Genesis 15

Notes

1. Reading↩ Back to the text

   Ruling 115

   דָּבָר is "word" throughout (115a), so the chapter opens on the one noun twice: "after these words, the word of Adonai." The first is the matter of Gen 14, the things said and done; the second is speech that comes to Abram. The same opening returns at 22:1, before the binding of Isaac, and at 39:7, 40:1 and 48:1. The KJV has "After these things… the word."

2. Decision↩ Back to the text

   Expected: "the word of the LORD came unto Abram" (KJV, RSV)

   Rulings 2, 104, 113

   הָיָה is "be," the home gloss. Rulings 104 and 113 give "become" only to a לְ of result, and here the verb takes אֶל, "to Abram." "The word of Adonai was to" is the formula with which the prophets' books open (Jer 1:2, 4; Ezek 1:3; Hos 1:1; Jonah 1:1), and this is its first use: Abram receives the word as the prophets will. Abram is called a prophet in 20:7. The English tradition supplies "came"; the Hebrew says the word "was," and the reader can hear that it happened to him. The noun מַחֲזֶה "vision" is from חָזָה "see in a vision" (Num 24:4, 16).

3. Reading↩ Back to the text

   Rulings 17, 39

   מָגֵן "shield" answers מִגֵּן "delivered" in Melchizedek's blessing (14:20): El Elyon "delivered" Abram's foes, and now Adonai says "I am a shield to you." The shield is a title of Adonai in the Psalms (Ps 3:4; 18:3, 31; 84:12) and in the blessing of Moses (Deut 33:29). "Do not fear" is the first of the Bible's many "do not fear"s spoken to a person by Elohim (21:17; 26:24; 46:3).

4. Decision↩ Back to the text

   Expected: "I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward" (KJV) / "I am your shield; your reward shall be very great" (RSV)

   Rulings 1, 2, 10, 46

   שָׂכָר is a wage, the pay for work done: Jacob's wage from Laban (30:28, 32–33; 31:8) and the wage of Moses' nurse (Exod 2:9). "Reward" loses the payment. Abram has just refused the king of Sodom's goods and taken no pay for his war (14:23–24); Rashi has him fear that he has had his wage already, and Adonai answers that his wage is great. The syntax divides the readings. "Your wage" may be a new clause, "your wage shall be very great" (RSV, Targum Onkelos), or it may be in apposition to "I," so that Adonai is the wage (KJV, after the Vulgate ego protector tuus sum et merces tua magna nimis). The comma keeps both. הַרְבֵּה is the hiphil infinitive of רָבָה "be many," used as an adverb, "much" (41:49; 2 Sam 12:2). A verb stays a verb (10): "made many," the causative of the home gloss, with מְאֹד "very much."

5. Reading↩ Back to the text

   Rulings 9, 49, 82

   אֲדֹנָי יֱהוִה is the first occurrence of this pair in the Bible, and it is printed by its device (82): the renderer shows Adonai with Elohim in small caps (49), since the Tetragrammaton is pointed here to be read "Elohim," after the written אֲדֹנָי. The WPRB has "Lord GOD." Abram calls Adonai by the title of a servant to his master, the first time a human speaks to him in this chapter; the pair returns in v. 8.

6. Reading↩ Back to the text

   Ruling 2

   עֲרִירִי "childless" is from the root of עָרַר "strip, lay bare" (Isa 32:11): a man stripped of heirs (Lev 20:20–21; Jer 22:30, "write this man down childless"). "Going" is the participle of הָלַךְ: Abram is going on, and the same verb is the verb of dying, "going the way of all the land" (1 Kgs 2:2).

7. Decision↩ Back to the text

   Expected: "the steward of my house is this Eliezer of Damascus" (KJV) / "the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus" (RSV)

   Rulings 25, 40, 24, 46

   מֶשֶׁק is found only here. The nearest word is מִמְשַׁק in Zeph 2:9, "a holding of nettles," land possessed by weeds, and so "the son of the holding of my house" is the one who will hold it. The LXX takes it as a name, "the son of Masek, my home-born slave woman, this Damascus Eliezer"; the Vulgate has filius procuratoris domus meae, "the son of the steward of my house"; Targum Onkelos "this administrator." The RSV's "heir" anticipates v. 3. The source marks sound: בֶן מֶשֶׁק … דַּמֶּשֶׂק, ben-mesheq … dammeseq, a play on Damascus that English cannot carry (24); it stays here. No stranger sense is attested, so the nearest attested sense is printed with the evidence (25, 40). "Damascus Eliezer" keeps the Hebrew's apposition; "Eliezer of Damascus" is an explanation. Eliezer, "my El is help," is probably the unnamed senior slave of Gen 24. The gematria of his name, 318, is in the note at 14:14.

8. Decision↩ Back to the text

   Expected: "one born in my house is mine heir" (KJV) / "a slave born in my house will be my heir" (RSV)

   Rulings 2, 37

   יָרַשׁ is to take possession, by conquest (Num 21:24; Deut 2:24) or by inheritance (21:10; Jer 49:1). The participle יוֹרֵשׁ אֹתִי is "possessing me": the heir takes possession of the man's estate, and the Hebrew puts the man himself as the object. The verb is used four times in this scene (vv. 3, 4, 7, 8), first of the heir and then of the land, so the chain holds (37) and one gloss is printed: the question of who will possess Abram becomes the question of who will possess the land. "Possess" is free: the CORE קָנָה "acquire" took it as its "instead of."

