Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
22.
Abraham’s victory over the enemies of Sodom; the rescue of Lot; and the blessing of Melchizedek
On receiving this promise Abraham moved on and stayed in another place in the same land, Hebron, near the Oak of Mamre.
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After that, there was the war of five kings against four, when the enemy attacked the men of Sodom. Sodom was defeated and Lot was among those captured by the enemy. Then Abraham procured his release, bringing with him to the battle 318 men, his own household dependants, and winning a victory for the kings of Sodom. He refused to take off any of the spoils when the king for whom he had won the victory, offered them to him.
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But he received at that time a public blessing from Melchizedek, who was the priest of the Most High God. Many important things are written about Melchizedek in the epistle entitled To the Hebrews,
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which the majority attribute to apostle Paul, though some deny the attribution. Here we certainly see the first manifestation of the sacrifice which is now offered to God by Christians in the whole world, in which is fulfilled what was said in prophecy, long after this event, to Christ who was yet to come in the flesh: ‘You are a priest for all eternity, in the line of Melchizedek.’
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Not, it is to be observed, in the line of Aaron, for that line was to be abolished when the events prefigured by these shadows came to the light of day.
23.
The promise that Abraham’s posterity would equal the number of the stars; Abraham’s faith, and his consequent justification, before circumcision
It was at this time that the word of the Lord came to Abraham in a vision. The Lord promised him protection and an exceedingly great reward; and then Abraham, concerned about his posterity, said that a man called Eliezer, a servant born in his household, was likely to be his heir. Straightway an heir was promised him, not that house-slave, but one who was to come from Abraham himself; and once again he was promised an innumerable seed, not like the sands of the earth, but like the stars of heaven.
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And here it seems that the promise is of a posterity exalted in heavenly felicity; for in respect of mere number, the stars will not bear comparison with the sands of the earth. Although it might be maintained that this comparison is similar to the other, in that the stars also cannot be numbered, because we have to believe that not all of them can be seen by us. For the keener the observer’s sight, the more stars he sees; and so we are justified in supposing that some stars are invisible even to the keenest eyes, quite apart from those stars which, we are assured, rise and set in another part of the world far removed from us. While as for all those who boast that they have made a comprehensive list of the whole number of the stars, Aratus,
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for example, and Eudoxus,
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and any others, the authority of this book treats them with contempt.
This, it should be noticed, is the context of the statement which the Apostle recalls for the purpose of emphasizing the grace of God: ‘Abraham believed in God, and this was accounted to him for righteousness.’
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Paul’s intention was to prevent the circumcised from boasting, and from refusing to admit the uncircumcised peoples to faith in Christ. For at the time when this happened, when Abraham’s faith was accounted to him for righteousness, Abraham had not yet been circumcised.
24.
The meaning of Abraham’s sacrifice
In the same vision, when God was speaking to Abraham, he said this also to him: ‘I am your God, who brought you from the land of the Chaldeans, to give you this land so that you may inherit it.’
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Then
Abraham asked God by what token he should know that he would inherit it; and God replied, ‘“Take a heifer of three years old, and a she-goat and a ram of three years old, and a dove and a pigeon.” Then he took all these and divided them in half, and put the halves facing each other: but he did not divide the birds. ‘And’, as the Scripture says,
birds came down on the carcasses which had been divided; and Abraham sat there by them. Now about sunset a horror assailed Abraham, and, behold, a dark and mighty dread fell upon him. And he was told: ‘You will know for a certainty that your seed will be strangers in a land not their own, and men will reduce them to slavery and afflict them for four hundred years. But I shall judge the nation to which they are enslaved; and after that they will depart with many possessions. You, for your part, will go to your fathers, nourished in peace in a great old age. But in the fourth generation they will return to this place. For the sins of the Amorites are not yet completed, up to the present time.’ Now when the sun was about to set, a flame appeared, and behold, a smoking furnace and burning torches, which passed along between the divided carcasses. On that day the Lord God arranged a covenant with Abram, saying: ‘To your seed I shall give this land, from the river of Egypt, as far as the great river, the river Euphrates, the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaims, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebu-sites.’
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All these things were done and said in a vision sent by God. Now it would be tedious to discuss every detail and explain every meaning, and it would go beyond the purpose of this work. Therefore we need to understand only what suffices for our inquiry. After the statement that Abraham believed in God and it was accounted to him for righteousness, we observe that he did not fail in his faith in saying, ‘Lord God, by what token shall I know that I shall inherit it?’ – referring, of course, to the promised inheritance of the land. For he did not say, ‘How am I to know?’, implying that he did not yet believe. He said, ‘By what token shall I know?’ in the hope that he might be given some representation of what he already believed, by which he could realize in what way it was to be effected. In the same way there is no suggestion of lack of faith in the Virgin Mary when she says, ‘How will this happen, since I do not know a man?’
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She was convinced that it would happen, but she asked in what way it was to be effected; and when she asked this, she was told. Thus on this occasion also a symbolic representation was presented in the form of the
animals, the heifer, the she-goat, the ram, and the two birds, the dove and the pigeon, so that he might know that the event about whose future happening he had no doubt, would come about in a way suggested by those symbols.
Thus the heifer may have symbolized the people placed under the yoke of the Law, and the she-goat the same people in their future state of sin, the ram the same people as destined to reign. Those animals are specified as three years old because the important eras are from Adam to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, from Abraham to David, who, after Saul’s rejection, was the first man established on the throne of Israel by the will of the Lord.
