believed,” conveys the thought of “complete rest” and “steadfast confirmation” in something or on something; in this case, it therefore means the removal of all doubt and hesitation from Abram’s soul and the full establishment of his cherished hopes and expectations in the good and all-perfect will of God. Notwithstanding neither his old age nor the barrenness of Sarah, Abram believes the divine promise about the birth of a son to him, and believes sincerely and ardently, without any reasoning or skeptical inquiry as to how all this could come to pass. and He counted it to him as righteousness. God, Who tests the hearts and reins of men and knows all things, even the least movements of the human soul, rightfully valued this noble and elevated elevation of Abram’s spirit and made it the chief foundation of his future justification—that is, the remission of both his personal and the ancestral sin weighing upon him. But the final justification of Abram, as of other Old Testament righteous men, came only after the sacrificial death of the Lord Jesus Christ and His descent to Hades (1 Pet 3:19). This momentous Old Testament fact of justification by faith is discussed at length by the Apostle Paul in his Letter to the Romans (Rom 4), where the example of Abram serves as clear proof of the truth that in Christianity also justification is granted not through any external deeds and merits, but freely (by grace)—through faith in the redemptive power of Christ’s death. But as Abram’s saving faith was the fruit and crown of all his pious activity and life, so also in the Christian, the justifying faith must encompass and permeate his entire being and be that living and active force which necessarily seeks corresponding outward expression—that is, in pious life and good deeds (Jas 2:24-26).

The confirmation of God’s covenant with Abram

Genesis 15:7. And He said to him: I am the Lord, Who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess. Although Moses does not directly say that Abram’s departure from Ur of the Chaldeans together with his father Terah was the result of a special divine call, he implicitly leads us to assume it (Gen 12:1), and the protomartyr Stephen even explicitly testifies to this (Acts 7:2-3). By pointing to the fact of Abram’s leading out from his native land and to the purpose of this fact, God thereby wishes to give Abram further proof of the immutability and faithfulness of His promises.

Genesis 15:8. He said: Lord God! How shall I know that I shall possess it? Since the promise of possessing Palestine did not pertain to Abram’s own person but to the fate of his offspring, the best explanation of this question is the opinion of those exegetes who hold that Abram posed this question not for himself and not on his own behalf, but for his future offspring, seeking assurance concerning the truth of such seemingly impossible promises. “The promise of possessing the land of Canaan,” Abram thought, “can only be fulfilled when his descendants have grown into a numerous people. This will require considerable time, during which they may experience many reversals of fortune, many sorrows and calamities. It is no wonder that these sorrows and calamities, amid the long waiting for the promised inheritance, might shake the faith of Abram’s descendants in the promise. Therefore, it was natural for Abram to desire that the Lord would in a special manner seal for his descendants the truth of His promise, and previously open to them how it should be fulfilled” (Bishop Vissarion).

Genesis 15:9–10. The Lord said to him: Take for Me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old goat, a three-year-old ram, a turtledove, and a young pigeon. He took all of them, cut them in two, and placed one part opposite the other; he did not cut the birds. Yielding to Abram’s respectful request for a sign that would assure his offspring of the fulfillment of the divine promises, the Lord deigns to give him the same sign that was customarily used among people in similar cases. For among the ancients, especially in the East, when people bound themselves by important promises, they would enter into a covenant with one another, the conclusion of which was accompanied by a specific external ceremony: they would take a certain number of sacrificial animals, slaughter them, pour out their blood, cut them into two equal halves, and pass between these severed parts. By all these symbolic actions, the people who entered into the covenant testified before God and men that they were ready to shed each other’s blood, that they obligated themselves to represent themselves as two equal halves of one and the same living whole, and that the breaker of this covenant would expect punishment from God, like the dismemberment of an animal’s corpse (Jer 34:18). Condescending to human weakness, the Lord deigned to use this covenant ceremony in entering into a covenant with Abram and his offspring. It should be noted that both the list of animals mentioned here and the very ritual of the ceremony itself (for instance, the non-cutting of birds) (Lev 1:14-17) closely matches the subsequent laws of sacrifice, from which it is evident that Moses was not introducing something new, but rather returning the people to forgotten ancient ordinances.

