The Lord makes a covenant with Abram
1After that Abram had a vision of the Lord. The Lord said to him: ‘Abram, you must not be afraid. I will be with you and I will protect you. I will bless you and give you a lot of things.’
2But Abram said: ‘Lord God, there is nothing more that You can give me, because I have no children and when I die, my slave Eliezer from Damascus will get everything that I have. 3You have not given me any children and my slave will inherit everything that I have.’
4Then the Lord said to Abram: ‘No, your slave Eliezer will not be the one who will inherit the things that you have. You will have a son and he will get everything that you have.’
5The Lord told Abram to go out of his tent and He said to Abram: ‘Look up at the sky and try to count the stars. How many stars are there? That is how many descendants you will have.’
6Abram believed the Lord and the Lord was pleased with Abram. He accepted him and said Abram was righteous.
The Lord makes another promise to Abram
7The Lord said to Abram: ‘I am the Lord. I told you to go. I took you from your town of Ur in the land of the Chaldeans and I gave this land to you.’
8But Abram asked the Lord: ‘Lord God, how can I know that I will get this land?’
9Then the Lord said to Abram: ‘You must bring a cow, a goat and a ram to Me. They must all be 3 years old. You must also bring 2 birds to Me, 2 doves.’
10Abram did what the Lord said. He took the animals and cut them in half. Then he laid the 2 halves of each animal on the ground, opposite each other. But he did not cut the 2 doves in half.
11Later vultures came down. They wanted to eat the meat of the dead animals but Abram chased them away.
12When the sun went down, it became very dark and Abram became afraid. He started to sleep. 13Then the Lord said to Abram: ‘You must know this: Your descendants will stay in a land that is not their land. They will be strangers in that land. They will be slaves and the people of that land will make them suffer a lot, for 400 years. 14But I will punish the people who make your descendants slaves. Your people will leave that land and they will take a lot of things with them. 15You will live for a long time and become very old. You will be at peace when you die and your children will bury your body with your family. 16Then after 4 generations your people will come back to this land and they will fight against the Amorites and they will defeat them. I will punish the Amorites for all the bad things and sins that they have done.’
17After the sun went down, it got very dark. A flame of fire and smoke went between the parts of the animals that lay on the ground.
18On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram. The Lord promised Abram and He said to him:
‘I give this land to your descendants,
all the land from the stream of Egypt
to the big Euphrates River.
19They will take the land from the people
who are there now,
the Kenite people, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites,
20the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaites,
21the Amorites, the Canaanites,
the Girgashites and the Jebusites.’
