Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Genesis · About this commentary
A smoking furnace passing between the pieces
Genesis 15:7-21
7 He said to Abram, “I am Yahweh who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldees, to give you this land to inherit it.” · WEB
Abram asks how he can be sure, and God answers by binding himself alone in a ceremony where both parties should have walked.
Two verses after believing, Abram asks for something to hold on to: Lord Yahweh, how will I know that I will inherit it?
The question is not treated as a failure of the faith just credited to him. It is answered, at length, with a ceremony — which suggests that asking God for assurance is a different thing from doubting him.
The animals are divided and laid in two rows with a path between them, and the birds are left whole. This was how a binding agreement was made in that world: the parties walked together between the pieces, invoking on themselves the fate of the animals if they broke faith. The oath is enacted rather than signed, and the meaning of the walk is that whoever breaks faith should be dealt with as these animals were.
The waiting is described in two details that make the scene human. Birds of prey come down on the carcasses and Abram drives them away — an afternoon spent guarding a covenant that has not happened yet. Then the sun goes down and a deep sleep falls on him, with terror and great darkness. Whatever else the presence of God is in this book, it is not comfortable.
And in the dark he is told the future, and it is not the future a man hopes for. His offspring will be foreigners in a land not theirs, enslaved and afflicted four hundred years. Then a judgment on that nation, and a coming out with great wealth. He himself will die in peace at a good old age.
One clause in it is among the most important sentences in the Old Testament for reading everything that follows: In the fourth generation they will come here again, for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet full.
The delay is explained, and the explanation is moral. The land is not given now because its present inhabitants have not yet reached the point at which their removal would be just. God is described as waiting — for centuries — while a people fills up a measure, which means the conquest recorded in Joshua is presented here, four hundred years in advance, as a judgment with a docket rather than as a land grab. It also means God's patience with the Canaanites cost his own people four centuries in Egypt.
Then the ceremony completes itself, and the way it completes is the whole point. A smoking furnace and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. Fire and smoke are how God's presence is described at Sinai and in the wilderness. He passes through.
Abram does not. He is asleep, and nothing in the account brings him between the pieces. A ceremony that required both parties to walk is performed by one, which makes the covenant one-sided in the only sense that matters: God has invoked the fate of the animals on himself and has not asked Abram to underwrite anything. The man asked how he could be sure. The answer was that the surety is not his.
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