1And Abram was ninety-nine years old, and the LORD appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am El Shaddai. Walk in My presence and be blameless, 2and I will grant My covenant between Me and you and I will multiply you very greatly.” 3And Abram flung himself on his face, and God spoke to him, saying, 4“As for Me, this is My covenant with you: you shall be father to a multitude of nations. 5And no longer shall your name be called Abram but your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you father to a multitude of nations. 6And I will make you most abundantly fruitful and turn you into nations, and kings shall come forth from you. 7And I will establish My covenant between Me and you and your seed after you through their generations as an everlasting covenant to be God to you and to your seed after you. 8And I will give unto you and your seed after you the land in which you sojourn, the whole land of Canaan, as an everlasting holding, and I will be their God.”
9And God said to Abraham, “As for you, you shall keep My commandment, you and your seed after you through their generations. 10This is My covenant which you shall keep, between Me and you and your seed after you: every male among you must be circumcised. 11You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin and it shall be the sign of the covenant between Me and you. 12Eight days old every male among you shall be circumcised through your generations, even slaves born in the household and those purchased with silver from any foreigner who is not of your seed. 13Those born in your household and those purchased with silver must be circumcised, and My covenant in your flesh shall be an everlasting covenant. 14And a male with a foreskin, who has not circumcised the flesh of his foreskin, that person shall be cut off from his folk. My covenant he has broken.” 15And God said to Abraham, “Sarai your wife shall no longer call her name Sarai, for Sarah is her name. 16And I will bless her and I will also give you from her a son and I will bless him, and she shall become nations, kings of peoples shall issue from her.” 17And Abraham flung himself on his face and he laughed, saying to himself,
“To a hundred-year-old will a child be born,
will ninety-year-old Sarah give birth?”
18And Abraham said to God, “Would that Ishmael might live in Your favor!” 19And God said, “Yet Sarah your wife is to bear you a son and you shall call his name Isaac and I will establish My covenant with him as an everlasting covenant, for his seed after him. 20As for Ishmael, I have heard you. Look, I will bless him and make him fruitful and will multiply him most abundantly, twelve chieftains he shall beget, and I will make him a great nation. 21But My covenant I will establish with Isaac whom Sarah will bear you by this season next year.” 22And He finished speaking with him, and God ascended from Abraham.
23And Abraham took Ishmael his son and all the slaves born in his household and those purchased with silver, every male among the people of Abraham’s household, and he circumcised the flesh of their foreskin on that very day as God had spoken to him. 24And Abraham was ninety-nine years old when the flesh of his foreskin was circumcised. 25And Ishmael his son was thirteen years old when the flesh of his foreskin was circumcised. 26On that very day Abraham was circumcised, and Ishmael his son, 27and all the men of his household, those born in the household and those purchased with silver from the foreigners, were circumcised with him.
CHAPTER 17 NOTES
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1. El Shaddai. The first term, as in El Elyon (chapter 14), means God. Scholarship has been unable to determine the origins or precise meaning of the second term—tenuous associations have been proposed with a Semitic word meaning “mountain” and with fertility. What is clear (compare Exodus 6:3) is that the biblical writers considered it an archaic name of God.
Walk in My presence. Or “before me.” In verse 18, the same preposition manifestly has the idiomatic sense of “in Your favor.” The verb is the same used for Enoch’s walking with God, but there the Hebrew preposition is actually “with.” The meaning of this idiom is “to be devoted to the service of.”
2. My covenant. The articulation of the covenant in this chapter is organized in three distinct units—first the promise of progeny and land, then the commandment of circumcision as sign of the covenant, then the promise of Sarah’s maternity. The politics of the promise is now brought to the foreground as for the first time it is stipulated that both Abraham and Sarah will be progenitors of kings. Source critics have observed that this second covenantal episode, attributed to Priestly circles, abandons the sense of an almost equal pact between two parties of chapter 15 and gives us an Abraham who is merely a silent listener, flinging himself to the ground in fear and trembling as God makes His rather lengthy pronouncements. But Abraham’s emphatic skepticism in verses 17–18 suggests that there is more complexity in his characterization here than such readings allow.
5. Abram . . . Abraham. The meaning of both versions of the name is something like “exalted father.” The longer form is evidently no more than a dialectical variant of the shorter one. The real point is that Abraham should undergo a name change—like a king assuming the throne, it has been proposed—as he undertakes the full burden of the covenant. Similarly in verse 15, the only difference between Sarai and Sarah is that the former reflects an archaic feminine suffix, the latter, the normative feminine suffix: both versions of the name mean “princess.”
10. every male among you must be circumcised. Circumcision was practiced among several of the West Semitic peoples and at least in the priestly class in Egypt, as a bas-relief at Karnach makes clear in surgical detail. To Abraham the immigrant from Mesopotamia, E. A. Speiser notes, it would have been a new procedure to adopt, as this episode indicates. The stipulation of circumcision on the eighth day after birth dissociates it from its common function elsewhere as a puberty rite, and the notion of its use as an apotropaic measure (compare Exodus 4) is not intimated here. A covenant sealed on the organ of generation may connect circumcision with fertility—and the threat against fertility—which is repeatedly stressed in the immediately preceding and following passages. The contractual cutting up of animals in chapter 15 is now followed by a cutting of human flesh.
13. silver. If the language of the text reflects the realia of the Patriarchal period, the term would refer to silver weights. If it reflects the writer’s period, it would refer to money, since by then coins had been introduced. The weighing-out of silver by Abraham in chapter 23 argues for the likelihood of the former possibility.
16. and I will bless him. The Masoretic Text has “bless her,” evidently to make the verb agree with the following clause, but this looks like a redundance in light of the beginning of the verse, and several ancient versions plausibly read here “bless him.”
17. and he laughed. The verb yitsḥaq is identical with the Hebrew form of the name Isaac that will be introduced in verse 19. The laughter here—hardly the expected response of a man flinging himself on his face—is in disbelief, perhaps edged with bitterness. In the subsequent chapters, the narrative will ring the changes on this Hebrew verb, the meanings of which include joyous laughter, bitter laughter, mockery, and sexual dalliance.
To a hundred-year-old. Abraham’s interior monologue is represented as a line of verse that neatly illustrates the pattern of heightening or intensification from first to second verset characteristic of biblical poetry: here, unusually (but in accord with the narrative data), the numbers go down from first to second verset, but the point is that, as incredible as it would be for a hundred-year-old to father a child, it would be even more incredible for a ninety-year-old woman, decades past menopause, to become a mother. The Abraham who has been overpowered by two successive epiphanies in this chapter is now seen as someone living within a human horizon of expectations. In the very moment of prostration, he laughs, wondering whether God is not playing a cruel joke on him in these repeated promises of fertility as time passes and he and his wife approach fabulous old age. He would be content, he goes on to say, to have Ishmael carry on his line with God’s blessing.
20. As for Ishmael, I have heard you. Once again, the etymology of the name is highlighted. These seven English words reflect just two Hebrew words in immediate sequence, uleyishmaʿel shemaʿtikha, with the root sh-m-ʿ evident in both.