This post was originally produced in June 2017.
19 July 2022 -- I've since abandoned this specific project, and am working on something a bit different. This page remains for anyone who might find it interesting.
This post is made in the same way as the one on Genesis 13, and comes with the same permissions and restrictions. Consider this post in beta form. Until such time as it is finalized, I might change it at any time without any notice.
Translation
1 After these things a message from Yahweh came to Abram in a vision: “Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield. Your reward will be very great.”
2 And Abram said, “My Lord Yahweh, what will you give me? I remain childless, and the ben mesheq of my household is Dammeseq Eliezer.”
3 And Abram said, “See, you have given me no descendants, and indeed, a son of my household is my heir.”
4 Then a message from Yahweh came to him: “This one will not be your heir, but rather one who comes from your own body will be your heir.”
5 And he brought him outside, and said, “Gaze at the sky, and count the stars, if you can count them.” And he said to him, “Your descendants will be likewise.”
6 He trusted in Yahweh, and he considered him righteous because of it.
7 And he said to him, “I am Yahweh who brought you out of Ur Kasdim, to give you this land for you to possess.”
8 And he said, “My Lord Yahweh, by what will I know that I am to possess it?”
9 And he said to him, “Take me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove and a young pigeon.”
10 So he brought to him each of these, and halved them down the middle, and placed each half facing the other, but he did not halve the birds. 11 Birds of prey descended onto the carcasses, but Abram drove them away. 12 And when the sun set, a stupor fell on Abram — it was a terror and great darkness falling on him.
13 And he said to Abram, “Know for certain that your descendants will live as aliens in a land not their own, and they will be their slaves, and they will oppress them four hundred years. 14 Then I will also judge that nation whose slaves they are, and afterward they will leave with great possessions. 15 But you will go to your ancestors in peace; you will be buried at a good old age. 16 And a fourth generation will return here, because the wickedness of the Amorites is not yet complete.”
17 Then, when the sun had set, there was a thick darkness, and there appeared a smoking furnace and a flaming torch which passed between the pieces.
18 On that day Yahweh made a covenant with Abram, saying, “I have given this land to your descendants, from the River of Egypt to the Great River, the Euphrates River: 19 the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, 20 the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, 21 the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.”
Notes
1. a message from Yahweh came. This is technical terminology used in the Bible to describe how prophets receive divine messages. According to Skinner, this argues for dating the passage after the beginnings of a written prophetic tradition in Israel. That would date this after the time of Amos, circa 750 BC.
Do not be afraid. What would Abram be afraid of? I would be inclined to read this as similar to other appearances of God or angels throughout the Bible. The person to whom the visitor appears might be afraid of the supernatural visitor, and so the supernatural visitor says, “Do not be afraid,” meaning roughly, “Don’t worry. I’m not here to hurt you. I have good news.”
However, Dillmann follows Knobel in taking this as referring specifically to the case of Abraham being afraid of the surrounding indigenous peoples. Skinner also sees Abraham’s fear of nearby peoples of being at work here, but speaks even more specifically, “[Verse 1] presupposes a situation of anxiety on the part of Abram, following on some meritorious action performed by him.” Presumably, this unnamed meritorious action would be needed to explain the use of the word reward. Driver says simply, “The promise attaches to Abram’s presumed state of anxiety with regard to the future.”
I am your shield. Your reward is very great. Some interpreters (such as KJV, RV, NIV) have read this as I am your shield, your very great reward. But Dillmann rejects this view on logical and grammatical grounds; he says we should have expanded a waw before your reward if this were all to be taken as a single sentence. The two-sentence view is found in the Septuagint and Peshitta, the one-sentence view in the Vulgate.
Your reward is very great. By a difference of one letter, the Samaritan Pentateuch reads I will greatly multiply your reward, a reading which Skinner thinks is perhaps correct.
After the word “childless,” the Hebrew text is very difficult, “unintelligible” according to Skinner. Dillmann says, “There seems to be some corruption in the text.”
ben mesheq. The Hebrew phrase, “son of mesheq” is unclear in meaning, because this term mesheq occurs only here, making it hard to say what it means. The KJV takes ben mesheq as meaning “steward,” while Gesenius takes it as a synonym for “heir.” On Gesenius’ reading, mesheq means “possession,” and so a “son of possession” is the person who will inherit Abram’s possessions. In Skinner’s time, most commentators agreed with Gesenius here, but Skinner said that the underlying logic they used “has neither philological justification nor traditional support.”
According to Skinner, all the ancient translations from the Hebrew show that none of the early translators appear to have understood what this word means. The Septuagint, writing it as Masek, takes it as the name of Eliezer’s mother (Skinner).
