{"commentary":{"id":"keil-delitzsch","name":"Carl Friedrich Keil and Franz Delitzsch Old Testament Commentary","website":"https://worthy.bible/commentaries/keil-delitzsch-commentary","licenseUrl":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/","licenseNotes":null,"licenseNotice":null,"englishName":"Carl Friedrich Keil and Franz Delitzsch Old Testament Commentary","language":"eng","textDirection":"rtl","sha256":"bb5cc0f9cfe0a93b3c903bb6972c6bc8c4e9f2bd3be6c2a6d276737cf9c5edce","availableFormats":["json"],"listOfBooksApiLink":"/api/c/keil-delitzsch/books.json","listOfProfilesApiLink":"/api/c/keil-delitzsch/profiles.json","numberOfBooks":39,"totalNumberOfChapters":909,"totalNumberOfVerses":6516,"totalNumberOfProfiles":0,"languageName":"English","languageEnglishName":"English"},"book":{"id":"GEN","commentaryId":"keil-delitzsch","name":"Genesis","commonName":"Genesis","introduction":"The First Book of Moses(Genesis)\n\nIntroduction\n\nContents, Design, and Plan of the Book of Genesis\n\nThe first book of Moses, which has the superscription בראשׁיח in the original, Γένεσις Κόσμον in the Cod. Alex. of the lxx, and is called liber creationis by the Rabbins, has received the name of Genesis from its entire contents. Commencing with the creation of the heaven and the earth, and concluding with the death of the patriarchs Jacob and Joseph, this book supplies us with information with regard not only to the first beginnings and earlier stages of the world and of the human race, but also to those of the divine institutions which laid the foundation for the kingdom of God. Genesis commences with the creation of the world, because the heavens and the earth form the appointed sphere, so far as time and space are concerned, for the kingdom of God; because God, according to His eternal counsel, appointed the world to be the scene both for the revelation of His invisible essence, and also for the operations of His eternal love within and among His creatures; and because in the beginning He created the world to be and to become the kingdom of God. The creation of the heaven and the earth, therefore, receives as its centre, paradise; and in paradise, man, created in the image of God, is the head and crown of all created beings. The history of the world and of the kingdom of God begins with him. His fall from God brought death and corruption into the whole creation (Gen 3:17.; Rom 8:19.); his redemption from the fall will be completed in and with the glorification of the heavens and the earth (Isa 65:17; Isa 66:22; Pe2 3:13; Rev 21:1). By sin, men have departed and separated themselves from God; but God, in His infinite mercy, has not cut himself off from men, His creatures. Not only did He announce redemption along with punishment immediately after the fall, but from that time forward He continued to reveal Himself to them, that He might draw them back to Himself, and lead them from the path of destruction to the way of salvation. And through these operations of God upon the world in theophanies, or revelations by word and deed, the historical development of the human race became a history of the plan of salvation. The book of Genesis narrates that history in broad, deep, comprehensive sketches, from its first beginning to the time of the patriarchs, whom God chose from among the nations of the earth to be the bearers of salvation for the entire world. This long space of 2300 years (from Adam to the flood, 1656; to the entrance of Abram into Canaan, 365; to Joseph's death, 285; in all, 2306 years) is divisible into two periods. The first period embraces the development of the human race from its first creation and fall to its dispersion over the earth, and the division of the one race into many nations, with different languages (2:4-11:26); and is divided by the flood into two distinct ages, which we may call the primeval age and the preparatory age. All that is related of the primeval age, from Adam to Noah, is the history of the fall; the mode of life, and longevity of the two families which descended from the two sons of Adam; and the universal spread of sinful corruption in consequence of the intermarriage of these two families, who differed so essentially in their relation to God (2:4-6:8). The primeval history closes with the flood, in which the old world perished (6:9-8:19). Of the preparatory age, from Noah to Terah the father of Abraham, we have an account of the covenant which God made with Noah, and of Noah's blessing and curse; the genealogies of the families and tribes which descended from his three sons; an account of the confusion of tongues, and the dispersion of the people; and the genealogical table from Shem to Terah (8:20-11:26).