"... Here Paul claims that God’s covenant promise to Abraham’s progeny was not intended for his numerous descendants (i.e., the people of Israel), but for only one of them: Jesus. Paul supports this extraordinarily implausible assertion by making two interpretive moves, one explicit and one covert. The explicit move is to draw attention to a point of grammar: the noun “offspring” (literally, “seed,” sperma in Greek) is singular in form, not plural. Despite the fact that “seed” is a collective noun in Greek (as well as in English), Paul here insinuates that God had hidden a secret meaning in plain sight by using the grammatically singular form of the word in his promise to Abraham ... There are three scenes in Genesis in which Yahweh makes promises about Abraham’s seed: Genesis 15:5, 17:4–8, and 22:17–18. Each scene uses the singular collective noun “seed” (zera’ in Hebrew, sperma in the Septuagint), and the content of each promise is that Abraham will have innumerable descendants ... Out of those three scenes Paul extracts, with surgical precision, only the words “your seed,” and on that basis argues that the promises to Abraham’s offspring were meant for only one man. We can see why Paul does not quote or describe what God promised Abraham, because Paul’s interpretation contradicts the plain sense of what God said in each scene. Paul belabors the point that the word “seed” is singular in form, but he is perfectly aware that the word is plural in meaning, for that is how he himself uses it a few paragraphs later ..."