If you remove the Masoretic pointing, the word m-sh-q contains the same letters as the last three of the word Dammeseq, which is also a bit confusing. Given that Dammeseq Eliezer is also a unique construction, perhaps there is some kind of copying error in play here.
is Dammeseq Eleizer. The word Dammeseq is also the name of the city of Damascus in Hebrew. The phrase Dammeseq Eliezer is therefore taken to mean “Eliezer of Damascus,” but for “Eliezer of Damascus” we should expect to read in Hebrew Eliezer Dammeseq, not Dammeseq Eliezer. This name Dammeseq Eliezer appears only in this verse. The Septuagint’s reading, Damaskos Eliezer, indicates that the Hebrew text in front of the Septuagint translators also had Dammeseq in front of the name Eliezer. Jerome, likewise, reads it as Damascus Eliezer. Dillmann mentions the possibility that “is Dammeseq” are a gloss, perhaps added to explain the meaning of the difficult phrase ben-mesheq. Dillmann proposes that the text is, in a manner involving a play on words, showing Abraham’s concern that his patrimony will wind up in Damascus after his death because that is where Eliezer is from. But because there is no other reference outside this verse to Eliezer’s origin, who knows?
3. a son of my household, following the Hebrew literally. The KJV interprets this as “one born in my house.” Dillmann and Skinner take it more generally as meaning a member of Abraham’s household, not necessarily born into it. Dillmann raises an interesting point: the text presupposes that Lot, Abram’s nephew, is not to be his heir. Are we to think that Abram disowned him, or does the text presuppose some sort of inheritance norms that would have made it appropriate for a servant, rather than a nephew, to inherit in this case?
4. from your own body. Or more literally, from your own innards (the KJV reads “bowels,” the Hebrew expression is mimmeʕeika). The Septuagint reading has simply “from you,” perhaps indicating a Vorlage reading of mimməka.
5. stars. This assumes that this conversation is occurring at night, however, a little later, in verse 12, the sun sets, and in verse 17 sets again. This chronological inconsistency is of interest to those who attempt to reconstruct the composition of passages in the Pentateuch from its hypothetical original sources. See Moshe Anbar, (1982) “Genesis 15: A Conflation of Two Deuteronomic Narratives” in the Journal of Biblical Literature.
7-8. According to Skinner, most critics considered these two verses a later interpolation.
7. Ur Kasdim follows the Hebrew form of the name, which is often translated as “Ur of the Chaldees” or “of the Chaldeans.” The term of Ur of the Kasdim. The term Kasdim is used several different ways in the Bible, wether referring to the region of Babylonia, or to Mesopotamia more generally, which would seem to be how it is used here. The term is also used in some cases as a term for magicians or astrologers.
9. three years old. Hebrew meshulleshet, “in this sense only here and in the Septuagint of 1 Sam. i. 24. Onkelos renders wrongly three-fold, i.e. three of each” (Dillmann). Elsewhere the word means “three-fold” (Skinner).
young pigeon. In the Bible, the word gozal appears only here and in Deuteronomy 32:11, where it describes eaglets or young vultures. As a result, then Young’s Literal Translation takes it as a general term for a young bird. This, however would be odd in this context: asking specifically for fore types of animals and then very generally for a young bird. See Moshe Anber (1982, p. 46), who notes that in Mishnaic Hebrew and Aramaic gozal is used as a synonym for ben-yonah, meaning “pigeon.”
This, then, would explain why every translation I’ve consulted reads “young pigeon” here. This would also, as Dillmann points out, mean that the collection of animals named in this verse make up every type of animal that is sacrificed in the biblical system: cattle, sheep, goats, turtledoves, and pigeons.
Here the reader should note that the English terms “dove” and “pigeon” don’t denote two entirely separate kinds of animals. See the Wikipedia article Columbidae: “In ornithological practice, “dove” tends to be used for smaller species and “pigeon” for larger ones, but this is in no way consistently applied, and historically, the common names for these birds involve a great deal of variation between the terms.” The Hebrew term yonah, according to John L. McKenzie, “appears to include several species” (John L. Mckenzie (1995). The Dictionary Of The Bible. Simon and Schuster. p. 203.).
10. halved. Compare the expression in verse 18, “to cut a covenant.” Dillmann sees this as the implicit, symbolic invocation of a curse. Animals were killed and cut up, with the implicit curse being that a person who violated his covenant would receive a similar punishment. Compare the covenant curses of Deuteronomy, and implicit curse involved in taking an oath in Hebrew by the formula, “If . . .” (im).
11. birds of prey. Dillmann sees the birds of prey as an evil omen of “unclean and violence-loving” foreign peoples, “especial [sic] the Egyptians” who would seek to oppress the Israelites. Compare the levitical legislation which defines predatory birds as unclean. Uncleanness of any kind would threaten the purity of a sacrificial offering.
Skinner notes, in comparison, a reference to predatory birds as an omen, defiling a sacrifice, in the Aeneid (start at page 138 of this PDF): “Then call the gods for partners of our feast, / And Jove himself, the chief invited guest. / . . . / We feed with hunger, and the bowls go round; / When from the mountain-tops with hideous cry, / And clatt’ring wings, the hungry Harpies fly; / They snatch the meat, defiling all they find, . . .”. Verse 13-16, then, constitute an interpretation of the omen, according to Skinner.
12. terror. According to Dillmann, the scene is terrifying because Abram is about to receive word the enslavement of his descendants. In Dillmann’s words, “This is a sufficiently joyless prospect.”
