17:1 tish‛im shana w'tésha‛ shanim
As soon as we read this we should know, by now, that in terms of source criticism, we are reading the words of P, who is the one who can count! P is not only a stippler for numbers and dates but also likes to make them meaningful which (whatever the meaning is) often produces "pretty numbers" or round figures. So, this happens when Abram is 99, itself a nice number. But P also seems to think ahead: this is going to put Abe's age at a nice round 100 come next year when his son and heir Isaac is born! All proof of the divine perfection of God's plan.
ani el shadday
See my post about the names of God. At this point in Genesis we have already had two el's (designations of God composed of the word el followed by a name): el ‛elyon in ch. 14, and in the passage we just finished reading there was el roi. Of all the el-names, the most common of all is the one we find here, el shadday, which is who God himself introduces himself as to Abram in this important scene, perhaps the scene when the real Abrahamic covenant is finalized. Nobody really knows what shadday means and anything you hear is only a guess; traditionally El Shaddai has been translated as 'God almighty'; but the fact is, sometimes a name is just a name. The importance of the name El Shaddai is heightened by its mention in a key passage in Exodus (6:2-4, JPS), which we should perhaps quote and read in its entirety and consider its implications even though it anticipates the next book in the pentalogy:
waydabber elohim el moshe vayyómer elaw ani YHWH wa'era el avraham el yitzxaq w'el ya‛aqov b'el shadday ush'mi YHWH lo nodá‛ti lahem w'gam haqimóti et b'riti ittam latet lahem et éretz k'ná‛an asher gáru vah...This tallies with what we are now reading. Notice, however, that the narrator of our text uses the tetragrammaton here: wayyera YHWH el avram wayyómer elaw ani el shadday 'YHWH appeared to Abram and said to him: "I am El Shaddai." So, it isn't the (post-Mosaic) narrator and the audience who do not know God by his name, only the patriarchs and the people of their time! That Genesis does not stick to this consistently is one of the founding arguments in favour of the documentary hypothesis, of course. We only need look again at the passage we just got through reading to see how, in some passages, YHWH occurs all over the place. It was YHWH's angel who found Hagar in the wilderness (16:7), and he is called mal'akh YHWH four times in that little sequence just in case we didn't catch it the first time! Then he blesses Hagar and actually tells her (16:11, JPS): hinnakh hara w'yoladt ben w'qarat sh'mo yishma‛el ki shama‛ YHWH el ‛onyekh 'Behold you are with child / And shall bear a son; / You shall call him Ishmael, / For the Lord [orig. YHWH] has paid heed to your suffering.' So much for keeping the name a secret! And there are other "slips" where it is clearly shown that not only do we know that God is YHWH (even though Jews observe a taboo on pronouncing this name out loud - which is conveniently easy since we haven't known for millennia what the vowels are!), but the characters in the patriarchal story knew too! In the preceding passage, notice that Sarai tells Abram (16:2, JPS) hinne na ‛atzaráni YHWH millédet 'Look, the Lord [YHWH] has kept me from bearing' and later on, when she is in a bad mood (16:5), yishpoT YHWH beni uvenékha 'The Lord [YHWH] decide between you and me!' But of course the one that takes the cake is 15:7 where God himself tells Abram ani YHWH asher hotzetíkha me'ur kasdim 'I am the Lord [YHWH] who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans.' Now if that isn't letting the cat out of the bag, what is? There only seems to be one sensible way to account for this, and it is to come to grips with the perfectly reasonable idea that there were variant traditions and that the book of Genesis as we have it (the only way we can have it, because this is what Genesis is) is a compendium of those traditions woven into a single piece of literature. The source critics explain how various earlier documents went into the mix, reflecting those differing traditions. The source of the passage we are now reading, in which God announces himself to Abram as El Shaddai, is thought to be the same as the source which tells in Exodus how God revealed his true name to Moses, to whom he explains that the patriarchs only knew him by the name of El Shaddai; and that is consistent for that source (i.e. P). Generally, the stories where the patriarchs knew God as YHWH come from another source: J.
