God Confirms His Promise
Abram asks how he can know he will possess the land, and the LORD answers by directing him to prepare a set of animals. Abram arranges them, then waits and drives away the birds of prey.
B8ut Abram replied, “Lord GOD, how can I know that I will possess it?” 9And the LORD said to him, “Bring Me a heifer, a goat, and a ram, each three years old, along with a turtledove and a young pigeon.” 10So Abram brought all these to Him, split each of them down the middle, and laid the halves opposite each other. The birds, however, he did not cut in half. 11And the birds of prey descended on the carcasses, but Abram drove them away.
As darkness and dread fall on Abram, the LORD speaks of his descendants' long affliction in a foreign land, their later deliverance with possessions, Abram's peaceful death, and the delayed return tied to the Amorites' unfinished iniquity.
12As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and suddenly great terror and darkness overwhelmed him. 13Then the LORD said to Abram, “Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. 14But I will judge the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will depart with many possessions. 15You, however, will go to your fathers in peace and be buried at a ripe old age. 16In the fourth generation your descendants will return here, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”
In the darkness, a smoking firepot and flaming torch pass between the divided pieces, and the LORD makes covenant with Abram. The promised land is then named in its breadth, with its peoples listed one by one.
17When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, behold, a smoking firepot and a flaming torch appeared and passed between the halves of the carcasses. 18On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I have given this land — from the river of Egypt to the great River Euphrates — 19the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, 20Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, 21Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, and Jebusites.”