\n\nThe second period consists of the patriarchal era. From this we have an elaborate description of the lives of the three patriarchs of Israel, the family chosen to be the people of God, from the call of Abraham to the death of Joseph (11:27-50:26). Thus the history of humanity is gathered up into the history of the one family, which received the promise, that God would multiply it into a great people, or rather into a multitude of peoples, would make it a blessing to all the families of the earth, and would give it the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession.\n\nThis general survey will suffice to bring out the design of the book of Genesis, viz., to relate the early history of the Old Testament kingdom of God. By a simple and unvarnished description of the development of the world under the guidance and discipline of God, it shows how God, as the preserver and governor of the world, dealt with the human race which He had created in His own image, and how, notwithstanding their fall and through the misery which ensued, He prepared the way for the fulfillment of His original design, and the establishment of the kingdom which should bring salvation to the world. Whilst by virtue of the blessing bestowed in their creation, the human race was increasing from a single pair to families and nations, and peopling the earth; God stemmed the evil, which sin had introduced, by words and deeds, by the announcement of His will in commandments, promises, and threats, and by the infliction of punishments and judgments upon the despisers of His mercy. Side by side with the law of expansion from the unity of a family to the plurality of nations, there was carried on from the very first a law of separation between the ungodly and those that feared God, for the purpose of preparing and preserving a holy seed for the rescue and salvation of the whole human race. This double law is the organic principle which lies at the root of all the separations, connections, and dispositions which constitute the history of the book of Genesis. In accordance with the law of reproduction, which prevails in the preservation and increase of the human race, the genealogies show the historical bounds within which the persons and events that marked the various epochs are confined; whilst the law of selection determines the arrangement and subdivision of such historical materials as are employed.\n\nSo far as the plan of the book is concerned, the historical contents are divided into ten groups, with the uniform heading, \"These are the generations\" (with the exception of Gen 5:1 : \"This is the book of the generations\"); the account of the creation forming the substratum of the whole. These groups consist of the Tholedoth: 1. of the heavens and the earth (Gen 2:4-4:26); 2. of Adam (Gen 5:1-6:8); 3. of Noah (Gen 6:9-9:29); 4. of Noah's sons (Gen 10:1-11:9); 5. of Shem (Gen 11:10-26); 6. of Terah (Gen 11:27-25:11); 7. of Ishmael (Gen 25:12-18); 8. of Isaac (Gen 25:19-35:29); 9. of Esau (Gen 26); and 10. of Jacob (Gen 37-50). There are five groups in the first period, and five in the second. Although, therefore, the two periods differ considerably with regard to their scope and contents, in their historical importance to the book of Genesis they are upon a par; and the number ten stamps upon the entire book, or rather upon the early history of Israel recorded in the book, the character of completeness. This arrangement flowed quite naturally from the contents and purport of the book. The two periods, of which the early history of the kingdom of God in Israel consists, evidently constitute two great divisions, so far as their internal character is concerned. All that is related of the first period, from Adam to Terah, is obviously connected, no doubt, with the establishment of the kingdom of God in Israel, but only in a remote degree. The account of paradise exhibits the primary relation of man to God and his position in the world. In the fall, the necessity is shown for the interposition of God to rescue the fallen. In the promise which followed the curse of transgression, the first glimpse of redemption is seen. The division of the descendants of Adam into a God-fearing and an ungodly race exhibits the relation of the whole human race to God. The flood prefigures the judgment of God upon the ungodly; and the preservation and blessing of Noah, the protection of the godly from destruction. And