The Covenant Between the Parts
God makes a covenant with Abraham, promising offspring and the Land, and foretelling four hundred years of exile.
Abram is seventy. God brings him outside and says: "Look at the heavens and count the stars… so shall your seed be." The Torah adds the line that becomes the foundation of Jewish faith: "And he believed in the Lord, and He counted it to him for righteousness." Then comes the covenant itself. Abram takes a heifer, a goat, a ram, a turtledove and a young pigeon, cuts the animals in half and lays the parts opposite each other; birds of prey descend and he drives them off. At sunset "a dread, a great darkness" falls on him, and he hears sentence and promise together: "Know surely that your seed shall be a stranger in a land not theirs, and they shall afflict them four hundred years… and in the fourth generation they shall return here." A smoking furnace and a flaming torch pass between the pieces. From this covenant to the Exodus of 2448 are exactly 430 years, and here the borders of the Land are first drawn, from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates.
How we know
Sources
Tanakh
- Bereishit 15 — the stars, “and he believed”, the divided pieces, the dread and the decree of four hundred years
- Shemot 12:40–41 — the verse about 430 years, from which the count runs
Chazal: Mishnah, Talmud, midrash, Zohar
- Bereishit Rabbah 44 — the vision of four kingdoms between the divided pieces
- Shabbat 156a — “step outside your astrology”: Israel is not ruled by a constellation
- Seder Olam Rabbah 1 — the year of the covenant, 2018; Avraham was seventy
Rishonim
- Rashi on Shemot 12:40 — the arithmetic of 430 and 400 years, and the 210 years actually spent in Egypt
Basis: stated in the Tanakh.