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15 Because all the land that you see
כִּ֧י אֶת־כָּל־הָאָ֛רֶץ אֲשֶׁר־אַתָּ֥ה רֹאֶ֖ה
According to a plausible-sounding explanation I found at How Stuff Works:
If you’re a person with normal vision acuity … and you gaze horizontally from around 5 feet (152.4 centimeters) above the ground, you can see about 3 miles (5 kilometers) into the distance, which is the point at which the Earth’s curvature bends away so that the surface is no longer in view.
I probably don’t any longer have the math skills to figure out on my own where the Earth would curve out of sight; as I say, this estimate sounds plausible. If Abram was an unusually tall man, he could see farther. However, I don’t recall anyone in the Bible but Saul (1 Sam 9:2) who is described as tall.
Calculating generously at every stage, if Abram did a 360º, he could see perhaps 30 square miles, something on the order of 20,000 acres of land — 80,000 dunams, to use the traditional measurement in this part of the world. Modern Israel is something over 8,000 square miles (depending on whom you ask and what you include), but let’s exclude the 5,000 sq. mi. of the country that’s south of Beersheva. Even in that case, Abram’s actual eyesight could show him no more than 1% of the country.
However, as we saw with Moses last time, this kind of statement is either (1) symbolic, (2) mystical, or (3) both. To speak with more precision, it is literary. We are not talking here about Queen Dido’s trick (though she was a former Canaanite and Abram a future one). What is really happening here, something we’ll have to consider elsewhere in Genesis as well, is that Bethel is being identified as the center of the land. I cannot help but think of Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar,” which begins this way:
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
We’ll undoubtedly read the rest of this poem when Jacob shows up.
I give to you and your seed
לְךָ֣ אֶתְּנֶ֑נָּה וּֽלְזַרְעֲךָ֖
Uh … what seed? I don’t have any children!
That, of course, is a big part of what our story is about. We’ve already mentioned that the beginning of our story implicitly presented Lot as Abram’s (presumed) heir. Now he is apparently out of the picture. Yet Abram is still married to a woman who cannot conceive children. What exactly is going to happen? We are in suspense.
One of the things that doesn’t happen in our story is what would actually happen in a more realistic situation: Some farmer (or rancher) shows up and asks YHWH, “What are you talking about? This is my land!”
However, we are still really in the realm of story, not history. As in Rashi’s explanation for why the Bible begins with creation, God can give land to any nation wherever and whenever he wants to. Do the Hungarians — who have only lived in Hungary for 1,000 years or so — have a myth about how God gave Hungary to them? We Americans more or less have a story of this kind, and no doubt many other nations do as well. The Bible, as I often say, is the story of the ménage à trois among the God of Israel, the land of Israel, and the people of Israel. Genesis is Israel’s explanation of how that story got started.
forever עַד־עוֹלָֽם׃
We’ve had a couple of l’olams, when YHWH was afraid humans would eat from the Tree of Life and live forever (3:22), and when he said that his rûaḥ would not remain in them forever (6:3). This is our first ad-olam. It is the difference (if any) between “to eternity” and “until eternity.” If you think “Adon Olam” means “Lord of the World,” consider the lyrics and think again — though by the time that hymn was written, olam had long taken on the additional meaning of “world.” In the Bible, it refers only to “eternity” (in either direction).
“Forever” is a long time, that’s for sure. If we look at it in the context of slavery, though, it is not infinitely long. As Rashi points out in his comments to Exod 21:6 and Deut 15:17, which say that a slave who rejects freedom after six years of servitude must remain enslaved “forever,” Lev 25:10 says that even such a slave is freed at the Jubilee, that is, after a maximum of fifty years.
An amusing anecdote in this New York Times story has a museum director explaining to a donor what “in perpetuity” really means:
After Philippe de Montebello agreed at breakfast two decades ago to name the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Roman Sculpture Court, in perpetuity, for the philanthropists and antiquities collectors Leon Levy and his wife, Shelby White, Mr. Levy predictably, but politely, posed an impertinent question.
“Aware that sometime in the future, Philippe’s successor would probably be making the same promise to some donor not yet born,” Mr. Levy later recalled, “I asked him, How long is ‘in perpetuity’?”
“For you, 50 years,” Mr. de Montebello, the museum director, replied.
Levy actually negotiated it up to 75 years. Make it 100 and that would still not be enough for this promise to Abram, whose offspring will not even return to Bethel and environs for a number of centuries. We assume that YHWH and our author have the big picture in view, both in terms of time and in terms of land. As we’ll see next time, even 80,000 dunams will not be nearly enough for Abram’s seed.
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