lastly, in the genealogy and division of the different nations on the one hand, and the genealogical table of Shem on the other, the selection of one nation is anticipated to be the recipient and custodian of the divine revelation. The special preparations for the training of this nation commence with the call of Abraham, and consist of the care bestowed upon Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and their posterity, and of the promises which they received. The leading events in the first period, and the prominent individuals in the second, also furnished, in a simple and natural way, the requisite points of view for grouping the historical materials of each under a fivefold division. The proof of this will be found in the exposition. Within the different groups themselves the arrangement adopted is this: the materials are arranged and distributed according to the law of divine selection; the families which branched off from the main line are noticed first of all; and when they have been removed from the general scope of the history, the course of the main line is more elaborately described, and the history itself is carried forward. According to this plan, which is strictly adhered to, the history of Cain and his family precedes that of Seth and his posterity; the genealogy of Japhet and Ham stands before that of Shem; the history of Ishmael and Esau, before that of Isaac and Jacob; and the death of Terah, before the call and migration of Abraham to Canaan. In this regularity of composition, according to a settled plan, the book of Genesis may clearly be seen to be the careful production of one single author, who looked at the historical development of the human race in the light of divine revelation, and thus exhibited it as a complete and well arranged introduction to the history of the Old Testament kingdom of God.","order":1,"numberOfChapters":50,"sha256":"2e2499c22cc142725ec4066943f45c4106f1c3bf15dc738918287a6c9be6b3ab","firstChapterNumber":1,"firstChapterApiLink":"/api/c/keil-delitzsch/GEN/1.json","firstChapterReference":{"commentaryId":"keil-delitzsch","book":"GEN","chapter":1},"lastChapterNumber":50,"lastChapterApiLink":"/api/c/keil-delitzsch/GEN/50.json","lastChapterReference":{"commentaryId":"keil-delitzsch","book":"GEN","chapter":50},"totalNumberOfVerses":321},"chapter":{"number":20,"content":[{"type":"verse","number":4,"content":["Abimelech, who had not yet come near her, because God had hindered him by illness (Gen 20:6 and Gen 20:17), excused himself on the ground that he had done no wrong, since he had supposed Sarah to be Abraham's sister, according to both her husband's statement and her own. This plea was admitted by God, who told him that He had kept him from sinning through touching Sarah, and commanded him to restore the woman immediately to her husband, who was a prophet, that he might pray for him and save his life, and threatened him with certain death to himself and all belonging to him in case he should refuse. That Abimelech, when taking the supposed sister of Abraham into his harem, should have thought that he was acting \"in innocence of heart and purity of hands,\" i.e., in perfect innocence, is to be fully accounted for, from his undeveloped moral and religious standpoint, by considering the customs of that day. But that God should have admitted that he had acted \"in innocence of heart,\" and yet should have proceeded at once to tell him that he could only remain alive through the intercession of Abraham, that is to say, through his obtaining forgiveness of a sin that was deserving of death, is a proof that God treated him as capable of deeper moral discernment and piety. The history itself indicates this in the very characteristic variation in the names of God. First of all (Gen 20:3), Elohim (without the article, i.e., Deity generally) appears to him in a dream; but Abimelech recognises the Lord, Adonai, i.e., God (Gen 20:4); whereupon the historian represents האלהים (Elohim with the article), the personal and true God, as speaking to him. The address of God, too, also shows his susceptibility of divine truth. Without further pointing out to him the wrong which he had done in simplicity of heart, in taking the sister of the stranger who had come into his land, for the purpose of increasing his own harem, since he must have been conscious of this himself, God described Abraham as a prophet, whose intercession alone could remove his guilt, to show him the way of salvation. A prophet: lit., the God-addressed or inspired, since the \"inward speaking\" (Ein-sprache) or