Our God is “The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob” (Ex 3:15 ESV). This triple name of God is strangely intimate, composed as it is of his covenant friends (Is 41:8). God builds this name piece by piece over three generations: to Abram, the Ur-Patriarch, he is only “the Lord” or “El Shaddai” (Gen 15:7; 17:1); to Isaac in a night vision at Beersheba, he becomes “the God of Abraham your father” (26:24); to Jacob in a dream at Bethel, he is now “the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac” (28:13). With Moses at the burning bush, God uses the complete and now-familiar form.[1] Here, the ink has dried. When their descendants spoke this name, they entreated the Lord to remember their fathers. Just as God pieces his name together from the names of the patriarchs, he embodies them in the animals of the Covenant of Pieces.
One Question, Two Ways
Popular readings of the Covenant of the Pieces in Genesis 15 focus on it as fact rather than as figure. When God promises land and offspring, an aged and childless Abram responds, “How am I to know that I shall possess it?” (Gen 15:8). To Abram the promises are one: without offspring, there is no one to possess the land. We read this question as a request for assurance. God takes a covenant-cutting rite familiar to Abram’s world—a solemn vow to keep one’s word on pain of death—and makes himself both parties in the agreement. This act proves God’s resolve and strengthens Abram’s faith. It is God’s honor, not Abram’s, that guarantees these promises: “[S]ince he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself” (Heb 6:13). In this reading, the answer to Abram’s question is, “By this rite.”
This reading causes us to overlook an important feature of the covenant: it is ratified in a night vision. Visions are the stuff of seers and prophets, of ladders to heaven (Gen 28:10–17), of flying scrolls (Zech 5:1–4), and of winged, chimeric creatures (Ezek 1:10–18). In a vision, a prophet is shown familiar things arranged in unfamiliar ways: to see, by the Spirit, the mind of God. So it is here. The bloody work of flesh and bone, slaughter and butchery, assembled in the heat of day, has its meaning unveiled in the darkness. Abram, the prophet, beholds “a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch pass[ing] between these pieces” (Gen 15:17). This vision is a peculiar answer to Abram’s question—though, what exactly did Abram ask? Have we misheard it?
Abram’s words are spoken, two millennia later, by another aged and childless man. Zechariah, his wife Elizabeth also barren, is divinely promised a son. Like Abram he asks, “How shall I know this?” (Lk 1:18).[2]Unlike Abram however, Zechariah is upbraided: “You will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things take place, because you did not believe my words” (1:20). Though the words are the same, God understands Zechariah to be asking a different question. Zechariah asks from unbelief and receives silence; Abram asks because “he believed the Lord” and receives a vision (Gen 15:6). The vision is not an answer to, “How do I know you will keep your word?” Abram is not seeking to be convinced. He asks to be let in, “How will it appear?” As an answer to this question, a vision makes sense. God is telling Abram, “Watch and see.”
Bearing Resemblance
Like an attentive Israelite hearing Genesis read aloud in the wilderness assembly, let us picture the scene. God commands Abram to gather five animals: “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon” (Gen 15:9). The first three animals he cuts in half and lays symmetrically to form an aisle with a whole bird placed on each side. At last, out of the darkness, the smoking pot and flaming torch process through these splayed bodies. For an Israelite rescued by a pillar of fire and guided through the desert by a living cloud, the pot and torch bear special significance. For an Israelite whose life is saturated with ritual sacrifice, so do these animals, more than we might suppose.
Beasts are images of men. They share the honor of our creation day. They cover the shame of our first parents with their skins. God speaks affectionately (and exasperatedly) of his people as his flock. The firstborn of Israel are redeemed by the firstborn of their herds. What is true of all beasts is intensely true of sacrificial animals: they figure the lives of God’s covenant people.[3] This is so clear as to be invisible to an Israelite, and it surfaces in ways that surprise and confound us: “Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the tendon attached to the socket of the hip, because the socket of Jacob’s hip was touched near the tendon” (32:32). Abram is no exception: the animals God commands him to prepare speak of his beloved offspring.
God’s promises are given to patriarchs and borne by matriarchs. Faced with the promise of a son, Abram is at a loss: Sarai is barren (11:30). Each matriarch struggles with childbearing—Rebekah and Rachel are barren (25:21; 29:31), and Leah has periods of infertility (30:9), but Abram is marked out by his longing for an heir: “O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless?” (15:2). And, as the birth of Ishmael makes clear, no shortcuts can be taken: the promised heir can only come through Sarai (17:19). The heifer, a bovine that has not yet calved, embodies all of this at once.
Critical moments of Abram and Sarai’s life are marked by cattle. Twice, Sarai is taken from Abram, and each time, cattle are part of the exchange. With Pharaoh, they are part of the price he pays (12:16); with Abimelech, they are part of his apology (20:14). After the covenant is cut, we hear no mention of cattle until, by the oaks of Mamre, Abraham is visited by three men. Abraham prepares a calf as a sacrificial meal and watches as they eat. Then they ask, “Where is Sarah your wife?” (18:9). As she eavesdrops, they announce, “[T]his time next year … Sarah your wife shall have a son” (Gen 18:10). Soon, says the Lord, the heifer will calve.
