Genesis 24:2

Genesis 24 is the longest chapter in Genesis, and the whole of it tells how a wife was found for Isaac (Genesis 24). It follows straight on from Sarah’s death and burial, when Abraham bought a burial place in Canaan (Genesis 23), and it opens with a look at Abraham himself. “Old” is zâqên, the plain word for growing old. “Well stricken in age” is in Hebrew baʼ bayyamim, literally “come into days”, a way of saying that he had lived his life to its full length and reached a great age. Joshua is described in the same way when he had grown old (Joshua 23:1). Long life was counted a mark of God’s favour, and a psalm says that the righteous still bring forth fruit in old age (Psalm 92:14).

The second half of the verse names the one who stands behind that long life: “the LORD had blessed Abraham in all things.” The name is Yᵉhôvâh, the LORD, God’s own covenant name, the name of the God who had bound himself to Abraham by promise. Abraham’s good was his gift. To bless, bârak, is to give good and favour, and here the blessing reaches every part of Abraham’s life, for “in all things” is a single word in Hebrew, bakkol.

Genesis has shown that blessing piece by piece. Abraham was very rich in cattle, silver and gold (Genesis 13:2). God protected Sarah in Egypt (Genesis 12:17). He gave Abraham and Sarah the promised son in their old age (Genesis 21:1–7), and he confirmed his covenant to give the land to Abraham’s seed (Genesis 15:18). All of it is what God promised when he first called Abraham and said he would bless him and make his name great (Genesis 12:1–3). Proverbs speaks of the same gift when it says that the blessing of the LORD makes rich (Proverbs 10:22).

The verse names Abraham at its start and again at its end, and so it keeps our eyes on the man God has blessed. It also sets up everything that follows. God had promised to be God to Abraham and to his seed after him, in an everlasting covenant (Genesis 17:7–8), so the blessing has to pass to the next generation, and the old man turns his mind to his son’s marriage.

Abraham gives the task to “his eldest servant of his house”. The word for eldest, spelled zâqên like the word for “old” in verse 1, is used of old men and of the elders of a people. So this is the senior man of the household, trusted and experienced. He “ruled over all that he had”, and the verb mâshal means to rule or to have dominion. He was Abraham’s steward, in charge of all his wealth and affairs, and his long faithfulness in that work made him the natural choice for the most important errand of Abraham’s later life.

The chapter leaves him unnamed. Years before, Abraham had spoken of Eliezer of Damascus as the steward of his house (Genesis 15:2), and this may well be the same man.

It was the patriarchs’ way of taking the most solemn kind of oath. Abraham asks for it in verse 2, and the servant does it in verse 9. The gesture appears in Scripture only here and when Jacob, near his death, asks Joseph to swear to him in the same way (Genesis 47:29). The word yârêk means the thigh, and Scripture also uses it as a modest way of speaking of the loins, near the upper thigh, from which a man’s children come. A hand placed there tied the oath to Abraham’s descendants, the very line this oath was meant to protect, and it made the promise a matter of the gravest weight. How the custom began is unknown, and its meaning is clear enough from where it stands: the servant was swearing by what concerned Abraham’s posterity.

To swear is shâbaʻ, a word connected with the number seven, as if the one swearing repeated his declaration seven times. The oath itself, shᵉbûwʻâh in verse 8, is simply “something sworn”. In verse 3 Abraham makes the servant swear “by the LORD”, so God himself is called to witness and to hold him to it. In verse 9 the servant swears “concerning that matter”, and the word for matter, dâbâr, means a word, and also a thing or an affair. Here it is the whole business Abraham has laid on him, including the terms Abraham has just set out.

Scripture treats such oaths with great seriousness. The law says that a man who vows a vow or swears an oath must do all that he has said (Numbers 30:2), and the psalm describes the man who may dwell with the LORD as one who “sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not” (Psalm 15:4). The letter to the Hebrews explains that men swear by one greater than themselves and that an oath for confirmation ends all strife, and it adds that when God made his promise to Abraham, having no one greater to swear by, he swore by himself (Hebrews 6:13–18). Behind the servant’s oath stands the God who keeps his own. His covenant with his people is sealed by the death of Christ, its mediator (Hebrews 9:15).