Genesis 15:11. And birds of prey descended upon the carcasses; but Abram drove them away. This minor detail is considered a prophetic foreshadowing of those idolatrous nations who, by their example, led the people of Israel astray and thereby defiled this covenant and corrupted its purity (“the straying of Israel”).

Vision

Genesis 15:12. As the sun was setting, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, In the Hebrew text, this sleep is designated by the same term—“tardema”—as the sleep of Adam when God created him a wife (Gen 2:21). Consequently, this was not an ordinary and natural sleep, but an extraordinary, supernatural one, in which all the higher faculties and powers of man not only did not weaken but, on the contrary, grew stronger. and behold, terror and great darkness fell upon him. Both of these states were purely subjective experiences for Abram and were caused by the approaching manifestation of God Himself in material form (Job 4:14-17). Some exegetes, however, see here a prophetic premonition of the terrors and calamities that awaited Abram’s offspring during the days of Egyptian bondage.

Genesis 15:13. And the Lord said to Abram: Know that your offspring will be strangers in a land not their own, and they will enslave them and oppress them for four hundred years. From the fact that the Lord’s answer pertains to the fate of Abram’s offspring, we have another proof that the question of Abram mentioned earlier also concerned the same subject (Gen 15:8). As though responding to Abram’s anxious thoughts about the reversals of fate awaiting his offspring, the Lord reveals to Abram that his descendants, before obtaining the fulfillment of the promise, must undergo a whole series of trials and calamities: first, they are destined for a long and troubled sojourn through the land of Canaan, and second, a long and grievous bondage—namely, bondage in Egypt. The Lord determines the total duration of this first period of Jewish history—the period of wandering, affliction, and bondage—to be four hundred years. To be more precise, the more exact figure for the entire period, which begins with Abram’s departure from Ur of the Chaldeans and ends with the Hebrew exodus from Egypt, is four hundred thirty years (at age 25 after leaving Ur, Isaac was born; at age 60 of Isaac, Jacob was born; Jacob entered Egypt at age 130, and 215 years passed after that until the Hebrews left (Exod 12:40; Gal 3:17). But the thirty years have obviously been omitted here for the sake of round numbers, as is customary in other places of the Bible, especially in counting by centuries, which are also often called generations (Gen 15:16).

Genesis 15:14. but I will judge the nation that enslaves them; An expression analogous to the saying: “Vengeance is Mine, and I will repay” (Deut 32:35; Rom 12:19; Heb 10:30). Historically, this was fulfilled in the Egyptians when the Lord struck them with grievous plagues and thereby forced them to release the Hebrews (Exod 7:4). afterward they will come out [here] with great wealth, A prophetic detail, accurately vindicated by history (Exod 12:35-36).

Genesis 15:15. and you shall go to your fathers in peace and be buried in a good old age; In these remarkable words, one rightly perceives the expression of the idea of Old Testament immortality; this is indicated already by the fact that the text clearly distinguishes “going to one’s fathers” from “burial of the body,” and if by the latter one certainly understands bodily, physical death, then by the former can only be understood spiritual immortality, which opens the possibility of an afterlife meeting with those fathers who died before. To interpret this “gathering to one’s fathers” in the sense of ordinary burial in a family, ancestral cave is precisely what Abram’s own example does not allow, given that Abram himself was buried in the cave of Machpelah (Gen 25:9), his father Terah in Haran (Gen 11:32), and his other ancestors in Ur of the Chaldeans.

Genesis 15:16. in the fourth generation they shall return here: Some see in these words a parallel to verse 13, meaning a reference to four centuries or generations—a disastrous period in Israel’s life; others, with better reason, perceive a reference to the duration of Egyptian bondage itself, which was to end in the fourth generation of those strangers who first settled in it. Indeed, Moses, the initiator of the Hebrew exodus, was already the fourth after Jacob, who came to Egypt (Levi, Kohath, Amram, and Moses). for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full. The Amorites are taken here as representatives of all the Canaanites (Josh 24:15). The longsuffering of God spared them for whole centuries to give them the opportunity for repentance; but they used this time for evil and deserved the dread judgment of divine justice regarding their complete destruction (Josh 6:20 and others).

