Jehovah comes to Abram in vision and answers the childless patriarch with the seed-promise: stars beyond numbering, an heir from his own body, and a land of inheritance bounded from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates. Abram believes, and it is counted to him for righteousness — the pattern of justification by covenant trust, long before Sinai. The cutting of the heifer, goat, ram, turtledove, and pigeon enacts a karath berith — a covenant cut in blood — and Jehovah Himself, as smoking furnace and burning lamp, passes between the pieces alone, binding the oath upon His own head. Within the horror of great darkness Abram is shown the four-hundred-year sojourn, the bondage, the judgment of the oppressor nation, and the coming-out with great substance — the Exodus pattern foretold in seed, which itself prefigures every later gathering of the covenant seed out of bondage.
