Fr. Stephen De Young: Verse seven: “Then he said to him, ‘I am the God who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land and inherit it.’ ” So why does he say that? Well, one other note, too. There is in some Midrashic Jewish interpretation, one of the questions that some of that interpretation tries to answer is: Why Abram? Like, out of all the humans— I mean, there weren’t that many humans in 2000 BC compared to today, but there were still a lot of humans. There were millions of humans on the earth. Why this guy in particular? Why does he get called? Why does he get the promises? Ultimately, that’s a question we can’t answer. God did what he did. It’s like asking: Why the Theotokos?

But in this Midrashic Jewish interpretation, one of the things they lit on is that he says he brought him out of Ur of the Chaldeans. Well, Ur in addition to being the Sumerian word for city, which is where the name actually comes from, but that word in Hebrew can mean fire. So they said what if this means: “I brought you out of the fire of the Chaldeans?” And so you get these big narratives. Some of them put Abram at the building of the Tower of Babel, and he refuses to worship idols, they throw him into a furnace—Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego style, in Babylon—and God delivers him out of it, out of the fire of the Chaldeans. And so that then is hypothesizing: “Oh, well, it’s because he was not worshiping pagan gods and this. This is why God chose him.”

I present that as a curiosity. [Laughter] The real answer is that—Why the Theotokos? Why St. Peter? Why St. Andrew? Why Daniel? Why Isaiah? Why St. Paul? This isn’t something available to us, why God picks whom he picks to do what he chooses them to do. But I thought I would note it. Also, Ur of the Chaldeans is completely anachronistic.

Q1: There are no Chaldeans yet.

Fr. Stephen: There are no Chaldeans yet. The word did not exist in 2000 BC. “Chaldeans” refers to specifically the Neo-Bablyonian Empire.

Q1: So it would be like saying Native American tribe location of the Americans.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Calling them Native Americans in the 13th century. [Laughter] Or saying, “This tribe lived near Lafayette, Louisiana, in the 13th century.” So the Neo-Bablyonian Empire is where Ur later was, but much later, like the exile. So this is another place, at least, where the text has been updated since the time of Moses, because that’s not a word that Moses ever encountered or knew. So that was a later identifier. It was probably “originally”—I’m doing scare-quotes, because “original” doesn’t exist and doesn’t matter—but likely “originally” just said “from Ur.” “Who brought you from Ur to this land.”

Q1: Eventually people didn’t know where Ur was.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so they’re clarifying for a later audience where that was in the world. “To give you this land and inherit it.” But overall, this is identifier. Does the phrasing of that ring a bell with anybody? “I am Yahweh your God who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land.”

Q1: “Brought you out of Egypt.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. Beginning of Exodus 20, beginning of the Ten Commandments. “I am Yahweh your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” So this phrasing is very deliberate in terms of what’s about to happen in the story. This is the language you use when you’re initiating a covenant. The word that’s usually translated “covenant” in Hebrew is beriyth; the Greek word is diathiki. That is the same word that’s translated by King James translators as “testament.” So, literally, the Old Testament and the New Testament, that’s the Old Covenant and the New Covenant; that’s what the name means.

But so a beriyth, when people are explaining what a covenant is, we tend to use sort of modern examples that don’t really work. Sometimes people say a covenant is like a contrast. Well, “testament,” you get “last will and testament.” We tend to [say it’s like] a contract, like two people sign, or a treaty, like between two countries. “Treaty” is a little closer. But it refers to a particular type of treaty that was common in the ancient world at the time of Moses, and for a couple hundred years before and after, and that followed a particular format.

Scholars and other nerds refer to this as a suzerain-vassal treaty or a Hittite suzerainty treaty or that kind of thing. The reason the Hittites are involved is we have a bunch of Hittite tablets of these that follow the same format as the ones in the Bible, but it wasn’t just the Hittites; this was a common thing in the Ancient Near East. It’s called a suzerain-vassal treaty because it’s issued by a suzerain, by a great king or a high king— We talked about this before when we talked about Chedorlaomer. You would have the king of a large city who would be able to sort of project his will—through force of arms, through economic power, etc.—over the neighboring cities and the neighboring kings. Sometimes that just happened through the realities of economics and that kind of thing. Sometimes that happened through war: you’d go and conquer those cities and make their kings your vassals, make them pay tribute.

