Fear No Fear

(All scripture from the World English Bible, ebible.org, all rights reserved)

“He brought him all these, and divided them in the middle, and laid each half opposite the other; but he didn’t divide the birds. The birds of prey came down on the carcasses, and Abram drove them away.”
(Genesis 15:10-11)

Abram was not passive in this. He collected the animals from his own stock – this cost him something (2 Samuel 24:24). He also didn’t sit on his heels waiting for God to do something. He protected the sacrifice. We protect from spoilage that which is important to us, just like we protect from desecration that which we love (2 Samuel 21:10).

Abram presented the sacrifice and then had to wait. God doesn’t promise to immediately arrive. He promises surety of His arrival. The comittment we demonstrate is not just in obedience or the presentation of the sacrifice (we are the living sacrifices, we are not required to sacrifice animals. That has passed away with the New Covenant because Jesus was the sacrifice that fulfilled it.). The commitment we demonstrate is in the waiting afterward. During that waiting (the time between seed and harvest), we must drive away everything that tries to prey on what we have dedicated to the Lord. We must be vigilant, even if a lot of time passes. This is part of the sacrifice.

The Torah: A Women’s Commentary writes: ‘split them. In Hebrew idiom, to make a covenant is literally to “cut” one. Drawing parallels with ancient Near Eastern custom and Jeremiah 34:17–22, scholars have suggested that the division of the animal is an implied threat, symbolizing the result of a failure to keep the covenant. An alternate view is that the covenant’s parties belong to one unit, one body; each half is incomplete without its counterpart. Bonds are affirmed through participation in sacrificial ritual—in a common mode of cultural expression.’

The sage Radak writes: ‘ויבתר אותם בתוך, both what he cut in half and what he did not cut was at the command of G’d, even though the Torah did not mention this specifically, The reason for cutting something in half was to show that G’d was making a covenant with Avram, as we already explained on verse 9. G’d hinted to Avram, by means of these carcasses being cut in half, that all the nations exiling the Jewish people, would suffer a fate as that suffered by these sacrificial animals. They would successively fight wars, the younger one against the older one, one wiping out the other eventually. All those nations represented different cultures, both in their secular outlook as well as in their religious orientation. All of this would be caused due their competitive spirit, each nation trying to achieve dominance over the others. Such behaviour is not typical of the Jewish people, although, for a brief period in our history, the tribe of Ephrayim competed violently with the tribe of Yehudah for pre-eminence among the 12 tribes of the Jewish people. Even during such periods, these tribes would not remain divided culturally or religiously. (compare Isaiah 11,13) אפרים לא יקנא את יהודה ויהודה לא יצר את אפרים, “Ephrayim will not be jealous of Yehudah, nor will Yehudah oppress Ephrayim.” To signify this difference between competition among the gentile nations, and tribal warfare in Israel, G’d told Avram not to cut the bird in half, seeing that it represented the nation that would emerge with Avram as their founding father. Therefore, the Torah reported ואת הצפור לא בתר, that Avram did not cut the bird in half. The word הצפור includes both the pigeon and the turtle dove, תור וגוזל, seeing that the Jewish people are scattered in the four directions of the globe and have yet remained a single people, clinging to their Torah and their faith in spite of being scattered all over the world. The people of Israel did not trade their religion for another in spite of the heavy burden involved in enduring exile’

The sage Rashi writes: ‘ויבתר אתם AND HE SPLIT THEM — He divided each into two portions. This verse does not lose its literal meaning although there are various Midrashic explanations of it. Since He was making a covenant with him to keep His promise to give the land as an inheritance to his children — as it is written (Genesis 15:18), “In that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying …” — and as it was the custom for parties to a covenant to divide an animal and to pass between its parts, as it is said elsewhere (Jeremiah 34:19) “who passed between the parts of the calf”, so also here the smoking furnace and the flaming torch which passed between the pieces (Genesis 15:17) were representative of the Divine Shechinah which is spoken of as fire.’