Abraham names God with care. The oath is “by the LORD, the God of heaven, and the God of the earth”. Yᵉhôvâh is the personal, covenant name of the God who had made promises to Abraham. God, ʼĕlôhîym, is plural in form, and when it names the true God it is read as a plural of majesty. Heaven, shâmayim, and earth together take in the whole of creation, so the God by whom the servant swears rules over all of it, including the distant country the servant must travel to. In verse 7 Abraham calls him “the LORD God of heaven” again, the God who can direct events across all that distance and send his messenger ahead.

Abraham’s concern was for the faith of the family through whom God’s promises would come. The Canaanites, Kᵉnaʻanîy (a name that also came to mean a merchant), were the people of the land God had promised, and Abraham lived among them. The verb for “dwell”, yâshab, means to sit down, and so to settle and remain. Abraham was their neighbour, and yet he kept his son’s marriage apart from them. They worshipped many gods, among them Baal and Asherah, with rites that included ritual prostitution and the sacrifice of children. A wife from among them would bring her gods into the household that carried God’s promise. To “take a wife”, lâqach, is to take, receive or fetch, and it covers the formal arranging of the marriage.

God’s law later forbade such marriages for the same reason. Exodus warns that their daughters would lead Israel’s sons to go after their gods (Exodus 34:15–16), and Deuteronomy forbids marriages with the peoples of the land, “For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods” (Deuteronomy 7:3–4). Ezra grieved when the returned exiles had taken daughters of those peoples for themselves and for their sons (Ezra 9:1–2). The dividing line was worship, so Abraham’s choice was about the LORD and the heir of his promise. His household lived in Canaan and belonged to God, much as Jesus prays for disciples who remain in the world and are not of the world (John 17:14–16).

The servant asks this before he swears, and it is a wise question. “Peradventure” translates the Hebrew ʼulay, “perhaps” or “it may be”. “Willing” is ʼâbâh, a verb whose root idea is to breathe after something, and so to want or consent. “Follow” is yâlak, the same verb as “go” in verse 4. The servant understands that the woman’s own consent matters, and that she might well refuse to leave her home and family for a far country. So he asks what he must do then: “must I needs bring thy son again unto the land from whence thou camest?” He asks this before Abraham has said a word about Isaac going back. The same servant later prays for God’s guidance at the well (Genesis 24:12–14), and the two belong together. Careful thought about what may go wrong sits well beside trust in God.

Abraham answers in verse 8: “if the woman will not be willing to follow thee, then thou shalt be clear from this my oath”. The woman is ʼishshâh, the ordinary word for a woman, here the bride the servant hopes to find. To be clear, nâqâh, is to be clean, free or held guiltless. If she refuses, the servant has done all that his oath asked, and Abraham holds him blameless for a choice that belongs to someone else. Abraham asks his servant for faithfulness and leaves the woman’s heart to God.

Isaac belonged in the land God had promised, and Abraham says so twice. In verse 6 he answers the servant’s question at once: “Beware thou that thou bring not my son thither again.” “Beware” is shâmar, to guard, keep or take heed, so the servant is to watch himself closely on this one point. “Bring again” is shûwb, to turn back or return, used here in the sense of making someone return. It is the same verb as the servant’s “bring again” in verse 5, and it comes back in verse 8, where the release from the oath ends with “only bring not my son thither again”. The word “only”, raq, marks the one thing that stays fixed whatever else happens.

The reason lies in God’s call. God had brought Abraham out of Mesopotamia and promised the land of Canaan to his seed (Genesis 12:1–7), and he had told him to look over all the land he could see, for it would be his and his seed’s (Genesis 13:14–17). To take the heir of that promise back to the old country would turn back the step of faith God had called Abraham to take, and it would place Isaac among the idolatry of his ancestral home. Abraham trusted God to bring the wife to Isaac, so Isaac would wait in the place of promise.

