Genesis: Chapter Fifteen (God's Covenant With Abram)

In which Abram starts thinking and is so shocked that he has that capability that he thinks it's God speaking to him, and in which God proves himself to be functionally useless

After helping the Sodomite sinners defeat their Elamese oppressors, "the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision" (15:1). Yep. Abram imagines that God is speaking to him, so he automatically assumes that God really is speaking to him, which is like dreaming that you can fly and then assuming that you can safely jump off the Sears tower.

God says:

Do not be afraid, Abram.
I am your shield,
your very great reward.

But Abram is beginning to doubt the Lord. He finally comes to the realization that his wife is barren and the "offspring" who will inherit his belongings is a slave named Eliezer of Damascus. When he queries God about this, God tells him in 15:5:

This man will not be your heir, but a son coming from your own body will be your heir. Look up at the heavens and count the stars — if indeed you can count them. So shall your offspring be.

God drops the line once more. Does Abram bite?

Yes, he most certainly does. "Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness." (15:6)

But when God tells Abram that the land he stands on all belongs to Abram, Abram's still a little skeptical, as well he should be. He asks, "O Sovereign Lord, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?" (15:8)

"Trust me," says God, and Abram believes him.

Actually, that's not the whole truth, but I almost wish it were. God's actually got something more insidious planned out. "Bring me a heifer," God says in 15:9, "a goat and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon."

It's either ritual time or time for stew. Abram takes notes.

Abram's Grocery List

• 3-year-old heifer
• 3-year-old goat
• 3-year-old ram
• Dove
• Young pigeon
• Milk
• Eggs
• Those little chocolates that Sarai likes

So Abram gets all of this stuff together, chops everything in two, and "arranged the halves opposite each other" like an obsessive serial killer, but he leaves the pigeon whole. He has to keep the buzzards from chowing down on his bloody animal sacrifice. (15:10-11)

Abram promptly falls asleep "and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him" (15:13). And then God makes his covenant while Abram's passed out, hardly giving Abram a chance to retort:

Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. You, however, will go to your fathers in peace and be buried at a good old age. In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.
...
To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt, the Euphrates — the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites."

I am a powerful fortune teller. I predict that in the next four hundred years, war will break out, but afterward there will be a period of relative peace. People will die and other people will be born. At least one newborn will be named Robert, and one Frances.

God's prediction here is not something so specific that no human could have guessed it. He predicts that a person with no education will become a slave, as will his entire family and every generation that passes from his loins, but that four hundred years later, they'll get pissed off and revolt. The only thing obviously wrong about this prediction is that Abram's wife is still barren!

Nothing has been done to help Sarai recover her fertility. Certainly, if God has the power to be Abram's shield, to help Abram and his army of 318 people destroy four entire armies run by kings, to flood the earth and destroy all life thereupon, to even create new universes, planets, and life to live on them, then certainly — certainly — he has the power to give a single woman a functional reproductive system, after he's promised her husband offspring! Certainly, God must know how that particular system works if he created it!