inspiration of God constitutes the essence of prophecy. Abraham was προφήτης as the recipient of divine revelation, and was thereby placed in so confidential a relation to God, that he could intercede for sinners, and atone for sins of infirmity through his intercession. \n"]},{"type":"verse","number":8,"content":["Abimelech carried out the divine instructions. The next morning he collected his servants together and related what had occurred, at which the men were greatly alarmed. He then sent for Abraham, and complained most bitterly of his conduct, by which he had brought a great sin upon him and his kingdom. \n"]},{"type":"verse","number":10,"content":["\"What sawest thou,\" i.e., what hadst thou in thine eye, with thine act (thy false statement)? Abimelech did this publicly in the presence of his servants, partly for his own justification in the sight of his dependents, and partly to put Abraham to shame. The latter had but two weak excuses: (1) that he supposed there was no fear of God at all in the land, and trembled for his life because of his wife; and (2) that when he left his father's house, he had arranged with his wife that in every foreign place she was to call herself his sister, as she really was his half-sister. On the subject of his emigration, he expressed himself indefinitely and with reserve, accommodating himself to the polytheistic standpoint of the Philistine king: \"when God (or the gods, Elohim) caused me to wander,\" i.e., led me to commence an unsettled life in a foreign land; and saying nothing about Jehovah, and the object of his wandering as revealed by Him. \n"]},{"type":"verse","number":14,"content":["Abimelech then gave him back his wife with a liberal present of cattle and slaves, and gave him leave to dwell wherever he pleased in his land. To Sarah he said, \"Behold, I have given a thousand shekele of silver to thy brother; behold, it is to thee a covering of the eyes (i.e., an expiatory gift) with regard to all that are with thee (\"because in a mistress the whole family is disgraced,\" Del.), and with all - so art thou justified.\" The thousand shekels (about 131) were not a special present made to Sarah, but indicate the value of the present made to Abraham, the amount of which may be estimated by this standard, that at a later date (Exo 21:32) a slave was reckoned at 30 shekels. By the \"covering of the eyes\" we are not to understand a veil, which Sarah was to procure for 1000 shekels; but it is a figurative expression for an atoning gift, and is to be explained by the analogy of the phrase פּני פ כּפּר \"to cover any one's face,\" so that he may forget a wrong done (cf. Gen 32:21; and Job 9:24, \"he covereth the faces of the judges,\" i.e., he bribes them). ונוכחת can only be the 2 pers. fem. sing. perf. Niphal, although the Dagesh lene is wanting in the ת; for the rules of syntax will hardly allow us to regard this form as a participle, unless we imagine the extremely harsh ellipsis of נוכחת for אתּ נוכחת. The literal meaning is \"so thou art judged,\" i.e., justice has been done thee. \n"]},{"type":"verse","number":17,"content":["After this reparation, God healed Abimelech at Abraham's intercession; also his wife and maids, so that they could bear again, for Jehovah had closed up every womb in Abimelech's house on Sarah's account. אמהות, maids whom the king kept as concubines, are to be distinguished from שׁפחות female slaves (Gen 20:14). That there was a material difference between them, is proved by Sa1 25:41. כּל־רחם עצר כּל does not mean, as is frequently supposed, to prevent actual childbirth, but to prevent conception, i.e., to produce barrenness (Sa1 1:5-6). This is evident from the expression \"He hath restrained me from bearing\" in Gen 16:2 (cf. Isa 66:9, and Sa1 21:6), and from the opposite phrase, \"open the womb,\" so as to facilitate conception (Gen 29:31, and Gen 30:22). The plague brought upon Abimelech's house, therefore, consisted of some disease which rendered the begetting of children (the coitus) impossible. This might have occurred as soon as Sarah was taken into the royal harem, and therefore need not presuppose any lengthened stay there. There is no necessity, therefore, to restrict ויּלדוּ to the women and regard it as equivalent to ותּלדנה, which would be grammatically inadmissible; for it may refer to Abimelech also, since ילד signifies to beget as well as to bear. We may adopt Knobel's explanation, therefore, though without approving of the inference that Gen 20:18 was an appendix of the Jehovist, and arose from a misunderstanding of