1 But after he began to be ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to him and said to him, I am God almighty, walk in my presence and be perfect. 2 And I will put my covenant between me and you and I will multiply you most exceedingly.

3 Abram fell prone on his face 4 and God said to him: I am, and my pact is with you, and you will be a father to many peoples. 5 Nor will your name be called Abram any longer, but you will be called Abraham because I have appointed you the father of many peoples. 6 And I will make you increase exceedingly, and I put you among the peoples, and kings will come from you. 7 And I will establish my pact between me and you, and between me and your seed after you in their generations, in an eternal compact: so that I may be God for you and  for your seed after you. 8 And I will give you and your seed the land of your wandering, all the land of Chanaan in eternal possession and I will be their God.

9 Again God said to Abraham: And you therefore will observe my pact, and your seed after you in their generations. 10 This is my pact which you will osberve between me and you, and your seed after you: for all the males out of you to be circumcised, 11 and you will circumcise the flesh of your foreskins, so that it may become a sign of the covenant between me and you. 12 An infant amoung you will be circumcised on the eighth day, ever male among your offspring: the servant and the slave will be circumcised, and whoever is not outside your lineage. 13 And my covenant will be in your flesh as an eternal covenant. 14 A man, whose flesh of the foreskin was not circumcised, that soul shall be deleted from your people because my pact was useless.

15 Likewise, God said to Abraham: Sarai your wife will not be called Sarai but Sara. 16 And I will bless her, and from her I will give you a son whom I am about to bless: and he will become nations, and kings of the peoples will be born from him.

17 Abraham fell on his face, and laughed, saying in his heart: Can a son be born to a centenarian? And Sara, a nonagenarian, give birth? 18 And he said to God: Would that Ismael live, before you.

19 And God said to Abraham: Sara your wife will give birth to your son and you will call his name Isaac and his descendants after him. 20 About Ismael likewise I have heard you: behold, I will bless him, and I will increase him, and I will multiply him vigorously: He will beget twelve princes, and I will make him into a great nation. 21 To Isaac I will establish my pact, whom Sarah will bear to you at this time in the next year.

22 And when the conversation had ended in speaking with him, the Lord went up from Abraham.

23 Therefore, Abraham took Ismael his son, and all the slaves of his house, and all whom he had acquired, every male from  all the men of his home: and circumcised the flesh of the foreskin at once on that day as God had instructed him. 

24 Abraham was ninety-nine years old when he circumcised the flesh of his own foreskin. 25 And Ismael the son completed thirteen years in the time of his circumcision. 26 Abraham and his son were circumcised on the same day 27 and all the men of his household as the domestic, so the purchased and foreign together were circumcised.

Theological notes

This is the first of God’s covenants with his people. A lot has been written about the covenant of circumcision, with greater depth than I can manage. But it’s still worth noting that Ismael figures strongly in God’s plan, where he will beget twelve princes and be made a great nation. I suppose a big part of that will revolve around the first century Christians’ understanding of the scope of the pact of circumcision and the debate about whether it applied to gentile converts to Christianity or only to Jewish Christians (this was the premier debate of the early church and one that the first pope, Peter, managed to fall firmly on the wrong side of, which given that this was the pope that Jesus himself picked, says something about popes).

Linguistic notes

There were a lot of interesting things happening linguistically in the Latin text of this chapter, but I wanted to focus on the last verse where there was a tam … quam construction. The Douay Rheims translation corresponds reasonably well with my literal translation although they inexplicably garbled the tam … quam rendering it instead of “as … so” instead going with “as well … as” which makes the English a bit of a mess. What I translated “domestic” and the Douay-Rheims translated “they that were born in his house” is in the Latin, vernaculus, which has a range of meanings (I think in a previous chapter I translated it as slave. Digging a bit, it looks like D-R followed the Septuagint which has οἱ οἰκογενεῖς, which, without even consulting a dictionary, I can spot οἰκος referring to the household and γενεῖς relating to birth or perhaps went directly back to the Hebrew with יְלִיד בָּיִת which is born in the house