Notes 18. A prediction (18:1-15)

SYNOPSIS: When three men, sent by God, pass by his tent, Abraham rushes to invite them to stay and eat. They forecast that in a year's time Sarah will have a child, even though she and her husband are old. From the entrance to the tent, Sarah hears and laughs. She is chided by God for it, for "nothing is too difficult for YHWH."

• Text of the passage in Nawat

The passage begins with a relatively intimate domestic scene: Abraham and Sarah receive guests at their home in Hebron. This scene has divine overtones, of course, but they are muted, and "hang in the air" rather than being played up by the narrator, who is clearly J.

Abraham has already been so clearly established as the central character of this part of the book that his name is not even mentioned in the first five verses; he is simple "he", although in H the pronoun can usually be omitted through the syntactic phenomenon of pro-drop, meaning that, as in many languages (but not English), an implied argument need not be expressed overtly by a noun phrase. So for example in v. 2, the H says wayyissa ‛enaw 'he raised his eyes', or more idiomatically, 'he looked up', but in the H there is no word present for he, because it is unnecessary, just as in Spanish, for example, the translation is (RV) alzó sus ojos which is sufficient without a need to say él alzó sus ojos. (Actually I think that Spanish translation is unidiomatic too; alzó los ojos would in my opinion be more correct.) But my point is that in these five verses Abraham is not named but we know he is the central actor; the fact he isn't named shows just how central he has become.

In verse 1, we immediately learn that wayyera elaw YHWH 'The Lord appeared to him' as he is sitting outside his tent, obviously in the shade, in the heat of the day, in much the same way as people in the countryside in tropical El Salvador sit outside their homes during the day time in the tenkal, the 'mouth of the house', or as we would call it in English, the yard (the Spanish word is patio); if this were Hawai'i, Abraham would be out on the lanai, perhaps. The cultural details may change but the basic idea is similar. Then in v. 2, he looks up from where he is sitting w'hinne sh'losha anashim 'and he saw three men.' The text goes straight from YHWH appearing to Abraham one moment, to Abraham seeing three men the next, and it would seem that perhaps they are the same, that is, the three men are the form in which YHWH appears to him on this occasion. If not, then it would read strangely: usually when YHWH appears we are told what he says or does, he doesn't just appear and then nothing. So the three men whom Abraham sees when he looks up are YHWH, and later in the story this will be confirmed though again in such a casual manner that it all is a bit strange. The whole thing is a bit dreamy: in a dream, and hopefully nowhere else if we're not going crazy, you can expect things like this to happen. Only this is not a dream scene, it seems. These men who were a moment ago referred to (we think) as YHWH, travellers who will now be invited to stop and rest, who are not really just men, are the closest things Genesis has to what in English are called angels. In H, when referred to as such at all, they are merely spoken of as YHWH's messengers (mal'akhim); see my note on 16:7, about the use of this term in Genesis.

So Abraham sees three men, and addressing them in an ironically ambiguous fashion (v. 3) as adonay ('sirs' - unless Abraham is anticipating by many centuries the later use of this very word as a substitute for the name of hashem...), invites them to stay a while. At this point in the story, does or does not Abraham know that this is actually God appearing to him (wayyera elaw YHWH)? Does he invite them in because he knows it's God, or is he just being hospitable to passing travellers? Supposedly it's the latter. Eventually, however, Abraham will become aware that these are no ordinary passers-by, because this visit is leading up to the famous scene where Abraham almost has an argument with God (see the next passage). Again, this all very dream-like! Perhaps that is why the ancients believed that dreams are really God inboxing us with private messages.

Everything in the next few verses suggests that Abraham did not at this point know these were not ordinary mortal men (he wouldn't really have invited God to wash his feet, would he?), and therefore show us Abraham behaving as he would have behaved to strangers passing by in front of his tent in the heat of the day. I don't think the point is to show us how exceptionally kind and considerate a man he was; that interpretation is either a subsequent projection of much later, changed social norms when it was no longer customary to invite unknown men into your tent to wash their feet, or an a posteriori attempt to prove that Abraham was a far better person than you or I, or both of the above. Actually, it is more likely that what we have here is simply a paradigm example of the practice of "Middle Eastern hospitality" as often portrayed or celebrated in many non-biblical stories and travellers' reports. Abraham was being polite, that is all. Two of Abraham's relatives, Lot (ch. 19) and Laban (ch. 24), will be shown acting in much the same way in similar circumstances, except that in Laban's case the visitor is not an angel, but Abraham's grandson.

And now, on with the story.

18:1 b'elone mamre
'By the terebinths of Mamre' (JPS). The noun elon designates a kind of tree. One tradition, which goes back to the LXX, translates the word here and elsewhere as 'oak', but acc. to Speiser "the best technical evidence favors 'terebinth'", a rendering adopted by the better modern translations. Yet another tradition, which goes as far back as Onk. and is reflected in the Vulg. (and hence subsequent translations subservient to it, such as RV), mistranslates this as 'valley'; in Speiser's opinion, the motivation for the alteration was to avoid any suggestion of pagan tree worship. The words in v. 4, which refer to "the tree", may or may not be worth taking as proof that an elon is a tree rather than a valley: w'hissha‛anu táxat ha‛etz 'and recline under the tree.' So what is a terebinth? I don't know but you can read about them here. I'm not sure that the botanical identification of the tree is terribly important to the plot; who knows, maybe Eloney Mamre was just the name of Abraham's ranch ("and meanwhile, over at Mamre Oaks").

k'xom hayyom
In hot countries, the degree of heat characteristic of different times of day may be one of the most salient ways of keeping track of time, especially without the benefit of a watch. Cf. the statement in 3:8 that God mithallekh baggan b'rúax hayyom 'was out walking in the garden in the breeze (or cool) of the day' (this was probably just a little before sunset, at least in El Salvador it would have been). The hot time of the day, referred to here, which is no doubt the hours right after midday, are no time to be out travelling on foot, and I'm sure it would be simple common courtesy in that heat to enquire of a passer-by whether they need a place to rest.

