And Abram said, behold, to me thou hast given no seed,.... He had bestowed many temporal blessings on him, as well as spiritual ones, having given himself in covenant, and all things in it, but he had not given him a child:
and lo, one born in my house is mine heir; meaning either Eliezer or his son, whom he had made his heir, or intended to make him, since he had no child; or of course he would have been to, Lot his nephew having no sons; and this Eliezer descending from Aram, the youngest son of Shem, was like to be next heir, if Abram should have no child of his own, as Dr. Lightfoot observes (g).
(g) Works, vol. 1. p. 695.
John Calvin on Genesis 15:2-3
And Abram said , Lord God. The Hebrew text has ychvh 'dvnt (Adonai Jehovah.) From which appellation it is inferred that some special mark of divine glory was stamped upon the vision; so that Abram, having no doubt respecting its author, confidently broke out in this expression. For since Satan is a wonderful adept at deceiving, and deludes men with so many wiles in the name of God, it was necessary that some sure and notable distinction should appear in true and heavenly oracles, which would not suffer the faith and the minds of the holy fathers to waver. Therefore in the vision of which mention is made, the majesty of the God of Abram was manifested, which would suffice for the confirmation…
Read the whole note in the consoleKeil & Delitzsch on Genesis 15:1-6
The words of Jehovah run thus: "Fear not, Abram: I am a shield to thee, thy reward very much." הרבּה an inf. absol., generally used adverbially, but here as an adjective, equivalent to "thy very great reward." The divine promise to be a shield to him, that is to say, a protection against all enemies, and a reward, i.e., richly to reward his confidence, his ready obedience, stands here, as the opening words "after these things" indicate, in close connection with the previous guidance of Abram. Whilst the protection of his wife in Egypt was a practical pledge of the possibility of his having a posterity, and the separation of Lot, followed by the conquest of the kings of the East, was also a p…
Read the whole note in the consoleHenry, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown, Clarke, Gill, Calvin and Keil & Delitzsch are in the public domain; Tyndale Open Study Notes © Tyndale House Publishers, CC BY-SA 4.0 — all from the Free Use Bible API (bible.helloao.org). Rashi: the Rosenbaum & Silbermann Pentateuch (public domain) and the Judaica Press and Metsudah Tanakh (CC BY), via Sefaria. Spurgeon's Treasury of David: public domain (lyteword's markdown edition, CC0).
