Глава 15

Gen.15:1. After these incidents Quite a common, although at the same time too general, chronological indication. the word of the Lord came to Abram Exegetes draw attention to this passage as the first case in which the Bible, under the term dabar “word,” offered a mysterious foreshadowing of the Word incarnate, i.e. on our Lord Jesus Christ (Ex. 9:20; 1 Sam. 3:21, Ps. 32:6, etc.). The last indication, in parentheses, is found in the LXX (not in all codices, see Golmes); the Hebrew original does not have it and most commentators consider it a later addition. But even if we assume that this theophany took place at night, then, in any case, there is no doubt that Abram, perceiving this revelation, was not in a sleepy, but in a waking state, as is clearly seen from the entire context (Gen. 15:2, 5, 9-11). More precisely defining this state, the writer of everyday life calls it “vision”, i.e. a particularly enthusiastic, elevated and, so to speak, ecstatic state, similar to the one in which the prophet Isaiah was at the time of his call to prophetic service (Is. 6) or the Apostle Paul, when he was caught up into paradise and heard ineffable verbs (2 Cor. 12:3–4). and it is said: Do not be afraid Abram; I am your shield; Do not be afraid, first of all, of revenge from those enemies over whom you recently won such a brilliant victory, and also do not be afraid of ill will and envy of your military success and growing prosperity on the part of the Canaanite rulers around you; Do not be afraid of anything like this, says the Lord: “for I am your shield,” i.e. patron and protector (Ps. 3:4, 5:13, 83:12, 119:114, etc.). your reward [will be] very great. As a reward for all the sublime and noble qualities of Abram’s lofty soul, especially for his obedience and faith, the Lord not only granted him a whole series of promises, both temporary and eternal blessings, but also honored him with special closeness to Himself, which gave the Apostle James (James 2:23) reason to call him even a friend of God, in which one cannot help but see the highest reward for a person. Abram mourns his lack of offspring Gen.15:2. Abram said: Sovereign Lord! This appeal in the Hebrew text is expressed in the words: “Adonai-Jehovah” (following after “Adonai”, “Jehovah” in Hebrew is no longer pronounced with the vowels of the first name, but with the vowels of the name “elohim”); This is the first example in the Bible of a similar, but rather rare combination of two magnifications of God (Gen. 15:8, cf. Deut. 3:24, 9:26), of which the first indicates God as the supreme judge (dan - judge), and the second as a provider and redeemer. And this is another proof of a completely incorrect interpretation of the words Jehovah, Elohim, Adonai: these words are used to honor the Majesty and Glory of the Creator. In this case, if we follow the Hebrew text, the phrase may have the following meaning: “Abram said: O Provident and Merciful Judge!” This follows from the context of the above references to the Holy Scriptures, and is in direct connection with the next part of the verse, since among the Jews childlessness was considered a punishment for sins, and Abram had every right to call the Lord the Judge. what will you give me? I remain childless; “When the Lord promised Abram a reward, and a great, very great reward, then he, discovering the sorrow of his soul and the despondency that constantly tormented him due to childlessness, said: Lord, what will You give me? After all, I have already reached a ripe old age and am leaving childless” (John Chrysostom). This Eliezer from Damascus is the steward of my house. In the Slavic Bible, this phrase begins somewhat differently, with the words: “the son of Masek of my household,” depending on which its very meaning changes. This difference is explained by the fact that the first word of this phrase in the Hebrew text - “Ben-Meshek” LXX was understood and translated in the sense of its own name - “son of Masek”; while the correct translation of these words gives the idea of ​​"a steward, manager of a house or property" (Hebraism: "son of possession", as well as "man of possession", simply means a person who owns or controls something). The very name "Eliezer" means one "whom God helps"; from the place of his origin he is called a resident of Damascus. Gen.15:3. And Abram said, Behold, thou hast not given me seed, and behold, the man of my household is my heir. Being childless already in his declining years, Abram, although he pours out his grief about this before God, is far from sinful despondency and murmuring against God; he hastens to adopt his beloved member of the household and make him a sharer and heir of all the promises God has given him. God promises him a son and numerous offspring Gen.15:4. And the word of the Lord came to him, and said, He shall not be your heir, but he who shall come out of your body shall be your heir. In the Greek, Latin and our Slavic Bible, this verse begins with the adverb: “immediately,” about which Chrysostom says: “Note the accuracy of Scripture: it is said: abiye, i.e. The Lord did not allow the righteous to grieve for a short time, but quickly gives consolation, and by talking with him eases the burden of sorrow.” God will give His faithful servant the most powerful consolation, healing his main heart wound, inflicted by