14. I will judge. A reference to the beginning parts of the book of Exodus.
16. fourth generation. Note that the text seems to equate a generation with one hundred years. This is unusual — one would ordinarily reckon a generation (Hebrew, dor) as perhaps 25 or 30 years. Could this usage be connected with the distance from the birth of Abraham to the birth of Isaac being one hundred years? Compare the genealogy of Exodus 6, which would indicate that Moses, who left Egypt, was only four generations removed from Jacob, who went down into Egypt 400 or 430 years earlier. Dillmann quotes Burckhardt’s Arabic Proverbs as claiming that, in Arabic, the cognate term dahr is used both for a shorter generation and for a period of one hundred years or more. According to Dillmann, similar usages can be found for the Latin seaculum and aetas. Skinner, however, finds the comparisons with similar usages in other languages unconvincing, and notes that if the comment about “four generations” and “four hundred years” originally belonged to different sources, the original authors of these stories may not have intended to equate a generation with a century.
Amorites. This verse uses the term “Amorites” to refer to the whole population which the Israelites were to displace, in contrast to the more normal usage which refers to that whole population as “Canaanites.” There is a fair bit of ambiguity about what exactly these sorts of terms mean: Genesis 13:7 seems to divide the pre-Israelite population into just Canaanites and Perizzites, while the Deuteronomy 7:1 includes Canaanites and Amorites as just two of seven large populations it says existed in the land prior to Israelites. Compare also the list of peoples at the end of this very chapter.
17. a smoking oven and a flaming torch. Skinner sees these as “making an emblem of the theophany, akin to the pillar and cloud of fire of the Exodus and Sinai narratives.” This makes better sense than the interpretation of Rashi, takes this as a symbol of hellfire as the destination of the foreign nations. While Rashi’s interpretation would make sense in the context of post-biblical Judaism with its conception of hell, it does not make sense in the Hebrew Bible, which knows nothing of a punishment in hell.
18. made a covenant. Literally, “cut a covenant.”
River of Egypt. Hebrew, nehar mitsrayim. It might seem natural to take this referring to the Nile, the main river associated with Egypt, but this is much further than the territories of Israel or Judah ever historically reached. So most commentators have taken this as referring to the Wadi El-Arish (Peter Enns (2000). Exodus. Zondervan Publishing House. p. 479), which is just a tad west of the western border of the modern state of Israel. However, the usual term for the River of Egypt is Hebrew nahal mitsrayim, so Dillmann, Driver, and Skinner think here the term nehar must refer to the Nile or the easternmost edge of its delta.
The unusual terminology for this River in Egypt, along with the fact that in Hebrew nhr is only one letter away from nhl, and the fact that nhr already appears in this verse, might suggest a copying error. It would be an easy slip. However, Dillmann says, “If [nhl] were the original reading, it could only be intentionally corrupted to [nhr].” But why only intentionally? Why not unintentionally? Dillmann does not say.
Euphrates. As Dillmann puts it, this “is an ideal limit, reached actually only once, in the palmy days of Solomon (1 K 4:21, cf. Ps 80:11), but promised also elsewhere (Ex 23:31, Dt 1:7, 11:24, Josh 1:4; cf. Ps 89:24), and forming the basis of the ideal hopes, or pictures of the future, in Is. 27:12, Zech 9:10, Ps 72:8.”
19-21. The Hebrew Bible has plenty of lists of the pre-Israelite peoples, but usually only five to seven are listed; only here are there ten (Dillmann).
19. Dillmann identifies the Kenites and Kenizzites as “the tribes of the Negeb and of the southern desert.” The Kadmonites he identifies with the “inhabitants of the Syro-Arabian desert.” In Driver’s view, the fulfillment of this verse with respect to Kenites and Kenizzites lies in their incorporation into Israel rather than their expulsion. Kadmonites, by that name, are mentioned only here, while Skinner thinks they may be the same as the bnei qedem of 29:1.
20. Hittites. The biblical “Hittites” do not appear to be quite the same group as the “Hittites” of Anatolia. The biblical Hittites are described as pre-Israelite inhabitants of Canaan, and the Bible makes no reference to the Hittite Empire in Anatolia.
Perizzites. Perhaps simply an ethnic group, perhaps a word meaning “peasants” or “villagers” referring to the rural Canaanites or some of the rural Canaanites.
20-21. the Rephaim, the Amorites. Dillmann identifies these with “for the most part, the tribes in the land east of Jordan.”
Between Canaanites and Girgashites, the Septuagint and Samaritan Pentateuch read “Hivites,” according to Dillmann. But Skinner says that only the Septuagint inserts “Hivites” after Canaanites, while the Samaritan Pentateuch reads it after “Girgashites.” According to Niels Peter Lemche’s The Canaanites and Their Land (p. 90), “the Hivites are totally unknown outside the Old Testament.”
Girgashites are never described, but only appear in lists like this one. Their identity is unknown, but they are discussed in Othniel Margalith’s The Sea Peoples.
Jebusites are the pre-Israelite inhabitants of Jerusalem, according to the Bible, though the biblical minimalist Niels Peter Lemche suggests that they may have been fictional in The Canaanites and Their Land, because their name, and the name of Jerusalem as Jebus, is not mentioned in any historical sources.