Promise and Fulfillment
An extraordinary drama begins to unfold in these early chapters of Abraham’s journey, all the more powerful for being understated and unexplained. One of the aspects of God’s promise to Abraham, whom He has asked to leave his family, is that he would have a family of his own. Time and again, the note is sounded, the promised repeated, the assurance given. It is there in the opening call of God to Abraham: “I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you” (12:2). This is no accidental blessing. We have already been told at the end of the previous chapter that “Sarah was barren, she had no children” (11:30). Rashi comments that the blessing is connected to the journey, as if to say that in the new land, Abraham and Sarah will be able to have children.1.Rashi to Bereshit 12:1.
According to the sages, a change of place is one of the things that brings about a change in fortune.2.Rosh HaShana 16b.
The promise is repeated and expanded in the next chapter:
I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust, then your offspring could be counted. (13:16)
Two chapters later, we hear it a third time, now with a new and dramatic image:
He took him outside and said, “Look up at the heavens and count the stars – if indeed you can count them.” Then He said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” (15:5)
The sages, cited by Rashi, gave a pointed interpretation to the phrase “He took him outside.” Abraham had apparently said to God, “I see in my stars that I am not destined to have children.” God said to him: “Leave behind [i.e. “stand outside”] your astronomical calculations. The stars will have no influence on your people’s destiny [ein mazal beYisrael].”3.Rashi to Bereshit 15:5; Bereshit Raba ad loc.
The promise is stated for a fourth time, when God makes a covenant with Abraham. Now we are told that he will not be the father of a single nation, but of many. To signal the seriousness of this promise, God changes Abraham’s name:
“As for Me, this is My covenant with you: You will be the father of many nations. No longer will you be called Abram; your name will be Abraham, for I have made you a father of many nations. I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you, and kings will come from you.” (17:4–6)
Abraham will be a parent. He will have not the normal number of children, but a vast panoply of offspring. They will become a great nation. His children will be as many as the dust of the earth and the stars of the sky. He will give rise not to one but to many nations. The promise could not be more explicit. Indeed, it is already implicit in Abraham’s name. Av means father; Abram is “mighty father;” Abraham means “father of many nations.” Yet even at this early stage, we discover that the course of events will be anything but simple and straightforward. Lekh Lekha contains three stories, each of which has to do with Abraham’s succession and his failure to have a child.
The first concerns his nephew Lot. Surprisingly, when Abraham sets out on his journey, Lot, son of Abraham’s brother Nahor, goes with him. A reasonable assumption would be that Abraham, without children and with a barren wife, has decided to adopt Lot or at least make him his heir and successor.
If that was the plan, it failed. After their sojourn in Egypt, Abraham and Lot have extensive flocks and herds, so many that they are unable to pasture together. There is a quarrel between their respective herdsmen. Abraham realises that they will have to separate:
Abram said to Lot, “There should be no arguing between you and me, or between your herdsmen and mine, because we are brothers. We should separate. The whole land is there in front of you. If you go to the left, I will go to the right. If you go to the right, I will go to the left.” (13:8–9)
“We are brothers” – implying, not adoptive father and adopted son. It is what happens next that convinces us that there is something deeper at stake in the separation:
Lot looked all around and saw the whole Jordan Valley and that there was much water there. It was like the Lord’s garden, like the land of Egypt in the direction of Zoar. (This was before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.) So Lot chose to move east and live in the Jordan Valley. In this way Abram and Lot separated. Abram lived in the land of Canaan, but Lot lived among the cities in the Jordan Valley, very near to Sodom. Now the people of Sodom were very evil and were always sinning against the Lord. (13:10–13)
Lot chooses the good land with evil inhabitants. Evidently, he puts the material before the moral and spiritual. This alone is sufficient to tell us that, as far as the covenant is concerned, he is not a child of Abraham.
The text goes out of its way to emphasize this, using a prolepsis – telling us in advance things we would not otherwise discover until later. There is the comparison with Egypt, whose full significance we will not realize until the book of Exodus. We are told that in the future, Sodom and Gomorrah will be destroyed. Twice the text stresses the wickedness of their inhabitants. The people are “very evil” and “always sinning.”
None of this would have been apparent to Lot at the time. We imagine him standing on a hilltop surveying the panorama. He has no way of knowing the character of the people in the towns he sees, nor of what would be their ultimate fate. Evidently Lot’s character failure lies in the fact that “he looked around and saw.” Like Eve when she saw that the fruit of the tree of knowledge was “pleasant to the eyes” (3:6), Lot judged by appearances. The children of the covenant follow sound, not sight, the voice of God in the depths of the soul, not the seductive surfaces of the visible. So Abraham loses his first potential heir.
If not Lot, then whom? This creates a crisis for Abraham. These are his first recorded words to God:
After these things happened, the Lord spoke His word to Abram in a vision: “Abram, don’t be afraid. I will defend You, and I will give you a great reward.”
