Kejadian 18:14

18:14 Is anything impossible ¹  for the Lord? I will return to you when the season comes round again and Sarah will have a son.” ² 

Kejadian 28:4

28:4 May he give you and your descendants the blessing he gave to Abraham ³  so that you may possess the land ⁴  God gave to Abraham, the land where you have been living as a temporary resident.” ⁵ 

Kejadian 48:5

48:5 “Now, as for your two sons, who were born to you in the land of Egypt before I came to you in Egypt, they will be mine. ⁶  Ephraim and Manasseh will be mine just as Reuben and Simeon are.

[18:14]  ¹ tn The Hebrew verb פָּלָא (pala’) means “to be wonderful, to be extraordinary, to be surpassing, to be amazing.”

[18:14]  ² sn Sarah will have a son. The passage brings God’s promise into clear focus. As long as it was a promise for the future, it really could be believed without much involvement. But now, when it seemed so impossible from the human standpoint, when the Lord fixed an exact date for the birth of the child, the promise became rather overwhelming to Abraham and Sarah. But then this was the Lord of creation, the one they had come to trust. The point of these narratives is that the creation of Abraham’s offspring, which eventually became Israel, is no less a miraculous work of creation than the creation of the world itself.

[28:4]  ³ tn Heb “and may he give to you the blessing of Abraham, to you and to your offspring with you.” The name “Abraham” is an objective genitive here; this refers to the blessing that God gave to Abraham.

[28:4]  ⁴ tn The words “the land” have been supplied in the translation for clarity.

[28:4]  ⁵ tn Heb “the land of your sojournings,” that is, the land where Jacob had been living as a resident alien, as his future descendants would after him.

[48:5]  ⁶ sn They will be mine. Jacob is here adopting his two grandsons Manasseh and Ephraim as his sons, and so they will have equal share with the other brothers. They will be in the place of Joseph and Levi (who will become a priestly tribe) in the settlement of the land. See I. Mendelsohn, “A Ugaritic Parallel to the Adoption of Ephraim and Manasseh,” IEJ (1959): 180-83.