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Hence it was in this third period, extending from Abraham to David, that the people attained adult status, in what may be called the third stage of its life. Or there may be some other more suitable application of the symbolism of these animals. However that may be, I have no shadow of doubt that Abraham’s spiritual offspring are foreshadowed by the addition of the dove and the pigeon.
The reason for the statement that ‘he did not divide the birds’ is that carnal beings are divided among themselves, whereas spiritual beings are not divided in any way, whether, like the turtle-dove, they keep away from the busy world of human affairs, or, like the pigeon, pass their time in the midst of those activities. Both those birds, however, are without guile and harmless, thus signifying that in the people of Israel, to which that land was to be given, there would be individual sons of the promise and heirs of the kingdom, destined to continue in eternal felicity. As for the birds descending on the divided carcasses, they do not stand for anything good; they represent the spirits of this lower air, looking for their own special food, as it were, in this division of carnal creatures. Further, the fact that Abraham sat by them symbolizes that even amidst those divisions of carnal creatures the truly faithful will persevere to the end. And the horror that assailed Abraham at sunset and the dark and mighty dread signify that about the end of this era there will be great distress and tribulation coming on the faithful. In the Gospel the Lord says about this, ‘For there will be great tribulation at that time, such tribulation as there has not been since the beginning.’
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Then there are the words spoken to Abraham: ‘You will know for a certainty that your seed will be strangers in a land not their own, and men will reduce them to slavery, and afflict them for four hundred years.’
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This was a clear prophecy about the people of
Israel who were to be slaves in Egypt; not that they were to spend 400 years in the same state of servitude under the Egyptians, enduring affliction at their hands. The prophecy was rather that this would happen in the course of 400 years. For the Scripture says of Terah, Abraham’s father, ‘The days of Terah in Haran were 205 years’, not because all those years were spent in Haran, but because they were completed there; and in the same way in this passage the introduction of the statement, ‘and they will reduce them to slavery, and will afflict them for 400 years’, means that this period of years was completed in that affliction, not that the whole of it was passed in that situation. 400 years, in fact, is given as a round figure, whereas the actual period was somewhat longer, whether it is reckoned from the time of those promises to Abraham, or from the birth of Isaac, because he was the ‘seed of Abraham’, about which these predictions are made. For, as I said above, 430 years are reckoned from Abraham’s seventy-fifth year, when the first promise was given, down to the departure of Israel from Egypt. And in recalling those events the Aposde says, ‘Now this is what I am saying; that the law, made 430 years later, does not invalidate the covenant confirmed by God, so as to make the promise void.’
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This shows that those 430 years could at that time be called 400, because they were not much more than that. How much more naturally could they be so called when a considerable number of them had already gone by at the time when this demonstration and these words were given to Abraham in a vision, or when Isaac was born to his father, now a hundred years old, twenty-five years after the first promise, when of those 430 years only 405 were left, which God chose to call 400. As for the rest of the substance of God’s prediction, no one can doubt that it all refers to the Israelite people.
But then follows this description: ‘Now when the sun was about to set, a flame appeared, and behold, a smoking furnace and burning torches, which passed along between the divided carcasses.’ For the affliction of the City of God, such an affliction as has never happened before, which is to be expected in the future under the power of Antichrist, is symbolized by Abraham’s ‘dark and mighty dread’ just before sunset, that is when the end of the world is approaching. In the same way at sunset, that is, at the very end, this fire symbolizes the day of judgement as it separates the carnal men who are to be saved by fire from those who are to be condemned to punishment in the fire.
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There follows the covenant made with Abraham: and this clearly
specifies the land of Canaan, naming eleven rivers there, from the river of Egypt to the great river Euphrates. We can see that this does not mean from the great river of Egypt, the Nile, but from the small river which divides Egypt from Palestine, where there is a town called Rhi-nocorura.
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25.
Hagar, Sarah’s maidservant, chosen by Sarah as Abraham’s concubine
Then follows the period of Abraham’s sons, one by Hagar the maidservant, and the other by Sarah the free woman. I have already spoken about these in the last book.
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Now in view of the facts of the case Abraham is in no way to be branded with guilt in the matter of this concubine.
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For he made use of her for the procreation of offspring, not for the satisfaction of lust: not to insult his wife, but rather to obey her; for she believed it would be a consolation for her own barrenness if she made her maidservant’s fertilewomb her own, by her own choice, since she could not do so by nature. Thus as a wife she availed herself of that right referred to by the Apostle when he says, In the same way also the man has no authority over his body, but the woman has’,
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in order to produce a child from another when shecould not do so from herself. There is here no lascivious desire, nothing degraded or shameful. The maidservant is handed over to the husband by the wife for the sake of offspring, and she is received by the husband for the sake of offspring. The aim of both of them is not guilty self-indulgence but the natural fruit of the union. Finally, when the pregnant servant flouted her barren mistress, and Sarah, in feminine jealousy, chose to blame her husband, even in that situation Abraham showed that he had been not a slavish lover but a free parent, and that in respect of Hagar he had safeguarded the reputation of his wife Sarah, having acted not to gratify his own sensuality but to carry out his wife’s decision. He had not sought Hagar but had taken her; he had come to her, but he had not become attached to her; he had given her his seed, but not his love. For he said, ‘Look, your maid is at your disposal; employ her as you wish.’
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What a true man he was, treating women like a true man; treating his wife temperately, her maid obethently, treating no woman intemperately.