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Genesis 15: What the Passage Says

73 claims across 21 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What Genesis 15 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

The word of the LORD comes to Abram in a vision, telling him not to be afraid. Abram says he is still childless and that a servant of his house will be his heir, and the LORD answers that his heir will come from his own body and that his offspring will be as many as the stars. Abram believes the LORD, and asks how he can know he will inherit the land; the LORD has him prepare animals cut in half, tells him in a deep sleep that his descendants will be strangers and slaves in another land for four hundred years before coming out with great wealth, and then a smoking furnace and a burning torch pass between the pieces. That day the LORD makes a covenant giving the land, from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates, to Abram's descendants, and lists the peoples who live there.

Claim by Claim

  1. 15:1
    • After these things the word of the LORD came to Abram.
    • The word came to Abram in a vision.
    • The LORD told Abram not to fear.
    • The LORD said he was a shield to Abram.
    • The LORD said Abram's reward was very great.
    • It is ambiguous whether the LORD says he himself is Abram's very great reward or that Abram's reward will be very great.
  2. 15:2
    • Abram spoke in reply.
    • Abram addressed God as Lord GOD.
    • Abram asked what God would give him.
    • Abram said he was going through life childless.
    • Abram said the man in charge of his household was Eliezer of Damascus.
    • The Hebrew phrase describing Eliezer's position in Abram's house is obscure.
  3. 15:3
    • Abram spoke again.
    • Abram said God had given him no offspring.
    • Abram said a member of his household would inherit from him.
  4. 15:4
    • The word of the LORD came to Abram.
    • The LORD said that this man would not be Abram's heir.
    • The LORD said that one who would come out of Abram's own body would be his heir.
  5. 15:5
    • The LORD brought Abram outside.
    • The LORD told Abram to look toward the sky.
    • The LORD told Abram to count the stars, if he was able to count them.
    • The LORD told Abram that his offspring would be like that.
  6. 15:6
    • Abram believed in the LORD.
    • The LORD counted Abram's belief to him as righteousness.
  7. 15:7
    • The LORD said to Abram, I am the LORD.
    • The LORD said he had brought Abram out of Ur of the Chaldeans.
    • The LORD said he brought Abram out in order to give him this land to possess it.
  8. 15:8
    • Abram spoke.
    • Abram addressed God as Lord GOD.
    • Abram asked by what means he would know that he would possess the land.
  9. 15:9
    • The LORD told Abram to take for him a heifer three years old.
    • The LORD told Abram to take a female goat three years old.
    • The LORD told Abram to take a ram three years old.
    • The LORD told Abram to take a turtledove.
    • The LORD told Abram to take a young pigeon.
  10. 15:10
    • Abram took all these animals for him.
    • Abram cut them in two down the middle.
    • Abram laid each half opposite its matching half.
    • Abram did not cut the bird in two.
  11. 15:11
    • Birds of prey came down on the carcasses.
    • Abram drove the birds away.
  12. 15:12
    • The sun was going down.
    • A deep sleep fell upon Abram.
    • A dread and great darkness fell upon Abram.
  13. 15:13
    • The LORD said to Abram, know for certain.
    • The LORD said Abram's offspring would be strangers in a land that was not theirs.
    • The LORD said Abram's offspring would serve the people of that land.
    • The LORD said those people would afflict Abram's offspring.
    • The LORD said this would last four hundred years.
  14. 15:14
    • The LORD said he would judge the nation that Abram's offspring would serve.
    • The LORD said that afterward Abram's offspring would come out with great possessions.
  15. 15:15
    • The LORD said Abram would go to his fathers in peace.
    • The LORD said Abram would be buried at a good old age.
  16. 15:16
    • The LORD said that in the fourth generation Abram's offspring would return to this place.
    • The LORD said the iniquity of the Amorites was not yet complete.
  17. 15:17
    • The sun went down.
    • It became dark.
    • A smoking furnace appeared.
    • A flaming torch appeared.
    • The smoking furnace and flaming torch passed between the divided pieces.
  18. 15:18
    • On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram.
    • The LORD said he had given this land to Abram's offspring.
    • The LORD said the land extended from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.
  19. 15:19
    • The land included the territory of the Kenites.
    • The land included the territory of the Kenizzites.
    • The land included the territory of the Kadmonites.
  20. 15:20
    • The land included the territory of the Hittites.
    • The land included the territory of the Perizzites.
    • The land included the territory of the Rephaim.
  21. 15:21
    • The land included the territory of the Amorites.
    • The land included the territory of the Canaanites.
    • The land included the territory of the Girgashites.
    • The land included the territory of the Jebusites.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

