This post was created in July 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 continues the series begun at Genesis 13. The same details, permissions, restrictions, etc. apply.
Translation
1 When Abram was ninety-nine years old, Yahweh appeared to Abram, and said to him, “I am El Shaddai. Walk before me and be irreproachable, 3 and I will set my covenant between me and you, and I will greatly multiply you.”
3 Abram fell on his face, and God spoke with him, saying, 4 “As for me, my covenant is with you, and you will become the father of a multitude of nations. 5 No longer will you be named Abram. Abraham will be your name, because I have made you a father of many nations. 6 I will make you very fruitful, and I will make you into nations, and kings will come from you. 7 I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your descendants after you throughout their generations, as an everlasting covenant, to be your god, and that of your descendants after you. 8 I will give to you, and to your descendants after you, the land where you are sojourning, all the land of Canaan, as an everlasting possession, and I will be their god.”
9 And God said to Abraham, “You must keep my covenant, along with your descendants after you throughout their generations. 10 This is my covenant which you must keep, between me and you, and your descendants after you: every male among you must be circumcised. 11 You must circumcise the flesh of your foreskin, and it will serve as a sign of the covenant between me and you. 12 At eight days old, every male among you must circumcised throughout your generations, whether born into your household, or bought with money from any foreign person, who is not of your descendants. 13 Born into your household, or bought with money, he must be circumcised. My covenant will be in your flesh as an everlasting covenant. 14 An uncircumcised male whose foreskin flesh is not circumcised: that person will be cut off from his peoples. He has broken my covenant.
15 And God said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you are no longer to call her name Sarai. Rather, Sarah will be her name. 16 I will bless her, and I will also give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she will become nations. Kings of nations will come from her.”
17 Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and thought to himself, “Will a child be born be born to someone a hundred years old? Will Sarah, ninety years old, have a child?”
18 And Abraham said, “Oh, that Ishmael might live before you!”
19 And God said, “No. Sarah your wife will give you a son, and you will call his name Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant with his descendants after him. 20 And as for Ishmael, I have heard you. Indeed, I will bless him and make him fruitful. I will multiply him exceedingly. He will father twelve princes, and I will make him a great nation. 21 But I will establish my covenant with Isaac, whom Sarah will bear you at this time next year.” 22 Then he was finished speaking with him, and God ascended from Abraham.
23 Then Abraham took Ishmael his son, and all who were born in his household, and all who were bought with his money, every male among the men of Abraham’s household, and circumcised the flesh of their foreskins on that very day, just as God told him.
24 Abraham was ninety-nine years old when he circumcised the flesh of his foreskin. 25 Ishmael his son was thirteen years old when he was circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin. 26 On that very day Abraham was circumcised, along with Ishmael his son. 27 And all the men of his household, whether born into the household or bought with money from a foreigner, were circumcised with him.
Notes
According to the biblical accounts, it is implied that the practice of circumcision must have ceased at some point after these stories and prior to the Exodus (the Exodus occurs 628 years later in the Masoretic chronology). Dillmann reminds the reader to see Exodus 4:25ff and Joshua 5:2, 8ff.
By way of context, it is worth noting that various authors have said various things about who in neighboring lands practiced circumcision, various things about what exact sorts of circumcision may have been practiced, and various things about what is implied in Jeremiah 9. See here.
1. ninety-nine. Chapter 16 ended with the notice that Abram was 86 years old. This chapter begins by informing us that 13 years have passed. Some readers take from these thirteen years of narrative silence the idea that the writer is expressing disapproval of Abraham’s production of Ishmael in the previous chapter.
El Shaddai. A name of uncertain origin, used in the Bible as an alternate title for Yahweh. On possibilities, see the pretty good Wikipedia article. See also Dillmann for a discussion of several proposals.
Walk before me, “i.e. in My sight, as contrasted with the man who withdraws himself from God, and in the consciousness of my presence, looking up to Me (there is a perceptible difference of meaning between this and ‘walk with God’)” (Dillmann).
“The condition which Abram is called upon to fulfil: not, as in the later Levitical law, obedience to a multitude of particular observances, but simply the duty of leading generally a righteous and holy life. To ‘walk before’ any one is to live and move openly before him (1 S. xii. 2); esp. in such a way as (a) to deserve, and (b) to enjoy, his approval and favour. Here the thought of (a) predominates, the meaning being to comport oneself in a manner pleasing in God’s sight” (Driver).
3. fell on his face. “An Expression of respect towards men . . . and of reverence towards God.” Driver cites Ruth 2:10, 2 Samuel 9:6 and 14:22 as examples before men, Genesis 17:17, Numbers 14:5, Judges 13:10, as some of the many passages where the falling is before God.
5. Abraham. The etymology provided here in the text is awkward. It looks like the text is saying that the change was Abram to Abraham was made in order to make Abraham sound a little bit like Ab (“father”) and hamon (“multitude”). “This is a mere play on the sounds of the words . . . it is not etymology” (Dillmann). It has been suggested that Abram might originally have meant “exalted father” (Dillmann). Quoting Tavernier, Dillmann says that the giving of a name is appropriate in this context because “the Hebrews named their children when they were circumcised, as the Persians also did.” If the author had intended to name Abraham “father of a multitude,” he would have called him Ab-hamon.
As for Abram, Driver explains it as a contraction of Abiram meaning “the father [a divine title] is exalted.” He says, “Abraham has no meaning in Heb[rew], nor is any meaning apparent from the cognate languages.”
6. nations. In addition to Ishmael by Hagar, the text of Genesis derives various nations from Abraham via Keturah (Genesis 25). And, of course, the most important son is Isaac, from whom the Israelites will be derived, and the Edomites (from Esau).
