Genesis For Everyone, Part 2 chapter 17-50

John Goldingay

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780281061259
• eBook ISBN: 9780281065288
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The first in a major new series of guides to the books of the Old Testament written in an accessible and anecdotal style. The series is suitable for personal or group use and the format is also appropriate for daily study. This series offers a natural progression from the successful 'For Everyone' series of New Testament translations and commentaries.

GENESIS 17:1–6
Your Name Will Be Abraham

¹Abram was ninety-nine years old. Yahweh appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am El Shadday. Live your life before me and be a person of integrity, ²and I will make my covenant between me and you, and make you very, very numerous.” ³Abram fell on his face; and God spoke with him: ⁴“Here is my own covenant with you. You will be the ancestor of a horde of nations, ⁵and you will no longer be called Abram. Your name will be Abraham, because I have made you the ‘ancestor of a horde’ of nations. ⁶I will make you very, very fruitful and make you into nations. From you kings will come.”

Names are important. My middle name is Edgar, which was my father’s first name. When I was being baptized, family legend says my grandmother leaned over to my mother and asked why it was not also to be my first name. My mother allegedly replied, “Because they will call his father Big Ed and him Little Ed” (which would be fine in the United States but would not work in Britain where “big head” suggests having too big an opinion of yourself). I don’t think my parents realized that John is ultimately a shortened version of Johanan, “Yahweh showed grace,” which is a neat name to be given. If they had realized, they would have been glad, because they had waited a while for the gift of a child. Names can suggest people’s destinies or significance, or say something important about their parents’ prayers for them.

So far, Genesis has been talking about “Abram.” In Genesis 17 the name changes to the familiar form “Abraham.” God brings about this change in connection with another reaffirmation of the promise to make Abraham into a numerous people, which God now expresses in a different way by declaring that Abraham will be the “ancestor” of a “horde” of nations. The first part of the name (ab) is the word for an ancestor or a father (in the New Testament, abba is the Aramaic equivalent). Now, if anyone wondered about the meaning of the earlier name Abram, they would probably conclude it meant “exalted father/ancestor.” In a sense it already thus constitutes a promise of what Abram will be (there was nothing particularly exaltedabout him in his beginnings). And if you asked someone back in Harran what the name Abraham meant, they would probably say it meant the same as Abram (that is, these are two different spellings of the same name, like John and Jon or Ann and Anne). But in Hebrew, a “horde” is a hamon, so that within the name Abraham you can see most of that word (it is the business part of the name, too; -on is simply an ending, like the -ing on “ending”). On the basis of that, God can give a new significance to the longer, more familiar version of the name.

There are other significant aspects to what God says to Abraham. Genesis tells us that “Yahweh” appeared to Abram, but God’s own self-introduction to Abraham is “I am El Shadday.” Yahweh is the name God will reveal to Moses and the name by which God will be known to Israel. While Genesis knows that Yahweh is also acting and speaking in Abraham’s day and is thus quite happy to use the name Yahweh, it also knows Abraham himself would not have used it. Names such as El Shadday correspond more to the way Abraham would have spoken. This usage signifies that the real God is involved here, the God who will be involved with Israel, but it preserves the distinctiveness of the way God would later speak to Moses.

God gives Abraham two significant biddings. First, he is to live his life before God. “Live your life” in Hebrew is the word literally meaning “walk,” but it is a form of that verb that suggests walking about rather than simply making a single walk from A to B. It is the verb used of Noah’s and Enoch’s walking about or living their lives “with” God. Abraham is to walk his walk or live his life “before” God, which makes a different point. Abraham’s walk will be one that God is watching and watching over, which is both an encouragement and a challenge. Both are significant in the context. God will be watching over Abraham protectively, as God has been doing through Abraham’s ill-advised Egyptian adventure and his expedition to rescue Lot (Genesis 12–14), as he promised in Genesis 15 and will promise again here. God will also be watching to see what kind of person he is. Like Noah (Genesis 6:9), Abraham is to be a person of integrity. The word is usually translated “blameless,” which makes it sound impossibly demanding.

But the word God uses suggests not the absence of any faults but the presence of a positive quality (which is, in a way, at least as demanding an expectation). More literally, God wants Abraham to be “whole,” though in our context that would have psychological overtones. God wants Abraham to be wholly committed to God’s ways. God doesn’t expect him to be sinless; God is realistic and can cope with people making moral mistakes. Rather, God looks for a certain direction in people’s lives, a certain cast to their lives, a fundamental moral wholeness or straightness.

