1 And so these things having finished, a conversation was made by the Lord to Abram by means of a vision saying: Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your protector, and your reward is excessively great.

2 And Abram said to the Lord God, what will you give me? I will go without children, and the son of the overseer of my house, this Damascus Elieer. 3 And Abram added: Moreover you have not given me offspring; and behold my slave, he will be my heir.

4 And then the conversation was completed to him by God, saying: He will not be your heir, but he who will come frorth from your womb, you will have as heir alone. 5 And he led him outside, and said to him: Look up to heaven, and number the stars, if you can. And he said to him: This will be your seed,.

6 And Abram believed God, and it was considered by him to be equity.

7 And he said to him: I the Lord who led you out of Ur of the Chaldeans, so that I might give to you this land, and you would possess it. 

8 And he said to him: Lord God, from where can I know that I might be able to possess it?

9 And the Lord answered: Take, he said, to me, a three-year-old cow, and a three-year-old goad, and a three-year-old male sheep and a turtledove and a pigeon. 

10 He taking all this, cut them in half, and put both parts agasint themselves on both sides but the birds he did not divide. 11 And birds descended over the carcasses, and Abram drove them away. 12 And when the sun fell, a deep sleep came over Abram, and great dread and gloom assailed him. And it was said to him: You will know foreknowing because your seed will be strangers in a land not theirs, and they will subject them to slavery, and they will be afflicted forty years. 14 However I will judge the people for whom they serve and after this they will be led out with great wealth. 15 But you will go to your fathers in peace, your grave in goold old age. 16 Moreover they will return here in the fourth generation: Indeed the iniquities of the Amarrhites are not yet complete to the present time. 17 Therefore when the sun set, the dark glow was finished and a smoking oven appeared, and a flaming lamp passing between those divisions.

18 In that day the Lord planted his covenant with Abram sayingh I will give your seed this alnd by the river of Egypt to the great Euphrates river, 19 the Cineans, and the Cenezites, the Cadmonites, 20 and the Hethites, and the Parazites, the Raphaim also, 21 and the Amarrhites, and the Chanaanintes, and the Gergesites, and the Jebusites.

Theological notes

One of many promises God makes about the future land of the descendants of Abram. The terrain here is pretty vast reaching from modern-day Iraq to the Nile river, but presumably part of that is for the descendants of Ishmael. Certainly, in the context of current geopolitics in the Middle East, expansive understandings of God’s territorial promise are a bit problematic.

Linguistic notes

I’ve finally gotten around to checking about something I’ve seen a lot in Jerome but also in the medieval Latin primer I’m currently reading, where qui and its relatives seems to be used as a pronoun rather than an interrogative. None of my dictionaries acknowledge this, but a useful answer at Latin Stack Exchange offers this commentary:

The distinction between relative, demonstrative/personal, possessive, and interrogative 3rd-person pronouns is relatively recent, such that e.g. Homer still often uses what is to us the article as a relative pronoun, and the relative as a possessive.

In Latin, too, the relative pronoun developed relatively recently (probably around late prehistory), out of a demonstrative or interrogative qui. At first this qui was always used interrogatively, or demonstratively with some subordinating or similar conjunction or particle, but then later it came be used alone as a subordinating pronoun (relative pronoun).

My other interesting note is the use of vernaculus to mean “slave” in 15:3, which apparently was the original meaning of the term rather than the more common idea of it being related to the common (non-liturgical speech). Wiktionary, which I tend to rely on as my primary dictionary these days, only mentions the slave meaning in a parenthetical, but include a link to Lewis and Short which gives it as the primary definition.

In 15:4 Jerome uses utero (uterus) where the Hebrew has מִמֵּעֶיךָ which is normally translated bowels or gut, which kind of indicates that Abram was going to shit out his heirs, which I guess is why Jerome went with the less scatological but also less anatomicall correct uterus. The Septuagint, meanwhile, simply says that the heir would come out of you (ἐξελεύσεται) without specifying a body part.