These cattle episodes form a chiasm centered on God’s choice of Isaac through Sarah:
The heifer’s promised calf becomes the offered ram: “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering” (22:2). But the Lord provides: “Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns” (22:13). For our ears, this is the first ram Abraham has seen since the vision. While Isaac asks, “[W]here is the lamb for the burnt offering?” (22:7) and Abraham equivocates, “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son,” (22:8), it is a ram that Abraham finds and burns as an “offering instead of his son” (22:13).
After Abram’s vision, no goats are seen until the arrival of Jacob. As God orders Abram to bring him a she-goat, so Rebekah orders Jacob to bring goats to her: “Now therefore, my son, obey my voice as I command you. Go to the flock and bring me two good young goats, so that I may prepare from them delicious food for your father” (27:8–9). The goat meat itself is disguised as game and offered to Isaac by Jacob in goatskins. Jacob, in becoming his brother, becomes the offered goat.[4] In Laban, Jacob takes his own medicine: his wages are a bride disguised as another (29:15–25); later his wages are sheep and goats (31:7). Near the end of his life, Jacob’s jealous sons disguise their betrayal by dipping Joseph’s coat in goat’s blood (37:31). Where Jacob was once a son disguised as a goat, here is a goat disguised as his son. The goat is a summary of Jacob-made-Israel: the act of becoming another.
A Strange Arrangement
The first three animals, read as the patriarchs they represent, appear to be out of order. The sequence God gives is: a heifer, a female goat, a ram, a dove, and a pigeon. That is: Abraham, Jacob, then Isaac. That a son is the subject of God’s promise to Abram explains this odd ordering: it is not a matter of chronology, but centrality. Matriarchs may bear the promise, but the son is the promise in the flesh. The son of promise—the only male animal—sits squarely in the center of the list, flanked on one side by two females, and on the other by two birds:
[F F] M [B B]
After cutting the land animals, Abram arranges their halves “over against the other” (Gen 15:10) — that is, facing each other. The dove and the pigeon, the only animals from “the heavens” (1:20), are not cut by Abram: this detail is crucial enough to be enshrined in Levitical law (Lev 1:14–17).[5] Abram divides, not the birds themselves, but their kind. It is a division that doubles. When the birds are placed on each side, the five animals have become two groups of four kinds:[6]
B – B
M | M
F | F
F | F
This is something new. Only in the vision does Abram see what he has made: two winged, chimeric creatures, face to face, flanking the arrival of God. Two cherubim, like those on the ark, “overshadowing the mercy seat with their wings, their faces one to another [and] toward the mercy seat”— the place where God says, “I will speak with you” (Ex 25:20–22). Abram beholds a tabernacle in microcosm: a place of meeting on which God descends, built from the flesh of sacrificial animals.
In Living Flesh
While the law records rites for sacrificing turtledoves and pigeons, no figures in the Hebrew Scriptures are recorded presenting them. From the night of Abram’s vision, this conspicuous silence lasts over two thousand years. When Mary and Joseph present their newborn son at the temple, they “offer a sacrifice according to what is said in the Law of the Lord,” which for them is the one they can afford: “a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons” (Lk 2:22–24). Later, when this son is baptized, the “Holy Spirit descend[s] on him in bodily form, like a dove” (3:22).
Years prior, in Zechariah’s house, two women greet each other: one barren, one virgin. Elizabeth, filled with the Spirit, bears in her womb the continuation of Abram’s promise. Mary, overshadowed by the Spirit, bears in hers its fulfillment. Here in this room, we finally behold, in living flesh, the vision that Abram saw: two mortal creatures, made from Abram’s flesh, faces turned toward each other, divided by covenants yet united by the same winged Spirit, flanking the arrival of God. The Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the one who takes on the names of his people—now takes on their flesh: I will be your son.
“Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.” —John 8:56
Steven T. Reynolds and his wife Amanda live in Waco, TX with their twins Eliana and Elias (and also many pets). He is a software engineer and a layman in the PCA. This essay grew from a Sunday school class he taught on biblical typology.
NOTES
[1] Prior to this, the full formula is only anticipated by Joseph, that dreamer, who closes Genesis and his life by reminding his brothers of God’s oath to “Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” (Gen 50:24).
[2] Luke repeats Abram’s core question from the LXX: κατὰ τί γνώσομαι.
[3] The human-like honor scripture confers to animals runs even deeper than I argue here. They are held liable by God for shedding man’s blood (Gen 9:5). In the tabernacle period, killing an animal apart from sacrifice is tantamount to murder (Lev 17:3–4). They participate in Nineveh’s repentance (Jonah 3:6–10) and are equal objects of God’s mercy (4:11).
[4] Seeing Jacob as “the goat-man” is James Jordan’s insight. Others in this essay may also be his, by accident or osmosis. Regardless, the essay itself is proof of my indebtedness.
[5] Though it warrants its own essay, I will only note here that Leviticus 1 formalizes all of Abram’s sacrifices in Genesis 15 for Israel’s Levitical system. That is, with one key difference: the sacrifices must now all be male.
[6] This specific arrangement is illustrative; all that is demanded is the symmetrical placement of the pieces.