But Abram said, “Lord God, what can You give me? I have no son, so my slave Eliezer from Damascus will get everything I own after I die.” Abram said, “Look, You have given me no son, so a slave born in my house will inherit everything I have.” (15:2–3)
Abraham’s patience breaks. The first Jew feared that he would be the last. The reference to Eliezer has taken on a new intelligibility in the light of ancient documents from the Nuzi archives, which show that it was a well established practice in Abraham’s day for childless individuals to adopt someone, even a slave, as a son. He would then have all the attendant duties and rights of a natural son and heir.4.See Nahum M. Sarna, Understanding Genesis (New York: Schocken, 1970), 122–23.
Whether or not Abraham had adopted his slave Eliezer, it is clear that with the departure of Lot, there was no one else he could look to. God reassures Abram: “He [Eliezer] will not be the one to inherit what you have. You will have a son of your own [literally, ‘one that goes out of your own body’] who will inherit what you have” (15:4). There then follows the promise of as many children as the stars.
The third drama is the most poignant. Sarai, recognising her own infertility, suggests to Abram that he take her handmaid Hagar as a wife. She may bear him a child. Abram listens and agrees:
So Abram had sexual relations with Hagar, and she became pregnant. But when Hagar knew she was pregnant, she began to treat her mistress, Sarai, with contempt. Then Sarai said to Abram, “This is all your fault! I put my servant into your arms, but now that she’s pregnant she treats me with contempt. The Lord will show who’s wrong – you or me!”
Abram replied, “Look, she is your servant, so deal with her as you see fit.” Then Sarai treated Hagar so harshly that she finally ran away. (16:4–6)
This is a strange passage that portrays all three protagonists in a less-than-good light. Hagar is disrespectful, Sarai querulous, and Abram seemingly indifferent. For once, Nahmanides, reluctant as were all the classic Jewish commentators to criticize the behavior of the patriarchs and matriarchs, delivers a negative judgment:
Our mother [Sarah] transgressed by this affliction [of Hagar], and Abraham also by permitting her to do so. And so God heard her [Hagar’s] affliction and gave her a son who would be a wild ass of a man to afflict the seed of Abraham and Sarah with all kinds of affliction.5.Nahmanides to Bereshit 16:6.
Whichever way we interpret the passage, the tensions show. Abraham and Sarah are acting out of character. Their nerves are frayed by the long-delayed and disappointed hope. Eventually God makes it clear: Ishmael, Hagar’s child by Abraham, will not be the promised son, bearer of the covenant, continuer of the faith. Despite all the evidence to the contrary – Sarai’s age and infertility – she will give birth to a son. For once, Abraham gives voice to disbelief, followed closely by his paternal feelings toward Ishmael:
God also said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you are no longer to call her Sarai; her name will be Sarah. I will bless her and will surely give you a son by her. I will bless her so that she will be the mother of nations; kings of peoples will come from her.”
Abraham fell face down; he laughed and said to himself, “Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?” And Abraham said to God, “If only Ishmael might live under Your blessing!” (17:15–18)
So, by the time the parasha ends, we have heard four promises of children and seen three prospective heirs, Lot, Eliezer and Ishmael, fail to fit the specification. Lot makes his home among evildoers. Eliezer is not part of the patriarchal family. Ishmael will become “a wild ass of a man: his hand will be against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him” (16:12).
What are we to make of all this? Undoubtedly, one theme is miraculous birth. Sarah, like Rebecca and Rachel after her, is infertile, so that the children born to them are seen, in some way, to be marked out as divine gifts: in a strong sense, God’s children. Similarly, Moses, the tongue-tied stammerer, will be one whose words palpably come from God, not from his own mouth.
But there is also a counter-theme, moving in the opposite direction. The patriarchs and prophets move in the real world, not a world of magic and myth and larger-than-life legend. Abraham begins a journey, but it is beset by obstacles. He receives a promise, but its fulfillment is long-delayed and fraught with diversions and false turns.
Whatever the divine promise, it is not fulfilled immediately. Abraham’s journey, like that of Moses and the Israelites in a later generation, takes longer than they or we expect. There is no sudden transition from here to the promised land, from starting point to destination. Taking Genesis literally, the universe might be made in seven days, but anything in the human world that involves profound change, takes time. The biblical drama is set in the arena of time. Faith is the ability to live with delay without losing trust in the promise; to experience disappointment without losing hope, to know that the road between the real and the ideal is long and yet be willing to undertake the journey. That was Abraham’s and Sarah’s faith, and that of Moses and the prophets and those who came after them.
And surely it must be ours. God delivers all He promises, but not always when we expect. Jews are often restless and impatient: in the Talmud they are described (by a Sadducee) as an ama peziza, a “rash people.”6.Shabbat 88a.
Yet none has waited longer – for freedom and equality, for the return to the land, and for the Messiah. To wait without despair, to hope and keep on hoping: that is the faith of Abraham and Sarah’s children, the faith that they themselves lived. And though it was shot through with disappointments, and though they themselves sometimes gave expression to their doubts and fears, it did not prove in vain. Jews kept faith alive. Faith kept the Jewish people alive.