18:2 w'hinne sh'losha anashim nittzavim ‛alaw
The verb form nittzavim is the niphal (medio-passive) of n-tz-b 'to stand', cf. 21:28 where the hiphil (causative) is found. The preposition ‛al is notoriously difficult to translate correctly (and notoriously easy to translate wrongly) because it's meaning covers so many notions and we are often unsure which is the one really meant in a given context. Its primary meaning is given as 'on, over, above', so according to that this would seem to mean '...and here were three men standing over him', but in terms of social behaviour, in the immediate context that sounds a bit weird. This consideration doesn't stop the highly literal LXX from doing just that: kai idou treis andres heistêkeisan epanô autou. EF, who acknowledges in a note that "Heb. alav could mean 'over' or 'next to' him", still inexplicably seems to play the devil's advocate and makes the wrong choice: ...standing over against him, a wording also used in Rev. Most translations rightly prefer to say beside him, e.g. EAS, JPS, and also KJV (by him), ESV (in front of him), etc. Note that the same construction occurs in v. 8, with the roles reversed: Abraham brings the visitors their meal (wayyitten lifnehem 'he put it in front of them'; perhaps they were sitting or reclining on the ground, unless he had a table in the patio) w'hu ‛omed ‛alehem táxat ha‛etz wayyokhélu 'and he stood ‛alehem under the tree and (better: as) they ate': even if they were on the ground I don't imagine Abraham hovering over them like an over-zealous head waiter, I think he just stood nearby in the shade of the tree, beside them. Besides these meanings ('on, over' and 'near'), other BH senses of ‛al include 'because of, with regard to, according to, in spite of, in addition to, against' (see CHALOT). It has cognates in most Sem. languages (EK). Apparently it is ultimately derived from the verb root ‛-l-h 'to ascend'. Its pronominal forms (‛alay 'on me', ‛alékha 'on you (m. sg.)', ‛aláyikh (f. sg.)', ‛alaw 'on him' etc.), derived from an older form of the preposition, ‛ale, which was archaic in BH.

18:4 w'raxatzu raglekhem
There is a lot of washing of feet in ancient hospitality. Hospitality means receiving visitors, and visitors are travellers of necessity, and very few people back then had a car, or even a camel: people walked long distances along dusty roads wearing sandals. In such circumstances, obtaining water with which to wash one's feet amounted to a car wash and checking your tyres. If you were lucky enouth to own a camel, getting water for the camels was filling up the tank.

18:10 ka‛et xayya
This expression is translated as 'this time next year' or something to that effect (cf. 17:21 where a different phrase is used for the same idea), though the construction is unclear. It occurs here and again in v. 14, and in the same kind of context in 2 Kings 4:16-17. The commentaries call it an idiom. Cf. 18:2, where the prediction is fulfilled.

w'hu axaraw
This clause coming here is awkward. If it meant that Sarah was behind the door (as we tend to imagine), it ought to be w'hi rather than w'hu. Various "solutions" are offered but it still is odd. 

18:12 wattitzxaq sara b'qirbah
Here is another version of the Isaac name game (cf. 17:17)!

axare v'loti
The verb b-l-h only occurs here in Genesis (fifteen times in the whole Tanakh). Its meaning is 'to be used up, worn out, exhausted.'

hay'ta li ‛edna
This word ‛edna is a hapax legomenon. The dictionaries gloss it as 'sexual pleasure.' I am not sure why the perfect hay'ta is used, I would have expected the imperfect tihye here.

18:13 wayyómer YHWH el avraham
See how sneakily YHWH is reintroduced (cf. 18:1 and my comments at the top). If the audience (or at least first-timers) were not assumed to know from the beginning that God was among the three men, now they are, perhaps after the demonstration of the ability to read Sarah' mind. In fact, this may just be a skilfully constructed narrative technique which allows listeners to begin to wonder and suspect the truth before finally confirming the suspicions by ever so casually throwing in the divine name in the course of the continuing story. Deliberate or not, it works; my guess is there is nothing hapless about it, just good story-telling.

18:14 hayippale meYHWH davar
'Is anything too wondrous for the Lord?' (JPS). The verb root p-l-' is yet another that is a hapax in Gen. but not that uncommon outside it. Often used in the niphal as here (perf. nifla), its two main meanings are 'to be too difficult' and 'to be wondrous'.

18:15 watt'khaxesh sara
The verb root k-x-sh only occurs this once in Genesis. It mostly occurs in the piel, and the meaning is 'to deny' or 'to lie.' Either translation seems to be possible here.

wayyómer lo ki tzaxaqt
The conjunction ki coming after the negative word lo is hardly translatable; the whole sentence might perhaps be, in English: 'He said: No, you did laugh.' Speiser is a bit more adventurous, with: 'Yes you did.' That actually works fine, but wouldn't in most languages. Cf. 41:12.