Abraham owned no more of Canaan than a burial place. Stephen says that God gave him no inheritance in it, not so much as to set his foot on, and yet promised it to him and to his seed after him (Acts 7:5). By faith Abraham lived in the land of promise as in a strange country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise, and he looked for a city whose builder and maker is God (Hebrews 11:8–10). Hebrews says that the patriarchs desired “a better country, that is, an heavenly” (Hebrews 11:16). Keeping Isaac in Canaan was Abraham’s way of holding on to what God had said.

Verse 7 is the heart of Abraham’s confidence. He reminds the servant of what God has already done: he “took me from my father’s house, and from the land of my kindred”, he “spake unto me”, and he “sware unto me”. To speak, dâbar, is simply to speak or tell, and here it is God’s own word to Abraham. God’s oath came after Abraham’s willingness to offer Isaac on the mountain (Genesis 22). There the LORD swore by himself to bless Abraham and multiply his seed (Genesis 22:16–18). The words Abraham quotes, “Unto thy seed will I give this land”, are God’s promise when Abraham first came into Canaan (Genesis 12:7), later confirmed by covenant (Genesis 15:18). Seed, zeraʻ, is the word for seed or grain, and so for offspring.

Abraham reasons from that promise. God has sworn to give this land to Abraham’s seed, and Isaac is the son through whom that seed must come, so the God who swore will see to Isaac’s marriage. Abraham builds each step on what God has already done and said. Then he gives the servant the assurance: “he shall send his angel before thee”. Malʼâk means a messenger, and it can be used of a human messenger. Sent by the LORD God of heaven to go before the servant, it is a heavenly messenger who will prepare the way, just as God later promised Israel an angel to go before them and keep them in the way (Exodus 23:20). Abraham ends with a certainty: “thou shalt take a wife unto my son from thence.”

Abraham’s care for Isaac’s marriage was care for the line of the promise, and that line led to Christ. Paul says that the promises were made to Abraham and his seed, and that the seed is Christ (Galatians 3:16). Through him the gospel God preached beforehand to Abraham reaches the nations, so that all who believe are blessed with faithful Abraham (Galatians 3:8–9). All the promises of God are yea and Amen in Christ (2 Corinthians 1:20), and Abraham’s blessing “in all things” finds its fullness in the God who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in Christ and gathers all things together in him (Ephesians 1:3–10). The promise God confirmed to Abraham’s seed also included blessing for all nations (Genesis 22:18), which God had spoken from the start (Genesis 12:2–3).

The chapter’s search for a bride for the son of promise also gives a picture of Christ and his church. Christ loved the church and gave himself for it, to present it to himself holy and without blemish (Ephesians 5:25–27). Paul says he espoused the believers at Corinth to one husband, to present them as a chaste virgin to Christ (2 Corinthians 11:2). Rebekah would leave her homeland to join Isaac, and the church is gathered to Christ out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation (Revelation 5:9). Scripture ends with the marriage supper of the Lamb (Revelation 19:7–9) and the holy city coming down from God as a bride adorned for her husband (Revelation 21:2). The unnamed servant, sent by the father to bring home a bride for the son, is a fitting picture of the Holy Spirit, sent by the Father and the Son to gather and prepare the church for Christ.

This passage shows God’s faithfulness across a whole life. The LORD who blessed Abraham “in all things” is the same God who called him, spoke to him and swore to him, and Abraham’s confidence at the end of his life rests entirely on that record. His promise reaches past one generation to the next, and he is concerned with something as close and ordinary as a son’s marriage, because the promise runs through it.

We also see faith and good sense standing side by side. Abraham is certain that God will send his angel, and he still sets out careful terms. The servant trusts his master’s God, and he still asks what to do if things go wrong. Abraham guards the faith of his household in the choice of a wife, and he refuses to let his son turn back from the land of promise. Over all of it is the God of heaven and the God of the earth, who keeps his own oath and sends his messenger ahead of those who go on his errand.