In connection with that, God will make a covenant commitment to Abraham. Actually God has already done that, and Genesis 15 was clear that making the covenant did not issue from Abraham’s being a person of integrity. He had not been that when they went down to Egypt. If Abraham made a contribution at all to the making of the covenant, it was simply by trusting in God’s promise. Nor was the making of that covenant conditional on any acts Abraham would do. Yet God’s commitment to Abraham was designed to involve Abraham’s integrity, and if that integrity is not forthcoming, it is not clear that God’s purpose in relating to Abraham can be fulfilled. Abraham’s integrity was not the basis of the covenant, but it was essential to its working. In this sense, God can only go on affirming the covenant commitment if Abraham does the same. Otherwise (as with a marriage relationship) things will simply not work. It takes two to tango.

God repeats earlier promises about flourishing and about nations coming from him, and also adds the note about “kings.”

GENESIS 17:7–8
Aliens and Strangers

⁷“I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations, as an agelong covenant, to be God for you and for your offspring after you. ⁸I will give to you, and to your offspring after you, the country in which you stay as aliens, all the country of Canaan, as an age-long holding, and I will be God for them.”

There is a world of difference between being an alien and being a citizen. The New York Times has an ethical agony page where the columnist discusses some dilemma. Last week a reader was taking his family on vacation in Holland, where smoking pot is legal. Would it be okay to let his son do so there when it is illegal in the United States? he asked. Is it okay to smoke pot illegally in the United States if you think the ban on pot is a silly law? If I were looking at that question as an alien, a big consideration would be, “What would happen if I were found out?” A citizen risks a fine or imprisonment; I might risk deportation. I am in the United States only on sufferance. Taxation without representation is fine; as long as I behave, I am secure. But I do not have the security of a citizen. Aliens in the United States (or anywhere else) have even less security if they lack the right papers, and/or if citizens stop needing aliens to pick their lettuce or blow their leaves.

Genesis 12–16 has twice referred to the status Abraham and his people have as aliens in describing his position in Egypt and the position his descendants will eventually have in Egypt. In both contexts they will be aware of the insecurity attached to this status. It makes Abraham nervous about what will happen to Sarah (and to him!), and it will lead to his descendants being ill-treated by their hosts, as can happen to aliens in any country.

Solemnly, being an alien is also the position Abraham’s family has in Canaan itself, and the position it will continue to have for generations. While things generally work out OK for them as aliens there, they have to live in areas that don’t interest the Canaanites, and they have to go and find food elsewhere in a famine. So it is a significant promise that they will not always be aliens. One day the country will be their agelong or perpetual holding, and it cannot then simply be taken away from them. “Holding” most often refers to the tract of land that an individual family occupies; God allocates the country as a whole to the clans, and the clans allocate it to individual families, and no one can appropriate it. It is each family’s secure possession. That is the position God promises that Israel will eventually have in relation to the whole country of Canaan. Genesis 15:16 has made clear it will be a long time before thiscan happen, because there is no basis at the moment for throwing the Canaanites out of the country. But when God can justifiably do so, it can become Israel’s holding.

Given that eventually people in Ephraim and then many people in Judah will be exiled from the country, hearing about God’s giving it to Abraham’s descendants as an age-long or perpetual holding would raise questions and possibilities in the minds of listeners. The question would be how this loss of the country could have happened, though they should have little difficulty working that out; it is implicit in that comment about the Canaanites’ losing the country because of their waywardness. If that can happen to the Canaanites, it can surely happen to the Israelites, as the Torah makes explicit. The possibility issues from that word “agelong” or “perpetual.” English translations often use the word “everlasting,” which may suggest too much. In the Old Testament, how long is agelong or how perpetual is perpetual depends on the context. The word can mean “through all your life.” Maybe God simply means, “The country will be theirs as long as they live with integrity, but if they give themselves up to waywardness and fail to turn from that waywardness, they could totally lose it.” But then, if in the context of exile people do turn back, this promise offers them hope. Maybe their exile is not the end. In the context of twenty-first-century politics, the implication would be that we can see the Jewish people’s freedom to live unhindered in the country as an outworking of this promise that goes back to Abraham. But Genesis 15:16 would imply that God can hardly reckon that the Palestinian people can simply be thrown out of the country without reason in order to make that possible and that the Jewish people would be unwise to assume that God’s real commitment to them excludes the possibility of their losing the country again.