9. Reading↩ Back to the text

   Rulings 39, 2

   מֵעִים are the inner parts of the body, the belly and womb, kept concrete (39): "one who goes out from your innards" is used of a son in 2 Sam 7:12 and 16:11 and Isa 48:19, and of the twins in Rebekah's womb (25:23). כִּי אִם "but" sets the son against Eliezer.

10. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 2, 116

    הַבֶּט is the hiphil of נָבַט "look at, regard": Israel "looked" at the bronze serpent and lived (Num 21:9); "they shall look on me whom they pierced" (Zech 12:10). It shares the English "look" with the interjection הִנֵּה (vv. 3–4, 12, 17), a verb against an interjection with no shared sense, of the kind ruling 116 declares. "Skyward" is הַשָּׁמַיְמָה with the ending of direction. "Number" is סָפַר, the verb of counting the stars (Ps 147:4, where Adonai "counts the number of the stars"); מָנָה "count" was used of the dust (13:16). Paul quotes "so shall your seed be" in Rom 4:18.

11. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "And he believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness" (KJV) / "And he believed the LORD; and he reckoned it to him as righteousness" (RSV)

    Rulings 1, 46, 74

    צְדָקָה is the CORE "justice." The second clause has no named subject: "and he reckoned it to him." The common reading has Adonai reckon Abram's believing to Abram as justice; the LXX makes it passive, καὶ ἐλογίσθη αὐτῷ εἰς δικαιοσύνην, "and it was reckoned to him," and Paul argues from that Greek (Rom 4:3, 9, 22; Gal 3:6), as James does (Jas 2:23). Nachmanides reads Abram as the subject: Abram reckoned the promise to Adonai as justice, a gift he had not earned. The same words are used of Phinehas' zeal, "it was reckoned to him as justice" (Ps 106:31), and 1 Macc 2:52 joins Abraham's faithfulness in testing to it. The English keeps both "he"s, and the reading is not settled (1, 46). הֶאֱמִין is the hiphil of אָמַן "be firm," the root of "amen": to hold someone firm, to rely on him. Isa 7:9 plays on the two stems: "if you do not believe, you will not be made firm." "Believe" is the expected gloss, and it stays because it carries the Greek πιστεύω of the NT quotations (4).

12. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 18, 2

    "Who brought you out" is the hiphil of יָצָא, the verb of the Exodus: "I am Adonai your Elohim, who brought you out of the land of Egypt" (Exod 20:2). Abram's going out from Ur is told in the words of Israel's going out from Egypt, and Neh 9:7 joins them. Ur of the Chaldeans is in the note at 11:28. "To give you… to possess it": the land is the object of the chain of v. 3.

13. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "an heifer of three years old" (KJV) / "a heifer three years old" (RSV)

    Rulings 1, 25

    מְשֻׁלֶּשֶׁת is the pual participle of שָׁלַשׁ, a verb made from "three": to do a third time (1 Kgs 18:34), to divide into three. The pual is "made threefold": "a threefold cord is not quickly broken" (Eccl 4:12), and Ezek 42:6 has the same form for a building "in three storeys." The LXX (τριετίζουσαν) and the Vulgate (trimam) read "three years old," and the KJV and RSV follow them. Targum Onkelos and Rashi read "three": three heifers, three goats, three rams, for the three kinds of offering the law will require. English cannot hold the age and the number together, so the stranger reading is printed and the age is in this note (1). The animals are the animals of the sacrificial law: the cattle, the goat and the ram, and the dove and young bird of the poor man's offering (Lev 1:14; 5:7).

14. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "laid each piece one against another" (KJV) / "laid each half over against the other" (RSV)

    Rulings 2, 57

    The Hebrew is אִישׁ בִּתְרוֹ לִקְרַאת רֵעֵהוּ, "a man his piece to meet his fellow," the distributive idiom (11:3, 7, "a man to his fellow"). Here it is said of halves of animals, and "man" would be a false sense in English (57), so "each" is printed. רֵעַ keeps "fellow." בָּתַר "sever" and בֶּתֶר "piece" are found again only in Jer 34:18–19, of the men of Judah who "passed between its pieces" when they cut a covenant with a calf cut in two. An Aramaic treaty from Sefire (8th century BCE) gives the meaning of the rite: "as this calf is cut in two, so may Mati'el be cut in two." The birds are not severed, as in Lev 1:17.

15. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 2, 25

    עַיִט is a bird of prey that swoops and screams (Isa 18:6; 46:11, "calling a raptor from the east"; Jer 12:9); the singular is collective. וַיַּשֵּׁב is the hiphil of נָשַׁב "blow": "he makes his wind blow" (Ps 147:18). Abram "fanned them away," driving off the birds as a wind would. Rashi, after the midrash, reads the raptor as the nations who would swoop on Israel, and Abram's merit as the wind that drives them off; Jubilees 11:11 has Mastema send ravens to eat the seed in Abram's youth.

16. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 2, 95

    "The sun was about to come in": בּוֹא is the verb of the sun's setting, "the sun came in" (28:11; Lev 22:7), and v. 17 completes it. The trance (תַּרְדֵּמָה) is the sleep Adonai sends, as on the human in 2:21. אֵימָה "dread" is the root of the Emim (14:5). חֲשֵׁכָה "darkness" is of the root of חֹשֶׁךְ "darkness" (1:2; Exod 10:22), and shares its English. Genesis Rabbah 44:17 reads the four nouns of the verse, "dread, darkness, great, falling," as the four kingdoms that would subdue Israel: Babylon, Media, Greece and Rome.

17. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 6, 2, 91

    "Knowing you shall know" keeps the infinitive absolute, as "eating you may eat" (2:16). גֵּר "sojourner" is the noun of גּוּר "sojourn": the resident alien, without land of his own (23:4; Exod 22:20, "for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt"). "They shall serve them, and they shall afflict them": the subjects change without warning, as in the Hebrew; the second "they" are the masters. עִנָּה "afflict" is the verb of Exod 1:11–12. The four hundred years are four hundred and thirty in Exod 12:40; Acts 7:6 quotes the number of this verse.

18. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 1, 18

    דָּן is the participle of דִּין "hold court" (6:3): Adonai is about to judge the nation of the servitude, the plagues of Egypt (Exod 6:6; 12:12, "on all the elohim of Egypt I will do judgments"). The form is the same as the name of the town Dan (14:14). "With great gains" is fulfilled when Israel goes out with the silver and gold of Egypt (Exod 12:35–36); רְכוּשׁ is the word of Abram's own goods (12:5; 13:6) and of the spoil of Sodom (14:11–21).

19. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "afterward" (KJV, RSV)

    Ruling 2

    אַחֲרֵי־כֵן is "after thus," an idiom of time (6:4; 23:19; 25:26). "Thus" is the home gloss of כֵּן, but "after thus" is not English, and the two words are printed together as "after that."

20. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "in a good old age" (KJV, RSV)

    Rulings 39, 2

    שֵׂיבָה is gray hair: "you will bring down my gray hair in sorrow to Sheol" (42:38; 44:29, 31); "gray hair is a crown of splendour" (Prov 16:31). The concrete word is kept (39): "good grayness," a gray head in a good old age. The promise is kept at Abraham's death: "in good grayness, old and satisfied" (25:8). שָׁלוֹם "peace" is wholeness and well-being; its root is the root of Salem (14:18) and of שָׁלֵם "complete" in v. 16.

21. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full" (KJV) / "not yet complete" (RSV)

    Rulings 103, 2, 91

    הֵנָּה is "hither," and with עַד in time it is "hitherto" (103; Josh 17:14; 1 Sam 1:16): the same word twice in one verse, "they shall return hither… hitherto." The KJV and RSV print "yet." שָׁלֵם is "complete," whole, the root of שָׁלוֹם in v. 15 and of Salem (14:18): Abram will go to his fathers in peace, but the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet whole. The land is given, but not taken, until the guilt of those in it is full (Lev 18:24–28; Deut 9:5). "A fourth generation" counts the four hundred years of v. 13 at a hundred years to a generation; Exod 6:16–20 gives Levi, Kohath, Amram and Moses.

22. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 2, 74

    עֲלָטָה is "dusk," found only here and in Ezek 12:6–7, 12, where the prophet goes out "in the dusk" with his baggage. The oven and the torch are the smoke and fire of the presence: Sinai "all in smoke, because Adonai had come down on it in fire, and its smoke went up like the smoke of a kiln" (Exod 19:18), "the torches" at the giving of the Ten Words (Exod 20:18), and the pillar of cloud and fire (Exod 13:21). Abram does not pass between the pieces; only the smoke and fire pass, and the oath is one-sided. גְּזָרִים "sections" is the word of Ps 136:13, "who cut the Reed Sea into sections."

23. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 37, 2

    כָּרַת בְּרִית "cut a covenant" uses the verb of v. 10's rite, and בְּרִית keeps "covenant," as in 6:18 and 9:9–17 (37). "I have given" is a perfect: the gift is spoken as done. The bounds, from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates, are the bounds of Solomon's kingdom (1 Kgs 5:1) and of the promise in Deut 1:7 and Josh 1:4. "The river of Egypt" may be the Nile, or the Wadi el-Arish, the "brook of Egypt" (Num 34:5).

24. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 18, 74

    The list has ten peoples, where most lists have six or seven (Exod 3:8; Deut 7:1). The Kenite is of the name of Cain (Num 24:21–22, a pun on קֵן "nest"); the Kenizzite of Kenaz, an Edomite clan (36:11) to which Caleb belonged (Num 32:12); the Kadmonite is "the Easterner," of קֶדֶם (see the note at 13:11). Genesis Rabbah 44:23 counts the three extra peoples as Edom, Moab and Ammon, kept for the age to come. The names table has the forms.

    See the table