the lack of direct, natural offspring: He, precisely, solemnly announces to Abram that not someone else's household, but his own, his own son will be his real heir. Gen.15:5. And he brought him out and said to him, Look at the sky and count the stars, if you can count them. And he said to him: You will have so many descendants. For greater clarity and strength of His identification, the Lord takes Abram out into the open sky and draws his attention to the myriads of stars scattered across it, saying that the same will be the number of his descendants. The meaning and significance of this comparison is already known to us from a similar image from the history of the previous theophany (Gen. 13:16). But in the disclosure of the promise itself, an important new feature is noticeable: previously it was spoken generally about the descendants of Abram; now it is added that this offspring will be personal and direct, since it will come from his own son. Abram is justified by faith Gen.15:6. Abram believed the Lord Among the coherent historical narrative that makes up the content of this chapter, the verse we are considering represents a certain digression, namely, an introductory remark by the writer of everyday life; Obviously, Moses attached too much importance to it if, for the sake of it, he decided to disrupt the coherence and orderliness of his epic narrative. And indeed, here we are talking about the main religious virtue of a person - faith that justifies and saves him. The first meaning of the Hebrew verb “aman” - “believed” gives the idea of ​​“complete tranquility” and “immovable affirmation” in something or on something; in this case, it therefore means the destruction of all doubts and hesitations in the soul of Abram and the complete confirmation of his cherished aspirations and hopes in the good and all-perfect will of God. Regardless of his old age or the barrenness of Sarah, Abram believes the divine promise of the birth of a son, and believes sincerely and fervently, without any reasoning or skeptical examination of how all this can happen. and He counted it to him as righteousness. God, who tests the hearts and bellies of men and knows everything, even the smallest movements of the human soul, appreciated this noble and high rise of the spirit of Abram and set it as the main basis of his future justification, i.e. atonement for both his personal and the original sin that weighed on him. The final justification of Abram, like other Old Testament righteous people, came only after the death of the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross and His descent into hell (1 Pet. 3:19). This significant Old Testament fact of justification by faith is commented in detail by the Apostle Paul in his Epistle to the Romans (Rom. 4), where the example of Abram serves as his obvious proof of the truth that in Christianity justification is given not by virtue of any external deeds or merits, but by tuna (free gift) - by faith in the redemptive power of Christ's death. But just as with Abram the faith that saved him was the fruit and crown of all his pious activities and life, so with a Christian, justifying faith must embrace and permeate his entire being and be that living and active force that would necessarily seek its appropriate expression outside, i.e. in godly living and good works (James 2:24–26). Confirmation of God's Covenant with Abram Gen.15:7. And he said to him: I am the Lord, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land for your possession. Although Moses does not directly say that Abram’s departure from Ur of the Chaldeans together with his father Terah was the result of a special divine calling, he silently forces this to be assumed (Gen. 12:1), and the first martyr Stephen even definitely testifies to this (Acts 7:2–3). Pointing to the fact of Abram's exile from his native land and the purpose of this fact, God thereby wants to give Abram new proof of the immutability and fidelity of His promises. Gen.15:8. He said: Sovereign Lord! how can I know that I will own it? Since the promise of the possession of Palestine did not relate to the personality of Abram himself, but to the fate of his offspring, the best explanation of this issue is the opinion of those exegetes who believe that Abram posed this question not for himself and not for himself, but for his future offspring, for the sake of their assurance of the veracity of such apparently impossible promises. “The promise of inheriting the land of Canaan,” Abram thought, “may not be fulfilled before his descendants grow into a large nation. This requires a lot of time, and during that time it can experience many vicissitudes in its fate, many sorrows and disasters. It is not surprising that these sorrows and disasters, with a long wait for the promised inheritance, could shake the faith in the promise in the descendants of Abram. Therefore, it was natural for Abram to wish that the Lord would seal the truth of His promise for his descendants in a special way, and would first reveal to them how it should be fulfilled” (Bishop Vissarion). Gen. 15:9–10. The Lord said to him: Take Me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old goat, a three-year-old ram, a turtle dove and a young dove. He took them all, cut them in half and put one part opposite the other; only he didn’t