But when that happened— So the king of Ur—we’re in the Ur III period. The king of Ur basically takes over, by extortion or whatever means, another city; he makes the king of that city his vassal, and he issues one of these covenants to that vassal. And that has a few parts, but the first part, the very first thing you do, is the great king, the high king, identifies himself, in exactly this kind of language. “I am—whoever. I am Shaloubiouba of the Hittites. And here is what I have done. I am the ruler of this city. I have conquered the lands of so-and-so. Da de de da da.” To identify himself. Then after that, it outlines: “Here’s what you are required to do.” And then: “Here is what I will do in return, if you do what you’re supposed to do.” So that would be like: “Here’s the tribute you offer me at this time. Here’s this, here’s that, here’s the rules. If I go to war, you need to send me so many soldiers, etc., etc. And then in return, usually, primarily, I will protect you from foreign invasion. I will secure trade routes. I will do these things.” And then it was: “Here are the consequences if you break the treaty,” which is usually: “I will come back and you will all die.”

That’s sort of what we saw go on with Chedorlaomer and the king of Sodom. Remember, he had made them vassals, they decided not to be vassals any more, he came down there and made them vassals again. [Laughter] This is— By using this language, this is telegraphing to us here in Genesis that God is about to issue a covenant to Abram. He is making Abram his vassal.

Now, the word that’s used in Hebrew regarding a covenant isn’t you “issue” a covenant or you “write up” a covenant; it’s you cut a covenant, [karat]: you cut a covenant with someone. And we’re about to see why.

Verse eight: “And he said, ‘Master and Lord, how will I know I will inherit it?’ So he said to him, ‘Bring me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old female goat, a three-year-old ram, a turtle-dove, and a young pigeon.’ ” This kind of sounds like quests in some MMOs I’ve played: “Bring me this list of random animals.” But so he says, “Bring me these animals.”

Verse ten: “So he brought all these to him and cut them in half down the middle and placed each piece opposite the other, but he did not cut the birds in two. And when the vultures came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away.” You notice, he doesn’t tell Abram to cut them in two, so Abram knows what’s going on here when he cuts them. This is where the “cutting a covenant” comes from. He goes and he gets the animals, and he cuts them lengthwise in half; he sort of butterflies them, which is hard to do with a heifer, but he does it. So they get butterflied on the two sides. And of course, while he’s doing it with all these animals, this takes time, so vultures and buzzards are trying to come and get at the—

Q2: Obviously they had aliens help them. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Cattle mutilations, is that where you’re going with that? So he has to beat off the vultures and the buzzards and the… drive them away.

This gets turned into an interesting thing. There’s a text, a Second Temple Jewish text, called the Apocalypse of Abraham, that interprets these vultures and buzzards as being demons, being sort of demonic forces who are trying to mess up the ritual that’s going on between God and Abram, because they know, whatever it is, it’s going to be bad things for them in the future, even though they’re not sure exactly what’s going on. So all of these things get split, get cut.

Q3: Are all those sacrificial animals?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, those are all clean sacrificial animals.

Q4: So is this—? I’m reading about Noah. Are sacrifices— or have they been continuous or just sporadic during those generations?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. No, they’ve been continuous, but they’ve been at just built, constructed altars. Remember, we talked about that Abram, as he goes, has been building these altars in these different places, sort of as he travels. So there’s not one sanctuary where everybody goes to worship.

Q4: In worship of this God.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And so they’re building altars with stones. We’ll talk more about altar construction when we get further into the Torah, but one of the reasons— They’re actually not allowed, when they build an altar, to cut the stone. They’re supposed to use just the natural stone the way they find it, not apply their own—

Q4: This is pre-Mosaic law, so it just took shape naturally?

Fr. Stephen: Well, so Genesis, as we’ve seen, sort of retrojects things from later in the Torah. So we had the sabbath all the way back in creation; we have Noah bringing clean and unclean animals onto the ark, and you’re like… [Laughter] Etc. So these things get sort of projected back. So the idea is that these things are actually built into the creation, so the sabbath is actually built into the creation, into how God created things in Genesis 1. It’s not that these animals, God has decided that this animal is unclean and this animal is clean; that’s actually something in the nature of the animals at this point. So it’s because— And this is not the Rabbinic Jewish understanding of this. The Rabbinic Jewish understanding of this is that Abram, Noah, these people sort of mystically knew the Torah already in advance. But the traditional Christian interpretation of this is that, no, these things are—it’s a realist interpretation, that these things are actually true. That it’s not just God making rules arbitrarily, but that this is based in reality.

Verse twelve: “Now around sunset, a trance fell upon Abram, and behold, horror and great darkness fell upon him.” So what is this casting us back to, the sight of him falling into a trance?

Q2: Adam’s… When Eve was created.

Fr. Stephen: Right, when Eve was created. Except that was a more positive thing, even though it was getting ripped in half. [Laughter] That was still a more positive thing. But this is “great darkness and horror.” Now, where in the future does this come back? Where is there darkness later in the Torah? On top of Mount Sinai. We tend to, because of the New Testament, think of God as light, because we’re used to thinking of “light, good; darkness, evil,” therefore God is light. But God is also hidden in darkness, because this is going to become an important principle in the Torah, and we already saw it in the expulsion from paradise, that sinful humanity—sinful anything—can’t be in the presence of God’s holiness. And people can’t see God and live, even though he just saw the Word of God and lived. God is shrouded in darkness so that he can’t be seen, and he can’t be known, he can’t be comprehended with our mind.

And when we see people come into the presence of God, into the presence of the holiness of God, in the Torah and throughout the Hebrew Bible, they aren’t like: “Oh, yay! Cool!” or “Oh, wow! Awesome!” What does Isaiah? It’s kind of bowdlerized in the English as “Woe is me! I am undone!” [Laughter] An accurate translation would involve cursing, so I don’t blame them for not putting it in the Bible, but he is hosed, right? He is like: “I am wicked! I am sinful! It has suddenly become very apparent to me, and I should not be here in the presence of holy God. This will go poorly.” This is the kind of terror that this is talking about. That’s the darkness and the terror this is talking about. It’s not that he’s in some— He’s not in danger like he’s being attacked by something evil; it’s that this is— Even though, again—see, again, we see it here—there’s this God who keeps appearing to him and he keeps having these conversations with, and then there’s coming into the presence of God who’s shrouded in darkness, whom he can’t see, and which fills him with terror and dread because of his own sinfulness and uncleanness. So this is the latter encounter with God.

But God speaks to him again. Verse 13: “Then he said to Abram, ‘Know for certain that your seed will be strangers in a land not their own, and will serve them, and they will afflict and humble them 400 years.” What is this a prediction of?

Q2: The exile.

Fr. Stephen: No, the exodus.

Q2: That time in—

Fr. Stephen: That sojourn in Egypt, yeah. The sojourn in Egypt. They were going to end up in a land not their own, not here. They’re going to be humbled for 400 years.

“Also, the nation they serve, I will judge, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions.” So he’s saying this is going to happen in the future; this is a prediction of the exodus. They’re going to become slaves in Egypt, they’re going to be humbled there, and then God’s going to judge Egypt and deliver them.

Verse 15: “But as for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace, buried in a good old age. Then in the fourth generation they shall return here, for the sin of the Amorites is not yet filled up.”

Q2: How did the Amorites get here?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right! So, people are going to get excited because I am going to, very briefly, talk about giants, which the Amorites are. The Amorites come— “Amorites,” the way we transliterate it, comes from the Akkadian word Amurru, which literally means “westerners,” because it referred originally to a group of people who came from western Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, that area which is to the west of Akkad and Sumer, to the west of Mesopotamia. One of them— They invaded in the middle of the third millennium BC.

Q2: Isn’t Hammurabi one of them?

