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Genesis 26 grounds God’s oath to multiply Abraham’s offspring and bless the nations in Abraham’s obedience to the Torah. Sirach draws on this passage, praising Abraham as one who kept the law and stayed faithful when tested.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Genesis 26:5
Hebrew Bible
3 Stay in this land. Then I will be with you and will bless you, for I will give all these lands to you and to your descendants, and I will fulfill the solemn promise I made to your father Abraham. 4 I will multiply your descendants so they will be as numerous as the stars in the sky, and I will give them all these lands. All the nations of the earth will pronounce blessings on one another using the name of your descendants. 5 All this will come to pass because Abraham obeyed me and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws.” 6 So Isaac settled in Gerar.
Date: 750–400 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
Sirach 44:20
Ben Sira, Ecclesiasticus
Deuterocanon
19 Abraham was a great father of a multitude of nations. There was none found like him in glory, 20 who kept the law of the Most High, and was taken into covenant with him. In his flesh he established the covenant. When he was tested, he was found faithful. 21 Therefore he assured him by an oath that the nations would be blessed through his offspring, that he would multiply him like the dust of the earth, exalt his offspring like the stars, and cause them to inherit from sea to sea, and from the Euphrates River to the utmost parts of the earth. 22 In Isaac also, he established the same assurance for Abraham his father’s sake, the blessing of all men, and the covenant.
Date: 195–180 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
... In fact, Sirach 44:19-21 employs many elements of Genesis 26:3-5 in its short gloss of Abraham, evoking, for example, the causally related tropes of obedience, progeny, dust, stars, and the sea (44:21). Bradley Gregory concludes that “these linguistic connections show that both Ben Sira and his grandson were probably working with Genesis 26:5 as the textual background for this understanding of Abraham.” It is highly likely, then, that Genesis 26:5 primarily informed Sirach’s short gloss on Abraham. This has implications for how we understand Sirach’s claim that Abraham kept the law of the Most High. ...
Mark Mariani, “Inheriting, Developing, and Debating within Tradition,” in The Early Reception of the Torah, ed. Kristin de Troyer, Barbara Schmitz, Joshua Alfaro, and Maximilian Haberlein (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020), 9–10.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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