Movement 1 of 4

An oath sworn to a man with no children

Genesis 12 - 50

God commits himself by oath to one seventy-five-year-old man: a land, descendants beyond counting, and blessing that will reach every family on earth. At the time, Abram has none of the three.

Abram is from Ur, a major city in southern Mesopotamia, and he is childless. What he is offered has three parts, and it is worth holding on to them separately, because most of what follows is the story of those three moving independently of each other.

The promise is unusual in that it is one-sided. In the ceremony that seals it in Genesis 15, the two parties would normally both walk between the divided animals, binding each other to the terms. Only God passes through. Abram is asleep.

Three more generations carry the promise, and each of them nearly loses it. The family deceives, cheats each other, and at one point sells one of its own sons to slave traders passing through. The promise survives all of it, which turns out to be the point being made.

Genesis closes with the whole family living in Egypt, invited there during a famine, and comfortable.

I'm going to make you into a great nation. I'll bless you, and I'll make your name well-known. You'll be a source of blessing for others.

I'll bless anyone who treats you well, and I'll stand against anyone who tries to harm you. Through you, every family on earth will find blessing.

Genesis 12:2-3 — Modern Text Bible

Movement 2 of 4

Brought out, and given terms

Exodus - Deuteronomy

The family has become a nation of slaves. God brings them out, and at a mountain in the desert binds himself to them in a formal covenant, one whose structure makes clear that the rescue came first and the requirements second.

Exodus opens with a single verse doing four hundred years of work: a new king came to power who did not know Joseph. The people who arrived as guests are now a labour force, and their birth rate is being managed as a security problem.

They are brought out in one night, after ten escalating disasters aimed largely at things the Egyptians relied on or worshipped. The meal they eat on the way out is still kept annually. Seven weeks later they are camped at a mountain, entering into a covenant.

The shape of that covenant is not arbitrary. It follows the standard form of a treaty between a great king and a lesser one, well attested across the ancient Near East in the same period, and the order of the sections is the argument it is making.

They then spend forty years not entering the land, because when they reach the edge of it they take a vote and decide against.

'I am the Lord your God. I'm the one who brought you out of Egypt, out of slavery.'

Exodus 20:2 — Modern Text Bible

Movement 3 of 4

A land, a king, and a house for God

Joshua - 2 Chronicles

They take the land and then ask for a king so they can be governed like the nations around them. They are told exactly what it will cost and accept anyway. For about forty years under David and Solomon, the promise comes closer to fulfilment than it ever will again.

The land is settled over several generations and then governed badly for about two centuries by a rotating cast of local leaders. The book covering that period closes by observing that everyone did whatever seemed right to them.

So they ask for a king. The request is granted along with an itemised warning of what a monarchy will take from them, and it is worth setting that warning beside what the record shows actually happened.

The second king, David, is the high-water mark: a united country, a capital city, and a promise that his family will hold the throne permanently. His son builds the temple. For roughly forty years the descendants of Abraham have a land, a name, and God apparently living at the centre of the country. That is as close as the promise ever comes, and it does not last one lifetime.

Movement 4 of 4

Everything lost, and a remnant sent home

1 Kings 12 - Malachi

The kingdom splits, both halves are conquered, the temple is burned and the people deported. Fifty years later a fraction returns to a small province, and every one of the three promises is now visibly unmet.

The split comes one generation after the temple is finished, over the question of taxation. The northern kingdom lasts two centuries and is destroyed by Assyria. The southern kingdom lasts longer and is destroyed by Babylon, which burns the temple and deports the leadership.

Through both collapses the prophets say the same thing in different words: this is what the covenant said would happen, and it is not the end of the story. Some of the most specific promises in the Old Testament are made while the city is burning.

What returns from Babylon fifty years later is much smaller than what left. They rebuild the temple, and the people old enough to remember the first one weep when they see the foundations of the second.

The Old Testament ends there. No king, a modest temple, a small province under foreign administration, and three promises that have, on any honest reading, not arrived.