Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Genesis · About this commentary
Walk before me: the covenant in the flesh
Genesis 17:1-14
1 When Abram was ninety-nine years old, Yahweh appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am God Almighty. Walk before me and be blameless. · WEB
Thirteen silent years end with a new name for God, a new name for Abram, and a sign cut into the body of everyone in his household.
When Abram was ninety-nine years old. Ishmael was born when he was eighty-six, and nothing is recorded in between. Thirteen years of silence sit between the last chapter and this one — the longest gap in the Abraham narrative, and it follows immediately on the attempt to secure the promise by other means.
God opens with a name not used before: I am God Almighty. The Hebrew is El Shaddai, and it appears at the points in Genesis where the promise most obviously exceeds what nature will supply. A hundred-year-old man is being addressed by the name that asserts sufficiency.
The charge that follows is two verbs: Walk before me and be blameless. Enoch and Noah walked with God; walking before him is living in his sight, conducting a life under observation. And blameless is the word used of Noah — whole, sound, with nothing held back — which is a demand and is stated after thirteen years in which Abram had plainly not managed it.
Then the covenant is restated and enlarged, and the enlargement is startling. He will be the father of a multitude of nations, and kings will come from him. The promise made to one childless couple has been growing steadily — a great nation in chapter twelve, offspring like dust in thirteen, like stars in fifteen — and now it is nations in the plural, with royal lines in them.
And the name changes to match. Your name will no more be called Abram, but your name will be Abraham; for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations. Every person who addressed him from that day forward was obliged to call him the father of a multitude, while he had one son by a slave and no legitimate heir. The name is a claim staked in advance, and he had to answer to it for a year before Isaac was born.
Two words in the promise carry unusual weight. It is everlasting, twice; and its content is not primarily land or descendants but relationship: to be a God to you and to your offspring after you. That clause is the substance of every covenant in Scripture afterward, and it is stated here first.
Then the sign, and it is unlike the previous one. The bow after the flood hung in the sky where God said he would look at it. This one is cut into the body, is permanent, is private, and is borne by the human party. Every male in the household is included — those born in the house and those bought with money, which means foreigners with no descent from Abraham at all are brought inside the covenant sign from the first day it exists.
What circumcision is called matters for everything that follows in Scripture. It is a token of the covenant — a sign of something already given, not a payment for it. Abraham had been counted righteous by believing, two chapters and at least thirteen years earlier Genesis 15:6, and this seals what was already reckoned to him Romans 4:11. The order is not reversible, and the whole New Testament argument about how anyone is accepted turns on it.
settled What this mark means