Scripture Daily

Context No. 248 of 4322 · Genesis

Context · Reflection

Genesis 15:8-21: in context

8He said, “Lord GOD, how will I know that I will inherit it?” 9He said to him, “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” 10He brought him all these, and divided them in the middle, and laid each half opposite the other; but he didn’t divide the birds. 11The birds of prey came down on the carcasses, and Abram drove them away. 12When the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. Now terror and great darkness fell on him. 13He said to Abram, “Know for sure that your offspring will live as foreigners in a land that is not theirs, and will serve them. They will afflict them four hundred years. 14I will also judge that nation, whom they will serve. Afterward they will come out with great wealth; 15but you will go to your fathers in peace. You will be buried at a good old age. 16In the fourth generation they will come here again, for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet full.” 17It came to pass that, when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold, a smoking furnace and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. 18In that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, “I have given this land to your offspring, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates: 19the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, 20the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, 21the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.”

Abram has been promised land and descendants, and he asks the plain question a person asks: how am I to know? God's answer is one of the strangest and oldest rituals in the Bible. He tells Abram to bring several animals, cut them in half, and lay the halves opposite each other with a path between them.

In the custom of that world, this is how two parties sealed a solemn oath. They would walk together between the split carcasses, as if to say, let me become like these animals if I break my word. So the pieces are laid out and the path is ready, and then the ritual does not go the way it should. A deep sleep falls on Abram, and a thick and dreadful darkness, and he does not walk through anything. Instead, when the sun is down, a smoking furnace and a flaming torch, standing for God himself, pass between the pieces alone. God walks the path of the self-curse by himself, while Abram lies unconscious, and takes the whole weight of the covenant onto his own side. The promise is not going to depend on Abram keeping up his end, because Abram was never asked to make the walk.

The content is sober too. God tells Abram in advance that his offspring will spend four hundred years enslaved before they inherit anything, and that he is holding off on the land until the sin of the people living there is actually full, giving even them generations of room. But the heart of it is the sleeping man and the God who walks alone. Whose faithfulness am I secretly counting on to keep a promise, mine, when the one who made it walked the path by himself?

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