God spoke to Moses and said to him, "I am the Lord. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make Myself known to them by My name יהוה. I also established My covenant with them, to give them the land of Canaan, the land in which they lived as sojourners...
hithallekh l'fanay wehye tamim
'Walk in My ways and be blameless' (JPS). The first two words mean lit. 'walk about in front of me' (l'fanay, which is lifne with the pronominal suffix, is yet another incarnation of the ubiquitous panim, the face-word; even more lit. 'go about to my face'). The third word, wehye, consists of the conjunction w- and the imperative h'ye 'be!' It is quite another matter whether the pragmatic meaning of this utterance is "I command you to walk in my ways and I command you to be blameless" (which is the literal meaning) or perhaps rather it is "If you walk in my ways, you're good." The word tamim is glossed in the dictionaries as 'whole, intact, unobjectionable, free of blemish, perfect' as well as 'blameless.' Another way of understanding the sequence of words more in accord with what we know of BH literary practice on the basis of our text is as a parallellism, i.e. the repetition of the same idea in different words, so that hithallekh l'fanay and h'ye tamim are two ways of saying the same thing, repeated as a matter of style.
17:2 w'ett'na vriti beni uvenékha
From the viewpoint of Genesis as a single narrative thread, this constitutes a confirmation and ratification of the b'rit established in ch. 15. For the documentary hypothesis, on the other hand, this is God making a covenant with Abram for the first time, since this is P's account; the other passage about the covenant between God and Abram was J's version of it. The most important difference of content between the two covenants is that in this one alone is it established that the sign of men's fulfilment of their side of the agreement is circumcision. The verb used here, ett'na 'I will give' or 'I will put' from the root n-t-n, does seem to suggest that God is establishing a new covenant rather than ratifying an existing one.
17:3 wayyippol avram ‛al panaw
Lit. 'Abram fell on his face' (again the face-word!). This is a conventional image of obedient prostration before a superior and a standard phrase in Genesis and elsewhere in the scriptures.
17:4-5 l'av hamon goyim, w'haya shimkha avraham
A very weak attempt to suggest a folk etymology for the name Abraham which God now gives to Abram: av hamon 'father of many'. Everyone agrees it's nonsense: av + hamon does not make avraham! It is not certain what (if anything) Abram or Abraham means, but I think I'll go along with Speiser who surmises that (a) the basic form is Abram; Abraham is simply a "random" lengthening of the name by inserting an extra syllable, and (b) Abram may be from av(i) 'father' + ram (from the root meaning 'to raise' and 'high'), so that we might gloss it roughly as "Exalted Father." See also my note about Sarai / Sarah (17:15).
17:7-8 wahaqimoti et briti... lihyot l'kha lelohim ul'zar‛akha axarékha
A covenant is an agreement between two parties which sets out the commitments of each of the parties. In this one, between God on the one hand and Abraham and his zéra‛ (seed, descendants) on the other, God is about to say what the latter's commitment should be, but first, here is what God offers: lihyot l'kha lelohim 'to be your God' or rather (EAS, JPS, EF) 'to be God to you', lit. 'to-be to-you for-[a]-god' (regarding the grammatical construction see my note below on 17:11). This strikes me as an interesting way of focusing on what the Israelite God offers his people and what the latter wish to receive because it is what they value. To be sure, there are also mentions in these passages of more materialistic benefits, such as inheriting the land, having lots of donkeys and camels, or promises that one's enemies will come to no good. This is all v. 7 offers, and v. 8 adds as something slightly more tangible the promise to give Abram's seed et éretz m'gurékha et kol éretz k'ná‛an la'axuzat ‛olam 'the land you sojourn in... all the land of Canaan, as an everlasting holding', but then concludes by repeating, just in case this wasn't clear, w'hayiti lahem lelohim 'and I will be their God.'