cut the birds. Condescending to Abram’s respectful request for a sign that would certify his descendants in the fulfillment of divine promises, the Lord deigns to give him the same sign that is used in similar cases among people. And among the ancients, especially in the East, when people bound themselves with any important promises, they entered into an alliance with each other, the conclusion of which was accompanied by a well-known external ritual: they took one or another number of sacrificial animals, slaughtered them and shed their blood, cut them into two equal halves and passed between these dissected parts. With all these symbolic actions, the persons who entered into the union testified before God and people that they are ready to shed blood for each other, that they undertake to represent, as it were, two equal halves of the same living whole, and that the violator of this union will face execution from God, like dissecting the corpse of an animal (Jer. 34:18). Condescending to human weakness, the Lord deigned to use this oath rite when He entered into a covenant with Abram and his descendants. It should be noted that both the list of animals indicated here and the very ritual of the rite (for example, the cutting of birds) (Lev. 1:14–17) almost literally coincides with subsequent laws on sacrifices, from which it is obvious that Moses did not introduce anything new, but only returned the people to forgotten, ancient institutions. Gen.15:11. And birds of prey swooped down on the corpses; but Abram drove them away. This small detail is considered a prophetic foretelling of those idolatrous tribes who, by leading the people of Israel with their example, thereby desecrated this covenant and harmed its purity (“the corruption of Israel”). Gen.15:12. When the sun set, Abram fell into a deep sleep, In the Hebrew text, this dream is designated by the same term - “tardema”, as was the dream of Adam during God’s creation of his wife (Gen. 2:21). Consequently, it was not an ordinary and natural dream, but an extraordinary, supernatural one, in which all the highest abilities and powers of a person not only do not weaken, but, on the contrary, increase. and behold, horror and great darkness fell upon him. Both of these states were purely subjective for Abram and were determined by the approaching appearance of God himself in a material form (Job 4:14–17). Some exegetes, however, see here a prophetic premonition of the horrors and disasters that awaited the descendants of Abram during the days of Egyptian slavery. Gen.15:13. And the Lord said to Abram: Know that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and will enslave them, and will oppress them for four hundred years. From the fact that the Lord's answer refers to the fate of Abram's descendants, new evidence follows that Abram's above question concerned the same subject (Gen. 15:8). As if to meet Abram’s anxious thoughts about the vicissitudes of fate awaiting his descendants, the Lord reveals to Abram that his descendants, before receiving the fulfillment of the promise, will have to endure a number of trials and disasters: firstly, they will face a long and restless wandering through the land of Canaan, and secondly, a long and difficult slavery, meaning slavery in Egypt. The total duration of this first period of Jewish history - the period of wandering disasters and slavery - God determines to be four hundred years. As a matter of fact, a more accurate figure for this entire period, the beginning of which is considered to be the exit of Abram from Ur of the Chaldeans, and the end of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, is indicated at four hundred and thirty years (in the 25th year, after leaving Ur, Isaac was born, in the 60th year Jacob was born to Isaac, 130 years later Jacob moved to Egypt and 215 years elapsed after that until the exodus of the Jews (Ex. 12:40) ; Gal. 3:17 ). But thirty years are obviously set aside here for the sake of roundness of counting, as is practiced in other places in the Bible, especially when counting by centuries, which are often also called generations (Gen. 15:16). Gen.15:14. but I will bring judgment upon the people to whom they shall be enslaved; The expression is similar to the saying: “Vengeance is mine and I will repay” (Deut. 32:35; Rom. 12:19; Heb. 10:30). Historically, it was fulfilled over the Egyptians at the time when the Lord struck them with cruel executions and thereby forced them to release the Jews (Ex. 7:4, 8–12:21). after this they will come out [here] with great wealth, A prophetic detail, exactly justified by history (Ex. 12:35–36). Gen.15:15. and you will go to your fathers in peace and will be buried in a good old age; These remarkable words are rightly seen as an expression of the idea of ​​Old Testament immortality; it is indicated by the fact that the text clearly distinguishes between “going to the fathers” and “burying the body,” and if the latter, without a doubt, means bodily, physical death, then the former can only mean spiritual immortality, which opens up the possibility of an afterlife meeting with previously deceased fathers. The example of Abram does not positively allow this “application to the fathers” to be interpreted in the sense of an ordinary burial in the family cave, due to the fact that Abram himself was