Fr. Stephen: And Hammurabi is the most well-known one of them. And the Amurru, a big part of their claim to sort of dominion was that they claimed that they still had the secrets that were revealed by the gods before the flood to humanity, that no one else had. So is that ringing any bells from back when we were in Genesis 6 a few chapters ago with the nephilim? [Laughter] They were claiming to have this divine wisdom and were practicing the same kind of rituals which identified somebody as a giant clan.

So what God is saying is— because he’s identified him as what? The Person who brought you out of Ur to give you this land. But Abram is not going to receive that land during his lifetime, and so God is here telling him why, and he tells him two reasons. The last reason is the one we just read: “The sin of the Amorites is not yet filled up.” And this is— All the way through the Torah, in Joshua, later on in the historical books of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, this imagery of a cup being filled up is used to describe the sins of particular people groups.

So there is a certain tension—not within God, but within the way God works in the world—because on the one hand, God is just and establishes justice and judges rightly—will put things back in order. And so that means if someone is wicked, it’s going to look an awful lot like punishment for them when God comes and straightens things out. On the other hand, as we’re told explicitly in Isaiah, “God does not desire the death of the wicked (man), but that he turn and live.” God does not want to punish; he does not want to destroy; he wants people to repent; he wants nations to repent. That’s what he wants.

The tension there between those two is what we call mercy, that period of time when God allows our sin and wickedness to go unpunished, allows things, tolerates things not being right, for the sake of our potential repentance. And what is our repentance? Our repentance is us making them right. It’s us making things right, not saying, “I’m sorry, God.” It’s us making things right so God doesn’t have to. This is what it means in the New Testament: if we judge ourselves, we will not be judged. If we put things right ourselves, God won’t have to do it on the day of judgment.

There’s this period of time, and what God is saying to Abram here is, for the Amorites, we’re still in that period of time; there’s still mercy. Now, God knows they’re not going to repent. That’s why he says it’s not full yet. He knows there’s going to come a point where it’s full, and when it’s full what that means is, on one hand— If we imagine justice like scales, we’ve got two scales: on one of these scales is his desire for the repentance of the wicked; on the other side of the scales is the cry of the innocent victim, like Abel’s blood crying out of the ground in Genesis 4, a few chapters before this. Those two things are on the scale. And eventually the cries of the victims, the cries of the oppressed, the people who have been harmed, who have been the victims of the evil—eventually it tilts, and when that happens, God comes in judgment. We can see this happen to Sodom in not too many chapters, where it tilts and that’s it.

So the time is going to come for the Amorites—in the book of Joshua—when that’s going to be it. The time for repentance is over and now is the time for God to make things right. But he’s saying, “That’s not yet, and so I’m not going to take their land away from them and give it to you yet, until this is done.”

The other reason has to do with what he’s going to do with Abraham’s descendants and forming them into Israel. They’re going to spend this time in Egypt. And here it talks about humbling them. Egypt is going to be referred to later in the book of Exodus, the time in Egypt as a furnace. We tend to think, “Oh, this is just horrible; they’re going through this horrible trauma, this horrible experience,” but a furnace is also what you use to refine things, to refine metal, to burn away the garbage and just leave the gold, the silver, the precious gems. So this is going to be an experience of suffering, but suffering that will potentially— has the potential to sanctify them.

So God is here giving Abram more detail about what’s going to happen in the next generations. He’s saying, “I am going to—” The immediate level— Because we’ve now seen there’s sort of two layers to these promises. There’s this stars layer, there’s this salvation layer that’s the ultimate layer. And then there’s this sort of physical layer: “Yes, you, Abram, are going to father a son in history, in your lifetime, and a bunch of people are going to be descended from you, and they are going to come and they are going to live in this piece of land.” So there’s that layer. And those two layers, if you think about prophecy, the way prophecy works in the Old Testament, there’s a sign that’s given that’s sort of immediate, and then that sign that’s immediate gives you the proof that the bigger piece that’s off in the future is also going to happen.