ul'zar‛akha axarékha
This phrase, (JPS) 'and (to) your offspring to come', (KJV) 'and to thy seed after thee', (NBIE) 'and (to) your children after you', occurs in both these verses, will be repeated many times in Genesis and may be considered one of the mottos of the entire book. When Abram's grandson Jacob returns to Bethel and God renews their covenant, he tells him again (35:12, JPS): w'et ha'áretz asher natátti l'avraham ul'yitzxaq l'kha ett'nénnah ul'zar‛akha axarékha etten et ha'áretz 'The land that I assigned to Abraham and Isaac / I assign to you; / And to your offspring to come / Will I assign the land.' The same formula has occurred already in the context of God's covenant with Noah (9:9): wa'ani hinn'ni meqim et b'riti etkhem w'et zar‛akhem axarekhem 'I now establish My covenant with you and your offspring to come.' See also the next two verses, and later in this chapter when God tells Abraham to name his future son yitzxaq (Isaac), he will repeat the formula (17:19): w'haqimoti et briti itto livrit ‛olam l'zar‛o axaraw 'and I will maintain My covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his offspring to come'.
17:9 w'atta et briti tishmor atta w'zar‛akha axarekha l'dorotam
'As for you, you and your offspring to come throughout the ages shall keep My covenant.' The reason why the "assignment of the land" is eternal is because so is the covenant!
17:10 uven zar‛akha axarékha
(Cf. vv. 7-9.) The same perpetuity clause applies, now, to the key commitment required of Abraham.
himmol lakhem kol zakhar
And this is it: God tells Abram to circumcise all the males. This is a clause in God's covenant that is only implementable on males (kol zakhar). The verb root m-w-l specifically means 'to circumcise': it has a simple active (qal) form (mal 'he circumcised') and a medio-passive (niphal) form (nimmol 'he was circumcised'). The form in this verse, himmol, is the verbal noun (infinitive) of the niphal: 'to be circumcised.' The postposed subject is kol zakhar 'all male(s)', which leaves lakhem 'to you (pl.)' to function as an ethic dative: 'let all your males be circumcised.' Symbolically this is the outward sign of Abram's and Abram's people's acceptance of and commitment to the covenant. Outwardly it is a ritual act; inwardly it is a gesture of participation in the pact between God and the Israelites who count themselves as heirs to their covenant (the zar‛akha axarékha).
17:11 un'maltem et b'sar ‛orlatkhem w'haya l'ot b'rit beni uvenekhem
'You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin, and that shall be the sign of the covenant between Me and you.' The noun ‛orla means 'foreskin'; here, b'sar (the flesh of) ‛orlatkhem. The second clause explains the function of this: w'haya l'ot b'rit 'it shall be for a sign of a covenant' or '...a covenant-sign' (not really 'the covenant', if we're nit-picking). The H construction h-y-h l-X is often translatable as 'to be X' but the l- preceding the predicate specifies 'to be for X' or 'to serve as X'. Other examples already seen include 1:29 (lakhem yihye l'okhla 'will be for food for you'; similarly 6:21 and 9:3), 11:3, 17:7 (see above). Sometimes, the same construction is better translated as 'to become X', e.g. 2:10 (w'haya l'arba‛a rashim), 2:24 (w'hayu l'vasar exad), 9:15 (w'lo yihye ‛od hammáyim l'mabbul), 17:4 (w'hay'ta l'av hamon goyim). The exact same formula as here, as part of covenant-speak, was seen in 9:13 (w'hay'ta l'ot b'rit etc.). Looking at this from the perspective of the "covenant script", one of the ritual elements of a covenant is the existence of a "sign" as a "reminder" of the agreement. In ch. 9, for instance, where it is actually God who undertakes to observe a "ritual" as a sign of the covenant which takes the form of a rainbow which he will put in the sky when it rains, God says (9:15) w'zakharti et briti asher beni uvenekhem etc. 'and I will remember my covenant between myself and you'; this doesn't mean literally, of course, that God needs the rainbow because otherwise he is going to forget, but rather w'zakharti 'I will remember' has the sense of 'in order to commemorate.' In this framework, then, Abram and his male descendants will be circumcised as a sign whereby to remember (i.e. in commemoration of) the covenant with God, wherein God agrees to be lelohim for him and them: to be their God.
17:12 uven sh'monat yamim yimmol lakhem kol zakhar
Abraham will begin to fulfil this stipulation when his son Isaac is born (21:4, JPS) wayyámol avraham et yitzxaq b'no ben sh'monat yamim ka'asher tziwwa oto elohim 'And when his son Isaac was eight days old, Abraham circumcised him, as God had commanded him'.
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