Genesis 15:17. When the sun had set and darkness had come, behold, A remark from the historian, indicating the exceptional length of this theophany: beginning the night before, it continued throughout the following day and went on into the coming night. a smoking oven and a fiery torch passed between the severed animals. Smoke and fire—these are the favored emblems of God’s manifestations in the history of Israel, at once awesome and dark like smoke, and bright and joyful like fire. “The passing between the severed animals signified, according to custom, the joining of what was divided—that is, a covenant. Otto Herkloss notes that Abram did not pass between the severed animals; only a visible image of the Lord passed, so this was a covenant of grace, a benefaction promised and confirmed through an external covenant ritual” (Vlastov).

Genesis 15:18. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying: The Hebrew term for covenant, “berit,” derived from a verb meaning “to cut, to sever, to divide,” clearly indicates its close connection to the ceremony of passing through severed animal parts described above. By this act the Lord enters into a solemn covenant with Abram, after the manner of how He earlier entered into such a covenant with Noah (Gen 9:9). However, the covenant of God with Abram has in view more important theocratic purposes, and therefore is surrounded with even greater solemnity than the covenant with Noah. to your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates: The Lord designates two rivers as the boundaries of the future possession of the Hebrews: on the east the Euphrates, and on the west some Egyptian river. The latter cannot be the Nile, since the Euphrates in comparison with the Nile could not be called the great river; apparently it is one of the border rivers of Egypt, considerably smaller than the Euphrates; it is believed to be the river Shihor, which separated Egypt from Palestine and where the city of Rhinocolura stood. Within these boundaries the Hebrews actually possessed the land of Canaan in the times of Kings David and Solomon (1 Sam 4:21; 2 Chr 9:26; Ps 71:8; 2 Sam 8:3), when not only all of Palestine and all the surrounding nomadic tribes acknowledged the rule of Israel’s kings, but even the kings of southern Arabia bowed before them. “But more remarkable still is the moral influence which Abram, his descendants the patriarchs, David and Solomon have maintained to this day over the minds of nomadic tribes. Their memory is honored more than the memory of Muhammad” (Vlastov).

Genesis 15:19. the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, The sad fate of the first—enslavement by the Assyrians—is foretold in the prophecy of Balaam (Num 24:21-22), and their dwelling place—to the south of Canaan, near the Amalekites, and then even completely within Palestine in the tribe of Judah—is indicated by the writer of the Book of Kings (1 Sam 27:10). Probably in the same tribe of Judah lived the Kenizzites, as can be surmised from the fact that Caleb, a member of the tribe of Judah, was called a Kenizzite (Josh 14:6). Much less is known about the “Kadmonites,” who in the Bible are not mentioned again; but they appear on Egyptian monuments, from which some conjecture that this name refers to one of the tribes bordering Canaan on the Egyptian side.

Genesis 15:20. the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, The first undoubtedly refers to the important and powerful “Hittite” nation, which held sway over Syria and had colonies in the vicinity of Hebron and Bethel (Judg 1:23-26; 1 Sam 10:29). The “Perizzites” are those already known to us (Gen 13:7) Canaanite inhabitants of the mountainous regions of Palestine (Josh 11:3). The “Rephaim” are again that already known tribe (Gen 14:5), dwelling (Josh 12:4) to the northeast of the Jordan Valley, though later it moved considerably further south, lending its name to the valley of the Rephaim or giants, one of the neighborhoods of Jerusalem (Josh 15:8).

Genesis 15:21. the Girgashites and the Jebusites. The former lived west of the Jordan (Josh 24:11), and the latter—near Jerusalem and within the city itself, which on account of this was even called Jebus for a time (Judg 19:10).