buried in the cave of Machpel (Gen. 25:9), his father Terah in Harran (Gen. 11:32), and other ancestors in Ur of the Chaldeans. Gen.15:16. in the fourth generation they will return here: Some see in these words a parallel to verse 13, i.e. we are talking about four centuries or generations - the disastrous life of Israel, others with great reason see an indication of the duration of one Egyptian slavery, which should have ended in the fourth generation of those aliens who first settled in it. Indeed, Moses, the initiator of the exodus of the Jews, was already the fourth after Jacob to come to Egypt (Levi, Kohath, Aram and Moses). for the measure of the iniquities of the Amorites has not yet been filled. The Amorites are taken here as representatives of all the Canaanites (Joshua 24:15). God's longsuffering spared them for centuries to give them the opportunity to repent; but they used this time for evil and deserved the terrible sentence of divine truth about their complete extermination (Joshua 6:20, 8:22, 9:24, etc.). Gen.15:17. When the sun went down and darkness came, behold, A remark from the writer of everyday life indicating the outstanding duration of this theophany: having begun the previous night, it occurred throughout the entire subsequent day and continued when a new night came. smoke, as if from a furnace, and flames of fire passed between the dissected animals. Smoke and fire are a favorite emblem of God's revelations in the history of Israel, at once menacing and dark as smoke, and bright and joyful as fire. “Passing between separated animals meant, according to custom, the union of the divided, i.e. union. Otto Gerlach notes that Abram did not pass among those who were cut; Only the visible image of the Lord passed through, i.e. it was a contract of mercy, a benefit promised and tangibly confirmed by the ritual of the contract” (Vlastov). Gen.15:18. On this day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying: The Hebrew name for the covenant, “berith,” derived from a verb meaning “to cut, dissect, cut,” clearly indicates its close connection with the above-described ritual of passing through the dissected parts of animals. With this act, the Lord enters into a solemn covenant with Abram, following the example of how He previously entered into a similar covenant with Noah (Gen. 9:9). However, God’s covenant with Abram has more important theocratic goals in mind, which is why it is arranged with even greater solemnity than the covenant with Noah. to your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates: The Lord indicates two rivers as the boundaries of the future possession of the Jews: from the east the Euphrates, and from the west some Egyptian river. By the latter one cannot mean the Nile, since the Euphrates, in comparison with the Nile, could not be called a great river; obviously this is one of the border Egyptian rivers, much smaller than the Euphrates; It is believed that this is the Sihor River, which separated Egypt from Palestine and on which the city of Rhinocolura stood. Within these limits, the Jews actually owned the land of Canaan during the time of kings David and Solomon (1 Kings 4:21; 2 Chronicles 9:26; Ps. 71:8; 2 Kings 8:3), when not only all of Palestine and all the nomadic tribes surrounding it recognized the dominion of the kings of Israel, but even the kings of southern Arabia bowed to them. “But what is more remarkable in this particular space is the moral influence that Abram, his descendants, the patriarchs, David and Solomon, have maintained until now over the minds of the nomadic tribes. Their memory is honored more than the memory of Mohammed” (Vlastov). Gen.15:19. Keneev, Kenezeev, Kedmoneev, The sad fate of the first - enslavement by the Assyrians - was predicted in the prophecy of Balaam (Num. 24:21-22), and their place of residence - to the south of Canaan, near the Amalekites, and then completely within Palestine, in the tribe of Judah, is indicated by the writer of the book. Kings (1 Sam. 27:10, 30:29). In all likelihood, the Keneseites also lived in the same tribe of Judah, as can be guessed from the fact that Caleb, a resident of the tribe of Judah, was called a Keneseite (Joshua 14:6). Much less known are the “Kedmonites,” who are never mentioned again in the Bible; but they are found on Egyptian monuments, from which some people guess whether any of the Egyptian tribes bordering Canaanite are called by this name. Gen.15:20. Hitteyev, Ferezeyev, Refaimov, The former undoubtedly means the important and strong “Hittite” nation, which ruled Syria and had its colonies in the vicinity of Hebron and Bethel (Judges 1:23–26; 1 Kings 10:29). “Perizzites” are already known to us (Gen. 13:7) Canaanite inhabitants of the mountainous countries of Palestine (Josh. 11:3). “Rephaim” is again a tribe already known to us (Gen. 14:5), living (Joshua 12:4, 13:12) to the northeast of the Jordan Valley, although later it descended significantly to the south, giving its name to the valley of the Rephaim or giants in one of the environs of Jerusalem (Joshua 15:8, 18:16). Gen.15:21. Gergeseev and Ievuseev. The first lived to the west of the Jordan (Joshua 24:11), and the second lived near Jerusalem and in the city itself, which as a result was even called Jebus for some time (Judges 19:10). You might be interested in: