Genesis Vol 3.pdf - College Press

15 : 12-17 GENESIS
chequered fortunes which awaited 7 his progeny, while at
the same time he was assured of thd:ultimate fulfillment
of the Promise, and the actual boundaries of the lands of
his inheritance were marked out from the river of Egypt
to the distant Euphrates; and in this cohfidence Abram
was content to possess his soul in .patience, Luke 21:19”
(COTH, 37). The present writer is inclined to the view
that the time sequence of events narrated here was not that
of Abram’s usual day and night, but that of his experiences
of light and darkness (daylight, sunset, etc.) in his prophetic
or preternatural “sleep’’ brought ori by Divine influence.
Many a man has experienced dreams whose content
stretched over more or less extended periods of duration,
only to discover on awaking that he has actually
been asleep only a few minutes of humanly-measured time.
Such indeed are the phenomenal powers of the Subconscious
in man. We have no way of knowing how longdrawn-out
the sequence of Abram’s total ‘‘vision” experience
was. As Leupold writes (EG, 482): “AS far as
the vision itself is concerned, it transpires in such a fashion
that in the course of it Abram sees the sun at the point of
setting, about as a man might dream he sees the sun setting.
Such a dream or vision might occur morning, noon or
night. Attempts to compute the length of time over
which the experience extended by the expressions used
such as ‘the sun was about to go down,’ would lead to an
unnaturally long lapse of tim’e. The setting of the sun
in the vision prepares for the falling of darkness upon him.
But first of all comes a ‘deep sleep’ which is as little a
‘trance’ here as it was in 2:21. The ‘terror and the great
darkness’ that fall upon him are the terror which the
ancestor experiences in the vision, at the revelation of the
sufferings which his descendants must endure. In the
vision he feels these things in anticipation, even before the
revelation is imparted to him that his descendants are
destined to this particular form of misery.” Again, ibid.,
166