The New Testament takes up the image of life as an alien to describe the position of Christians in the world. We are aliens there (1 Peter 1:1, 4, 17; 2:11–12). The idea is not that God’s created world is not our home in the sense that we are just passing through it on the way to heaven. It is that we could not be citizens of the “world” because it works on a basis that has little to do with Christ. If we feel at home in that world, something worrying has happened to us.

Another basis for hope here is the link between the agelong or perpetual possession of the country and God’s agelong or perpetual covenant with Abraham. God has described the covenant with Noah as a perpetual one; now that expression is used of this covenant. The expression again raises the question of the cash value of the word “agelong” or “perpetual.” In making this commitment God might presuppose, “But of course all this assumes you stay faithful to me. If you do not do that, all bets are off.” God will not terminate the covenant arbitrarily, but if Abraham’s offspring withdraws, God will feel free to do so.

Christians have sometimes assumed that this is what God did when the Jewish people as a whole did not recognize Jesus, reckoning that the new covenant of which the New Testament speaks is made with the church rather than the Jewish people and that it replaces God’s covenant with the Jewish people. In effect Romans 9–11 asks whether that might have happened. Paul’s response is horror at the idea. How could the faithful God do that? It is as well God could not, he implies, because if God could terminate that commitment to the Jewish people because of its waywardness, then the church could be cast off in the same way. Actually God has not allowed the Jewish people to disappear, and they have been free to reestablish themselves in the country. This sign of God’s faithfulness can make the church sleep easier in its bed.

In other words, God will continue to be God for Abraham and his offspring. God uses that expression three times.

GENESIS 17:9–14
A Sign of Grace, Commitment, and Discipline

⁹God said to Abraham, “And you, you are to guard my covenant, you and your offspring after you, through their generations. ¹⁰This is the covenant that you are to guard, between me and you and your offspring after you: the circumcising of every male you have. ¹¹You are to be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskin. It will be a covenant sign between me and you. ¹²As a child of eight days, every male among you is to be circumcised, through your generations. The person born in the household and acquired for money from any foreigner, who does not belong to your offspring: ¹³he is definitely to be circumcised, the one born in your household and the one acquired for money. My covenant in your flesh will be an agelong covenant. ¹⁴But an uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin: that person will be cut from his kin. He has thwarted my covenant.”

As was once the custom in Britain, my parents had me baptized when I was a baby, even though this was the only involvement they had with the church apart from weddings and funerals. I don’t know exactly what they thought baptism was about, though I doubt if they regarded it as simply a social occasion. Given that they had waited a few years during which they had not been able to have a baby, they were thankful for my birth, and having me baptized would be a sign of this gratitude. When theologians seek to provide some further theological rationale for baptizing people as babies rather than waiting until they make their own profession of faith, they often emphasize that baptizing a baby reflects and testifies to baptism’s being a sign of God’s grace expressed in God’s covenant with Israel that is then extended to the church. Yet baptism is indeed also a sign of someone’s personal profession of faith, and baptizing people when they are in a position to make that profession matches that other aspect of its significance. Thus when I was a teenager and belonged for a while to a church that baptized people on the basis of their profession of faith, I was “rebaptized.” (A bishop I know blows a fuse at that expression, because really you can be baptized only once and being “rebaptized” implies renouncing your first “baptism.” So when someone who subsequently comes back to the Church of England wants to be ordained, he presses them to renounce their second “baptism.” I don’t think I have ever before come out with this shady event from my youth, so I may be in trouble.)

Both the baptism of babies and the baptism of people on profession of faith can thus have some theological rationale, and denominations that practice one or the other do not need to dismiss as misguided those that practice the other. In Israel, whereas the later practice of bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah signifies a person’s taking up a personal commitment to the Torah, the practice of circumcision testifies to God’s grace. Male circumcision was a common custom among Middle Eastern peoples, as has been the case in many other societies, but it was generally applied to boys on the verge of adulthood, not at birth. Applying it when they are born reflects the fact that they do nothing to earn it. It was God who made the covenant with Abraham, which in this way comes to apply to them.

In another sense the rite of circumcision (like infant baptism) does indicate the need for response to God’s grace. Paradoxically, this acceptance of responsibility is undertaken by the community as a whole, and in particular by the baby’s family. They must guard or keep or protect God’s covenant, and accepting the rite of circumcision is a way they do that.