A quick example of that: Luke 2. Angels come to shepherds, tell them, “The Messiah has been born. He’s going to redeem Israel.” And then what does the angel say? “This will be a sign for you: you will go and find a baby, wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger”: Go over here, you’ll see a baby lying in a food-trough, an animal food-trough, in a cave with animals. That’s not something you see every day. So if you go see that, that’ll be a sign to you that we’re telling you the truth and that that Baby is the Messiah. This is also what, when Jesus was preaching—the people come to him and ask for a sign. “Oh, show us some sign so that we know what you’re telling us is true.” And Christ says, “Woe to you— Cursed is the generation that demands signs or they won’t believe.”

So God is saying to Abram, “Look, you’re not going to— I mean, you’re going to have this son, but you’re not going to see me keep this land promise during your lifetime, but I am, and here’s why you’re not going to see it. And so you still know that this bigger promise in the future is true.” We saw this in Hebrews, the way Hebrews treats these promises, that the physical promised land, them coming and living in that land for a couple centuries, that that was the sign—that wasn’t the end itself, that wasn’t the goal, that wasn’t the purpose, that wasn’t the promise. That was the sign of the bigger promise of salvation, of theosis, that it was true. When you see X happen, you’ll know that Y will happen. And correspondingly, because it happened, the land now becomes irrelevant. [Laughter] But that was a sign. The same way that the manger Jesus was lying in wasn’t like: “Oh, we need to go back and find that manger and put the Eucharist in it” or something. That would be the same kind of thing: you’re mistaking the sign for the prophecy.

So this is what God is getting at: “You’re not going to see this immediate sign; here’s why. But the rest of this will be true.” And we’re going to see then a further confirmation. Do you have a—?

Q1: I was just going to ask: Are the Amorites the ones who depict their god as having fish fins, or am I thinking of something else?

Fr. Stephen: You’re thinking of the apkallu, I think, the Seven Sages. That was in… Well, yeah, because the old Babylonian dynasty had versions of those stories.

Q1: I was just— It seemed—

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes, but also other people.

Q1: It seems like that implies something about the flood.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that the— So the first of the Seven Sages is part-fish, part-human, and comes up out of the river, out of the underworld, out of the deep, and shares wisdom. [Laughter] Yeah.

Q3: So when you were talking about the Pharisees asking Jesus for a sign, and he doesn’t give them a sign, there’s one time at which he said, “You will not receive any sign but the sign of Jonah.”

Fr. Stephen: The sign of Jonah.

Q3: And that’s kind of reversing it, right? “The sign that you will receive is the sign that was already given in the past,” which points to him? Is that kind of—?

Fr. Stephen: Well, he was going to repeat it, because this is one of the things a lot of people don’t realize, but we’ll emphasize when we get to Jonah. The reason we read Jonah on Holy Saturday, pretty much the whole book is one of the Old Testament readings in the baptismal Liturgy, is that—a lot of people don’t realize this—Jonah died. He wasn’t sitting in Monstro with a campfire like in Pinocchio.

Q1: The fish was Leviathan.

Fr. Stephen: The fish was Leviathan, he swims down to the abyss.

Q1: The spirit [Inaudible] or something.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And one of the— We just had, a couple weeks ago, on Sunday I noted it in one of the hymns. It’s from Jonah’s point of view, and he says, “The fish was my grave.” [Laughter] And so the idea was he was three days in the fish; he was dead, and then God brought him back to life. So that’s a way of Christ referring to— Because what was the sign to the Pharisees? That Christ died and was in the tomb, and he rose on the third day. That’s the sign you’ll receive, will be the sign of Jonah. And what happened to Jonah was sort of a type, then, that Christ fulfilled, a pattern that Christ fulfilled, and which should have the Pharisees, when Christ rose from the dead, been like: “Oh. Well, yes, then everything he was saying was true, because he rose from the dead. And God thereby vindicated him,” which, if you read the early chapters of Acts, that’s exactly how they preach about Christ to those same Pharisees. They talk about God having vindicated him as the Messiah by having raised him from the dead.

