When teaching the book of Genesis, after chapter 14 my favourite chapter was chapter 15. What intrigued me there was the ritual which is described in verses 7-12
This chapter is about God’s promise to Abraham. It seems that the patriarch is concerned about who his heir will be. He asks God if Eliezer, his house steward will be his heir.
God responds by saying “No he shall not be your heir…” instead “your heir shall be one from your own body.”
As a form of reassurance Abraham is commanded to arrange and take part in a certain ritual:- as follows.
7 And he said to him, “I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.” 8 But he said, “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” 9 He said to him, “Bring me a heifer three years old, a she-goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” 10 And he brought him all these, cut them in two, and laid each half over against the other; but he did not cut the birds in two. 11 And when birds of prey came down upon the carcasses, Abram drove them away.
12 As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram; and lo, a dread and great darkness fell upon him.
This was the ritual which fascinated me because it seemed so unlike anything else I had read in the legalistic regulations of the books of the law or indeed the practice of the temple. I would confidently tell my students that the ritual must be very ancient and would by way of corroborative evidence point to the detail which described the cutting of the animals. In Hebrew the verb used for the making of a covenant is “cut”. One “cuts” a covenant in Hebrew.
In reality and with the luxury of time to prepare one’s lessons with greater care, I would now wish to apologise to all my former students because I believe I was wrong in almost every respect – structurally and linguistically wrong – and it can’t get much worse than that!
Over the years I have also been very disappointed to find that the version of the daily lectionary which I use skips over Genesis 15 completely.
So what needs to be said about this ritual?
Initially I think we need to consider the structure of the chapter. Chapter 15 verses 1-6 seem to be a self-contained episode. There would possibly be no good reason why verses 7-21 should not stand alone.
Scholars from the time of Gunkel regarded the events of the rite as being very ancient. Albright and von Rad in part agreed. More recent research has cast doubt on whether or not Genesis 15 is really about a covenant at all. Lothar Perlitt has suggested that the story is a solemn oath of promise. He maintains that the patriarchal oath as a reinforcement of the simple promise made to the patriarchs belongs to Deuteronomic theology. In Genesis 12-50 wherever it occurs, the legalist Deuteronomic language is in evidence ( as for example in Gen 50:24) This of course means that while the subject in the text is Abraham, the real point of the story is the actualization of the promise which belongs to the theology and expectation of the Israelite community in the late exilic period.
Even a reputable scholar such as R E Clements wanted to assign the passage to a court official living in the time of David. Clements of course wanted to maintain the traditional view that the Yahwist school was responsible for the transmission. He thought Genesis 15 was used by the Yahwist to
reinforce the role of kingship, the possession of the land, and the authentication of the Davidic kingdom.
Many people I suspect will find the reading in to a simple text a much later meaning difficult to agree with, but as I pointed out in my study of Genesis 14, I believe that much of what we read about Abraham is in the hands of editors who were as conscious of the needs of the contemporary situation as they were about relating the events in the life of an ancient worthy. J Van Setters has also pointed out that the phrase “Ur of the Chaldees” only makes sense in the late Babylonian period.
But what of the strange ritual? It seems to be universally recognised that what we have here is the enactment of a solemn oath. By passing between the two halves of the animals the person making the oath invokes death upon himself should he break his word and the terms of the oath. Here the oath ritual is transferred to God. The promise of the land reinforced by the oath weighs on him. Although the animals here are ones that would normally be used in a sacrifice, this may be an attempt to bring an unfamiliar ritual in line with the idea of sacrifice familiar to Israelite readers.
It is also interesting to note that Abraham divides the animals down the middle. The verb used for cutting is רתב and is very unusual. It does not occur anywhere else in the Old Testament, although it does appear as a noun in Jeremiah 34:18 where the same rite is described! Normally the word to cut would be כרת and although that is found in verse 18 it seems likely that the action described in the ritual originally used the more unusual רתב
In conclusion I think we have here a ritual of a solemn oath which has been utilised by the author of this part of the book of Genesis to describe a joint action undertaken by Abraham and God. The whole episode has been written in the form of a covenant ceremony between God and Abraham, but the real purpose of which was to give assurance to the people about either the legitimacy of the Davidic kingdom and monarchy in the tenth century or the reassurance to the people of the late exilic period that they would return to the land of Israel one day. Both of course are depicted as the will of God.
I think today there are very few scholars who would wish to support the idea that we have here a reminiscence of a highly unusual event in the life of one of the first patriarchs.
Thought points
I sometimes wonder if we underestimate the personality of Abraham and I am slightly saddened by the lack of scholarly interest in him.
I was fascinated to find how much emphasis is placed on the patriarch by Islam. There is a whole corpus of literature and information about Abraham in the Qur’an.
Even the Christian Church misses out so much information about him in its lectionary, which I find disappointing.
Hokmah 