While circumcision is the distinctive and exclusive sign of a distinctive and exclusive commitment to Abraham’s family, God’s instructions also emphasize that it does not apply to Abraham’s birth family alone but to everyone in his household—to all those who are part of the family business, whether they have always belonged to it or whether they are like those further members of the household whom Abraham and Sarah acquired in Egypt or might have acquired as a result of the adventure in Genesis 14. While they are “only” servants, they belong so firmly to the family that the covenant also applies to them. It is another expression of the way God’s involvement with Abraham and Sarah brings blessing through them to other people.

For us, some ethical questions are raised by the description of these people. It simply assumes it is okay for Abraham to have people in his household who count merely as long-standing “servants” (that word does not come here, but it is the status of many of the people “born in his household”). Indeed, it assumes it is OK for Abraham to buy people, but such people are not “slaves” in the sense of possessions you can do what you like with. Their being included in the covenant and thus given the covenant sign indicates that they are not treated as less than human. God’s approach to their position is similar to the one the New Testament takes to actual slavery. God does not simply declare that the difference between masters and servants must be abandoned, but God does transform the status of servants (home-born or bought) in their eyes and in the eyes of Abraham.

Receiving the sign will be t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Map
• Acknowledgments
• Genesis 17:1–6 Your Name Will Be Abraham
• Genesis 17:7–8 Aliens and Strangers
• Genesis 17:9–14 A Sign of Grace, Commitment, and Discipline
• Genesis 17:15–19 Sarai Becomes Sarah
• Genesis 17:20–27 But What about Ishmael?
• Genesis 18:1–15 Entertaining Angels Unawares
• Genesis 18:16–20 The Cry from Sodom
• Genesis 18:21–33 On Praying for Sodom
• Genesis 19:1–14 The Sin of Sodom
• Genesis 19:15–38 Don’t Look Back
• Genesis 20:1–13 Do We Ever Learn?
• Genesis 20:14–21:14 At Last
• Genesis 21:15–32 On Watching Your Son Die
• Genesis 21:33–22:2 The Test
• Genesis 22:3–10 On Letting Your Son Die
• Genesis 22:11–19 Now I Know
• Genesis 22:20–23:20 When Your Spouse Dies
• Genesis 24:1–20 Where to Find Isaac a Wife
• Genesis 24:21–48 How to Find Isaac a Wife
• Genesis 24:49–25:6 The First Romance?
• Genesis 25:7–22 Brothers United and Divided
• Genesis 25:23–26:5 Two Guys Who Need Their Heads Banged Together
• Genesis 26:6–33 Do We Ever Learn?— Take Two
• Genesis 26:34–27:33 How Stupid Parents Can Be
• Genesis 27:34–28:5 Words that Cannot Be Undone
• Genesis 28:6–15 The Stairway to Heaven
• Genesis 28:16–29:14a How to Live in a Contractual Relationship with God
• Genesis 29:14b–31 The Deceiver Deceived
• Genesis 29:32–30:3 I Want to Know What Love Is
• Genesis 30:4–21 The Problem of Insight
• Genesis 30:22–43 The Competition to Be the Shrewdest Sheep Farmer
• Genesis 31:1–29 The Divisiveness of Stuff
• Genesis 31:30–54 The Pain of a Family Divided by Miles
• Genesis 31:55–32:24a Fear
• Genesis 32:24b–33:17 God Struggles
• Genesis 33:18–34:31 Should Our Sister Be Treated like a Whore?
• Genesis 35:1–29 Do People Change?
• Genesis 36:1–37:4 Excluded but Not Forgotten
• Genesis 37:5–36 The Dreamer
• Genesis 38:1–30 Another Deceiver Deceived
• Genesis 39:1–40:8 God Was with Joseph
• Genesis 40:9–41:24 When You Need an Expert
• Genesis 41:25–57 Save First, Spend Afterward
• Genesis 42:1–35 What Game Is Joseph Playing?
• Genesis 42:36–43:34 What Game Is Genesis Playing?
• Genesis 44:1–34 Tough Love
• Genesis 45:1–28 Not You but God
• Genesis 46:1–34 Call No One Happy until They Are Dead
• Genesis 47:1–26 Nationalization
• Genesis 47:27–48:22 The Younger Again Ahead of the Elder
• Genesis 49:1–28 Deathbed Promises and Predictions
• Genesis 49:29–50:26 Am I in the Place of God?
• Glossary