15:1
"The word of the LORD" is a set phrase for a message delivered directly by God, not for a written scripture. (LORD printed in capitals stands for the personal name of God in Hebrew, four letters usually written YHWH; Jewish tradition avoided saying it aloud, and English Bibles mark it this way to distinguish it from the ordinary word "lord.") The last phrase is genuinely ambiguous in Hebrew: it can mean "I am your shield and your very great reward," or "I am your shield; your reward will be very great."
15:2
"Lord GOD" renders two Hebrew words together, the ordinary word for master and the personal name YHWH; printers distinguish them by using capitals for the second. In this period a childless man could make a trusted senior servant his legal heir, so that the household property stayed intact and someone was obliged to bury him and maintain his name. Eliezer holds that position: he runs the estate and, as things stand, will inherit it.
15:3
The King James word here and in verses 5, 13 and 18 is "seed," which in 1611 English simply meant offspring or descendants, used of people as naturally as of plants. It does not carry the narrower biological meaning it has in modern English.
15:4
"He that shall come forth out of thine own bowels" sounds grotesque now, but "bowels" in 1611 English meant the inner parts of the body generally, and was used for the seat of both reproduction and strong feeling. The phrase means a biological son, not an adopted heir.
15:5
"Tell the stars" does not mean speak to them. "Tell" in 1611 English meant to count, the same sense preserved in "bank teller" and in "telling" votes. "Number them" in the next clause is the same idea repeated.
15:6
"Counted" is a bookkeeping word: an amount entered in someone's account. "Righteousness" here is not private virtue but standing in a relationship, being in the right, as a judge would declare of someone whose case is sound. The Hebrew leaves open who credits what to whom, though it is normally read as God crediting Abram's trust to him.
15:7
Ur was a major city in southern Mesopotamia, in what is now southern Iraq, far to the east of Canaan. "Of the Chaldeans" identifies the region by the name of a people who lived there much later than Abram, the way one might say "Ur in modern Iraq."
15:9
These five are the animals later Israelite law accepts for sacrifice. Three years old means fully grown and at peak value, the most costly form of each.
15:10
This is the standard way of making a binding agreement in the ancient Near East. The Hebrew idiom for making an agreement is literally to "cut" one. Animals were killed and split, the halves laid out with a path between them, and the party swearing the oath walked down that path, in effect calling down the animals' fate on himself if he broke his word.
15:11
"Fowls" here means birds of prey, vultures and kites drawn to fresh carcasses. If they had eaten the split animals, the ceremony would have been wrecked before it began, so Abram spends the afternoon guarding them.
15:12
The word for "deep sleep" is a rare one used for a sleep sent by God rather than ordinary tiredness; it is the same word used of Adam in Genesis 2.
15:13
Four hundred years is a round figure. Exodus 12:40 gives the time in Egypt as 430 years, and Genesis 15:16 here speaks of four generations; the numbers are not harmonized within the text itself.
15:14
"Great substance" in 1611 English meant a large quantity of movable property: livestock, silver, gold, clothing. It has nothing to do with the modern sense of "substance" as material or as seriousness.
15:15
"Go to your fathers" is a normal Hebrew way of saying "die," drawn from burial in a family tomb where the bones of earlier generations already lay. It carries no claim about what follows death.
15:16
A "generation" in Hebrew can mean a lifetime rather than the gap between a parent and a child, which is how four of them can cover the long span just mentioned. ("Not yet complete" uses the image of a measure being filled up: the Amorites' wrongdoing has not yet reached the point at which action against them would be warranted.) "Amorite" names a specific people, but the Hebrew Bible also uses it loosely for the inhabitants of Canaan in general.
15:17
The "smoking furnace" is a portable clay firepot, the kind used for baking, and the "burning torch" an open flame. Fire and smoke are how God's presence is regularly represented in these narratives. Note who walks the path between the halves: God alone passes through, and Abram, asleep, does not, the obligation sworn is one-sided.
15:18
A covenant is a formal, binding agreement between two parties, of the same kind used for treaties between a king and a lesser ruler, and sealed by a ritual rather than a signature. ("The river of Egypt" is disputed: the word used here normally means a great river, which would point to the Nile, but the same boundary is elsewhere marked by a seasonal desert stream at the edge of Sinai, the Wadi el-Arish.) The Euphrates runs through modern Syria and Iraq; the two limits together describe the largest extent ever claimed for the land.
15:19
What follows is a list of the peoples living in the region at the time. The Kenites were metalworking desert nomads to the south; the Kenizzites and Kadmonites are barely known outside lists like this one, "Kadmonite" means roughly "easterner."
15:20
The Hittites here are a local Canaanite group, not necessarily connected to the empire of that name in Asia Minor. The Perizzites appear to be village-dwellers rather than city people. "Rephaim" is used both for a people remembered as unusually tall and, elsewhere, for the dead, here it means the people.
15:21
The Canaanites are the general population of the land; the Jebusites held the hill settlement that later became Jerusalem. Ten peoples are named, more than in any other such list, which is a way of saying the whole territory without exception.

Read Genesis 15