the word ויּלדוּ in Gen 20:17. A later addition Gen 20:18 cannot be; for the simple reason, that without the explanation give there, the previous verse would be unintelligible, so that it cannot have been wanting in any of the accounts. The name Jehovah, in contrast with Elohim and Ha-Elohim in Gen 20:17, is obviously significant. The cure of Abimelech and his wives belonged to the Deity (Elohim). Abraham directed his intercession not to Elohim, an indefinite and unknown God, but to האלהים; for the God, whose prophet he was, was the personal and true God. It was He too who had brought the disease upon Abimelech and his house, not as Elohim or Ha-Elohim, but as Jehovah, the God of salvation; for His design therein was to prevent the disturbance of frustration of His saving design, and the birth of the promised son from Sarah.\nBut if the divine names Elohim and Ha-Elohim indicate the true relation of God to Abimelech, and here also it was Jehovah who interposed for Abraham and preserved the mother of the promised seed, our narrative cannot be merely an Elohistic side-piece appended to the Jehovistic account in Gen 12:14., and founded upon a fictitious legend. The thoroughly distinctive character of this event is a decisive proof of the fallacy of any such critical conjecture. Apart from the one point of agreement-the taking of Abraham's wife into the royal harem, because he said she was his sister in the hope of thereby saving his own life (an event, the repetition of which in the space of 24 years is by no means startling, when we consider the customs of the age) - all the more minute details are entirely different in the two cases. In king Abimelech we meet with a totally different character from that of Pharaoh. We see in him a heathen imbued with a moral consciousness of right, and open to receive divine revelation, of which there is not the slightest trace in the king of Egypt. And Abraham, in spite of his natural weakness, and the consequent confusion which he manifested in the presence of the pious heathen, was exalted by the compassionate grace of God to the position of His own friend, so that even the heathen king, who seems to have been in the right in this instance, was compelled to bend before him and to seek the removal of the divine punishment, which had fallen upon him and his house, through the medium of his intercession. In this way God proved to the Philistine king, on the one hand, that He suffers no harm to befall His prophets (Psa 105:15), and to Abraham, on the other, that He can maintain His covenant and secure the realization of His promise against all opposition from the sinful desires of earthly potentates. It was in this respect that the event possessed a typical significance in relation to the future attitude of Israel towards surrounding nations. \n"]}],"introduction":"After the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham removed from the grove of Mamre at Hebron to the south country, hardly from the same fear as that which led Lot from Zoar, but probably to seek for better pasture. Here he dwelt between Kadesh (Gen 14:7) and Shur (Gen 16:7), and remained for some time in Gerar, a place the name of which has been preserved in the deep and broad Wady Jurf el Gerr (i.e., torrent of Gerar) about eight miles S.S.E. of Gaza, near to which Rowland discovered the ruins of an ancient town bearing the name of Khirbet el Gerr. Here Abimelech, the Philistine king of Gerar, like Pharaoh in Egypt, took Sarah, whom Abraham had again announced to be his sister, into his harem, - not indeed because he was charmed with the beauty of the woman of 90, which was either renovated, or had not yet faded (Kurtz), but in all probability \"to ally himself with Abraham, the rich nomad prince\" (Delitzsch). From this danger, into which the untruthful statement of both her husband and herself had brought her, she was once more rescued by the faithfulness of the covenant God. In a dream by night God appeared to Abimelech, and threatened him with death (מת הנּך en te moriturum) on account of the woman, whom he had taken, because she was married to a husband. \n"},"thisChapterLink":"/api/c/keil-delitzsch/GEN/20.json","thisChapterReference":{"commentaryId":"keil-delitzsch","book":"GEN","chapter":20},"nextChapterApiLink":"/api/c/keil-delitzsch/GEN/21.json","nextChapterReference":{"commentaryId":"keil-delitzsch","book":"GEN","chapter":21},"previousChapterApiLink":"/api/c/keil-delitzsch/GEN/19.json","previousChapterReference":{"commentaryId":"keil-delitzsch","book":"GEN","chapter":19},"numberOfVerses":5}