8. the land where you are sojourning. Dillmann reads, “The land of thy nomad life, ‘in which thou dwellest as ger, stranger.” So also in Driver. The verb is indeed the one related to the noun ger, which is mentioned in legal contexts and elsewhere as denoted a legal status in the ballpark of “resident alien.”
10. This is my covenant. Hebrew, zot briti. Dillmann passes on a conjecture by Olshausen that perhaps originally the Hebrew text read zot ot briti, “This is the sign of my covenant.” This might strike some readers as more logical, or at least a simpler statement; is circumcision the covenant itself? It could also have been miscopied fairly easily, through skipping the second repetition of ot.
and you. Not you (singular), but you (plural). The you (plural) might refer either to Abraham’s descendants, or to his household who were circumcised with him.
14. not circumcised. A variant reading, found in the Septuagint, Samaritan Pentateuch, and Jubilees, is not circumcised on the eighth day, a considerably stricter reading. For an argument that the stricter reading is the original, see Thiessen, M. (2009). “The Text of Genesis 17:14”. Journal of Biblical Literature, 128(4), 625-642.
cut off from his peoples. There has been some debate over what this statement, found repeatedly in biblical law, means: whether it implies expulsion, separation from one’s relatives in the netherworld, divine intervention to kill the person who is “cut off” or to discontinue his lineage, or even capital punishment. See Patrick Miller (2000) in The Religion of Ancient Israel, p. 152. Regardless of the exact meaning, I think I detect a weird some of wordplay here: either a man will be cut in his foreskin, or cut off from his peoples.
his peoples. We have the plural ameiha “his peoples” rather than the singular ammah, “his people” (literally, her peoples and her people, because the word “person”, nephesh, is grammatically feminine, although obviously not implying a woman). Driver says that “as it is impossible to speak of a man’s ‘peoples,’ the word must, when it is so used, have some different meaning; and this is shewn by Arabic to be father’s kin.”
15. Sarai, Sarah. Oddly, no explanation is given for the name change, which swaps a yod for a he. “The absence of an etymological motive is remarkable” (Skinner). Even weirder is that in the Septuagint, her name is given a different change, from Sara to Sarra. All the way back to chapter 11, whenever the Hebrew text reads Sarai, the Septuagint has Sara. From here on, wherever the Hebrew text has Sarah, the Septuagint has Sarra. This means that, at least in chapters 11 through 17, someone (in either the Masoretic Text or Septuagint) went along and systematically changed the name. Who did this, or why they did it, is a mystery to me. I’ve dug around a bit and found no explanation. This should be an incredibly interesting question that people would write about, but the Septuagint is sadly under-studied.
Dillmann connects the name Sarah with the verbal root of the name Israel, but does not elaborate further on what the connection might mean. Driver says, “Sarah means ‘princess’; the meaning of Sarai is obscure. That given by some older commentators, ‘my princess,’ is philologically impossible.”
\16. I will bless her, and I will also give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she will become nations. Kings of nations will come from her. The Septuagint reads the blessing as referring not to Sarah but to Isaac, as Brenton’s Septuagint translation has it, And I will bless her, and give thee a son of her, and I will bless him, and he shall become nations, and kings of nations shall be of him. According to Skinner, Jubilees, the Peshitta, and the Vulgate agree with the Septuagint’s line of interpretation here.
\17. laughed. The verb is reminiscent of the name “Isaac” (Hebrew Yiṣḥaq), which Genesis connects with a theme of laughing (ṣ-ḥ-q).
a hundred years old. This is odd if one accepts the apparent order of events in Genesis 11-12. Genesis 11:32 records that Terah, Abraham’s father, died at 205 years old, after which Abraham, 75 years old, leaves for Canaan. If we take this as representing the chronological order of events, Terah was at least 130 when Abraham was born, making it strange that Abraham would laugh at the idea of having a child at a mere 100 years old. Acts 7:4 endorses the view that Abraham’s travel to Canaan occurred after the death of his father. The problem is more acute in the Septuagint, which records in Genesis 11 that Abraham’s grandfather, great-grandfather, and so on had their children at age 79, 130, 132, 130, 134, 130, 130, 135, and 100 years, respectively. On the other hand, a literal reading of 11:26, which would seem to suggest that Terah was 70 when Abraham was born. Working out what all this implies is left as an exercise for the reader.
ninety years old. Abraham’s exclamation would seem to make sense if we accept the idea that Sarah has been aging normally, in which case such a birth would be miraculous. However, the repeated sister-wife narratives belie the suggestion that Sarah aged like a normal woman. The first time Sarah catches the eye of a foreign man and is taken into a royal harem, she is at least sixty-five years old, and later the same thing occurs when she is eighty-nine.
18. live before you, Dillmann explains as meaning, “under thy protection and care.” But see the note by Driver on verse 1.
As in the note on 17, the name Isaac (Yiṣzḥaq) is connected to the verb “laugh” (ṣḥq).
As Driver notes, the verb ”heard” (šmʿ) relates to the name Ishmael (yišmāʿēʾl, “El/God hears”).
23. all who were bought with his money. Let’s be clear about what we’re reading here. Abraham is genitally mutilating his slaves, and the command is given without any reference as to whether they consent. Consent, in general, is much less a concern in the Bible than elsewhere, and rape does not exist as a crime in the Bible.
24. was circumcised. This is a niphal verb, and could thus also be read reflexively, “he circumcised himself” (Skinner).
thirteen years old. “This was the age of circumcision among the ancient Arabs, according to Jos[ephus] Ant[iquities] i. 214″ says Skinner, who cites Origen and Ambrose giving “a similar age (14 years) for the Egyptians. It is possible that the notice here is based on a knowledge of this custom.”