The Covenant Between the Parts
Proposes that the pharaoh who knew Joseph learned of God's prophecy to Abraham in Genesis 15, calculated its deadline using ancient Near Eastern generation-years, and adopted a deliberate policy of privilege plus confinement to prevent the oppression that would trigger Israel's redemption, so that the covenant was fulfilled only much later through free human choices and the fourth generation that entered Canaan.
Abraham confronts the arithmetic puzzle in God’s promise that Abraham’s offspring would sojourn four hundred years yet return in a fourth generation. Rather than treating the figure as symbolic, he reconstructs the prophecy as intelligence an Egyptian court could have gathered. On that reading, the pharaoh’s odd question about Jacob’s age becomes a data point in a chronological calculation, and his generous treatment of the Israelites becomes a strategy to forestall the oppression that would set redemption in motion. A later pharaoh, ignorant of that reasoning, supplied the trigger. Abraham then counts Levitical lifespans, assigns Yocheved a pivotal generation, and tentatively locates events in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties.
Jed H. Abraham holds a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.B.A. from New York University, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He also studied at Yeshivat Kerem B'Yavne in Israel and was a Returning Scholar at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. He is a private investment manager and teaches Bible at Skokie Valley Synagogue in Skokie, Illinois.
Cite this article
Jed H. Abraham. "The Covenant Between the Parts." Jewish Bible Quarterly 36, no. 4 (October – December 2008): 231–242.
Jed H. Abraham. "The Covenant Between the Parts." Jewish Bible Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 4, 2008, pp. 231–242.