a compact (because made by passing between pieces of fl… · noun, common feminine singular construct + pronominal suffix
father
לְאַ֖בle.'Av
H1
father · preposition + noun, common masculine singular construct
many
הֲמ֥וֹןha.Mon
H1995
a noise · noun, common masculine singular construct
nations
גּוֹיִֽםgo.Yim
H1471
a foreign nation · noun, common masculine plural absolute
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (James Strong, 1890/1894), public domain; digitized by Open Scriptures (CC BY-SA). KJV word tagging: eBible.org (public domain). Original-language text, parsing and brief lexicon: STEPBible.org data from Tyndale House, Cambridge (CC BY 4.0).
Cross-references
Genesis 35:11 And God said unto him, I am God Almighty: be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a company of nations shall be of thee, and kings shall come…
Romans 4:11-18 And he received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had yet being uncircumcised: that he might be th…
Genesis 12:2 And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing:
Galatians 3:28-29 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.
Genesis 13:16 And I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth: so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be numbered.
Genesis 16:10 And the angel of the LORD said unto her, I will multiply thy seed exceedingly, that it shall not be numbered for multitude.
Genesis 22:17 That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon th…
Genesis 25:1-18 Then again Abraham took a wife, and her name was Keturah.
Cross-references from OpenBible.info (CC BY), in the lineage of the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (public domain).
Commentary
Matthew Henry on Genesis 17:4-6
The promise here is introduced with solemnity: "As for me," says the great God, "behold, behold and admire it, behold and be assured of it, my covenant is with thee;" as before (Gen 17:2), I will make my covenant. Note, The covenant of grace is a covenant of God's own making; this he glories in (as for me), and so may we. Now here,
I. It is promised to Abraham that he should be a father of many nations; that is, 1. That his seed after the flesh should be very numerous, both in Isaac and Ishmael, as well as in the sons of Keturah: something extraordinary is doubtless included in this promise, and we may suppose that the event answered to it, and that there have been, and are, more of the chil…
my covenant is with thee--Renewed mention is made of it as the foundation of the communication that follows. It is the covenant of grace made with all who believe in the Saviour.
Adam Clarke on Genesis 17:3
And Abram fell on his face - The eastern method of prostration was thus: the person first went down on his knees, and then lowered his head to his knees, and touched the earth with his forehead. A very painful posture, but significative of great humiliation and reverence.
John Gill on Genesis 17:4
As for me, behold, my covenant is with thee,.... Who was gracious to make it, faithful to keep it, and immutable in it, though Abram was but a man, and sinful:
and thou shalt be a father of many nations: as he was of many Arabian nations, and of the Turks in the line of Ishmael; and of the Midianites, and others, in the line of his sons by Keturah; and of the Israelites in the line of Isaac, as well as of the Edomites in the line of Esau; and in a spiritual sense the father of all that believe, in all the nations of the world, circumcised or uncircumcised, as the apostle explains it, Romans 4:11.
John Calvin
The Church Fathers
(Chapter 17—Verse 3 and following) And the Lord spoke to him, saying: Behold, my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations. It should be noted that wherever we read Testament in Greek, in the Hebrew language it is the word covenant or pact, that is, Berith ().
And God said to him: I am, and my covenant is with you. For what is it for the Lord to say: I am, if not to clearly declare the state of his eternity, in which he is always the same? About which the Psalm also says: But you are the same (Psalm 102:28). This place harmonizes with the Gospel where the Lord said to the Jews: Before Abraham was, I am (John 8:58). For appearing in the flesh, he taught that he himself was the one who had once appeared to Abraham in spirit, when he repeated to the Jews the same testimony of his essence that he had given to Abraham; but the Jews were troubled because they had heard: Before Abraham was, I am; yet Abraham rejoiced when he heard: I am, and did not doubt that God existed before he did; hence, because he faithfully heard the word of divine eternity, he received in the increase of reward that he would be called and be the father of many nations. Moreover, the Jews, because they could not grasp the mysteries of divinity they'd heard, were cast out from the lineage of Abraham, and were counted among the offspring of vipers: Finally, they took up stones to throw at him; but he hid himself from them, and went out of the temple (John 8:59), so that, evidently hidden from their stony hearts, and going out, he would come to reveal to the Gentiles the knowledge of his majesty. For even then having gone out of the temple, he restored sight to the man born blind. Evidently as a figure of grace, with which he was to enlighten the hearts of the Gentiles. It follows:
The Church Fathers: public-domain translations (Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers), verse-indexed by SermonIndex (CC BY 4.0).
Dictionary and topics
Abraham — Father of a multitude, son of Terah, named (Gen. 11:27) before his older brothers Nahor and Haran, because he was the heir of the promises. Till the age of seventy, Abram sojourned among his kindred…
Circumcision — Cutting around. This rite, practised before, as some think, by divers races, was appointed by God to be the special badge of his chosen people, an abiding sign of their consecration to him. It was…
Covenant — A contract or agreement between two parties. In the Old Testament the Hebrew word berith is always thus translated. Berith is derived from a root which means “to cut,” and hence a covenant is a…
Prophecy — Or prediction, was one of the functions of the prophet. It has been defined as a “miracle of knowledge, a declaration or description or representation of something future, beyond the power of human…
Circumcision · Covenant promises of — Covenant promises of
Covenant, The · Made with: Abraham — Made with: Abraham
Dictionary: Easton's (1897) and Smith's (1863), public domain. Topics: Nave's Topical Bible (1896) and Torrey's Topical Textbook (1897), public domain. Both as parsed by NEUU (CC BY 4.0).
on Genesis 17:4-6
As for me, behold, my covenant is with thee [404] They who translate the passage, Behold, I make a covenant with thee,' or, Behold, I and my covenant with thee;' do not seem to me faithfully to represent the meaning of Moses. For, first, God declares that he is the speaker, in order that absolute authority may appear in his words. For since our faith can rest on no other foundation than his eternal veracity, it becomes, above all things, necessary for us to be informed that what is proposed to us, has proceeded from his sacred mouth. Therefore, the pronoun I, is to be read separately as a preface to the rest; in order that Abram might have a composed mind, and might engage, without hesitatio…
On the part of God אני placed at the beginning absolutely: so far as I am concerned, for my part) it was to consist of this: (1) that God would make Abram the father (אב instead of אני chosen with reference to the name Abram) of a multitude of nations, the ancestor of nations and kings; (2) that He would be God, show Himself to be God, in an eternal covenant relation, to him and to his posterity, according to their families, according to all their successive generations; and (3) that He would give them the land in which he had wandered as a foreigner, viz., all Canaan, for an everlasting possession. As a pledge of this promise God changed his name אברם, i.e., high father, into אברהם, i.e., f…
God guaranteed his promise by changing Abram’s name. Abram referred to his noble lineage, as Terah was the “exalted father” (11:27). His new name, Abraham (Hebrew ’ab hamon) was a wordplay on the promise of his own progeny (see also John 8:31-59; Rom 4:16-17; Gal 3:7, 15-19, 29). Whenever the new name was used, he and his household would remember that a multitude of nations would issue from him.