Verse 17: “It came to pass, when the sun went down, that there was a flame. And behold, there appeared a smoking oven and lamps of fire that passed between those divided pieces.” So he has the split animals, this flame—which, think later: where does this thing show up, a moving flame? The pillar of fire in Exodus, that we would hold to be a manifestation of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God in the Old Testament. So this covenant is Trinitarian, to boot. We saw the Word initiate it; we saw the darkness, the presence of the Father; and we see the Holy Spirit now, this manifestation of God’s presence, [which] moves between the pieces.

So when this ritual is normally done, and what people would have been expecting—the expected pattern for this would have been for Abram to walk between the pieces, because he’s the vassal; he’s the lesser party. And walking between the pieces was a way of taking an oath, saying, “If I violate this covenant, if I violate what is expected of me, then may I be like these animals: split in two, dead, ripped apart.” So this gets inverted, though. God, who is the higher party, passes through and takes this oath, that if this covenant is broken, God will be split in two.

Now, immediately, this would say to Abram, “Well, God can’t die, so now I know, even though I’m not going to see my descendants living in the land, I know that this is true. Even though I’m not going to see that sign, I have now seen God take this oath, so I know God will keep it.” But let’s think a little further ahead in history. What’s going to happen with this covenant? Are his descendants going to stay in the land?

Q1: Not in the long run.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because they’re not going to keep this covenant; they’re going to violate it in every way they possibly can. They’re going to break this covenant. And what— How does God, then, fix that situation? He dies. He has to become man to do it, but he dies. And so now: covenant renewed. The new covenant that we get in the New Testament is really a renewed covenant, a re-established covenant, by Christ, because he takes care of the violation of the old covenant and restores it. So, see, we get Christ’s death and resurrection: we get the whole Gospel and the Holy Trinity, right here in Genesis 15—and giants, to boot! I mean, what more could you want in a chapter? The giants are about to come back, too.

Verse 18: “On the same day, the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, ‘I will give this land to your seed, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the River Euphrates—the Kenites, the Kenezzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Euaites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.’ ” That list will become familiar as we move through here: those are all the giant clans.

Q2: Are those only in Canaan, or is that all Hittite—?

Fr. Stephen: That area, that geographic area he just described.

Q2: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: Now notice— I have to say this, because of our dispensationalist friends. Notice here: “I will give this land to your seed (plural),” and then he describes that land. He does not say, “Those are going to be the borders of the nation of Israel. Sorry, dispensationalists. He says, “That’s the land that’s going to go to Abram’s descendants. That gets fulfilled by the end of Joshua.

Why? We’ll see when we get to Deuteronomy 2, God’s going to go through all of the other Abrahamites. So he’s going to talk about the Edomites, who are descended from Esau, and say, “I brought them to this land,” which is part of this big piece of land he just described. He’s going to say, “I brought them here. I gave this to the Edomites. They drove out a couple of these giant clans from the land of Edom, and I gave it to them. And, guess what, Israel? You’re not allowed to take a single foot of that land, because it doesn’t belong to you; I gave it to them.” He’s going to say the same thing about the Amonites, who are descended from Lot; the Moabites, who are descended from Lot; the Ishmaelites, who become the Midianites, like Jethro, Moses’s father-in-law. All of these people are descended from Abraham, and all of them get pieces of this big swath of land.

At the end of all that listing in Deuteronomy 2, he says, “And now I’m bringing Israel to this piece of it, for them to have this strip.” But it’s not presenting Israel, in regard to the land, in regard to the promises of Abraham, as different from those other descendants of Abraham, other than firstborn status, but the others are still sons of Abraham, too, and receive promises, too. So this is going to be a theme we’re going to see over and over again as we move through the Torah, breaking this thing we’ve got in our head. I think we all know where it came from, that the Old Testament is just about ethnic Israel or people blood-descended from Abraham, blood-descended from Jacob, and that’s all the Old Testament is about, that’s all the Torah is about—it’s not. Wait till the Greeks show up! There’s a bunch of Greeks who are going to show up later.

But this is—since we’re at a chapter break, time-wise, this is a good place to stop for this evening. So we’ll pick up in chapter 16 next week, Lord willing. Thanks, everybody!