The Offspring Question

In yesterday’s Anonymous Asks post, I promised to delve a little deeper into the wording of God’s covenant with Abraham. In Genesis 15, the Lord promised Abraham’s offspring a significant parcel of territory delimited by two rivers, the Euphrates and the “river of Egypt”, and further specified in terms of land occupied by ten nations of the day. Yesterday’s post explored what, if anything, that covenant means for modern Israel.

I’d like to back it up just a little further and look at that word “offspring”. Who exactly was the Lord referring to?

More Options Than Initially Appears

In yesterday’s post, media personality Tucker Carlson acknowledged that significant numbers of conservative Christians read this promise as applying to the modern secular nation of Israel, at least to the extent that these people are genuinely physically descended from Abraham. (There are also Christians who argue today’s Zionist Jews are not actually descended from Abraham, or that their genetics are too diluted to qualify them under this promise. That’s a debate better settled by geneticists than theologians.) However, national Israel is not the only possible scriptural option for “offspring”.

Language study cannot settle the question on its own. The Hebrew is zeraʿ, a masculine noun translated literally as “seed” and figuratively meaning descendants. Abraham would eventually have genetic descendants through eight sons by three different women. That’s millions, perhaps billions, of “offspring”, including but not at all limited to the nation of Israel. Further, the apostle Paul writes in Galatians that Abraham had spiritual offspring: “It is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham.” He includes Gentiles in that group — you and me, assuming we know Christ by faith. Later in the same passage, Paul uses the word “offspring” to mean Christ himself. All these various interpretations are scriptural in the sense that the word “offspring” is used that way somewhere in the Bible. The question is what it means in Genesis 15.

So then, when we read the word “offspring” in this territorial promise to Abraham, we must ask ourselves if it means: (1) all Abraham’s genetic descendants; (2) Abraham’s genetic descendants through his grandson Jacob, meaning the nation of Israel; (3) Christ, who descended from Abraham; or (4) Christians, Abraham’s spiritual descendants by faith.

How Abraham Heard the Lord

Abraham himself understood God’s promise in sense 2, literal descendants through the son of promise, later revealed as Isaac. This is the same sense in which Dispensational Christians read it, though we have a whole lot of history to clarify things Abraham didn’t fully understand at the time.

The word “offspring” appears not once but four times in Genesis 15, in verses 3, 5, 13 and 18. Abraham begins by pointing out that he has no genetic descendants, and God replies that his offspring will be as numerous as the stars. Then in verse 13, God predicts these offspring will sojourn in a land not theirs and be afflicted for 400 years, afterward coming out with great possessions. These two references, being plural and obviously literal, eliminate senses 1, 3 and 4. Abraham knew nothing at this point of other genetic descendants than the children of promise, but even if he had, it is evident neither Ishmael’s descendants nor those of Keturah’s sons went down to Egypt for 400 years. (For that matter, none of the children of Esau from the next generation of Abraham’s descendants did either.) Anyone who believes all four of these verses refer to the same type of “offspring” must reject the figurative sense as well. Christ went to Egypt as a child. He was not afflicted there for 400 years, and neither were Abraham’s spiritual descendants, those who trust in Christ for salvation.

A consistent, natural reading of Genesis 15, then, yields a promise of specific earthly territory to a subset of Abraham’s genetic offspring, which we now know to be the nation of Israel. That’s who sojourned in a land not theirs for 400 years, and that’s who came out with great possessions. Ishmael’s descendants didn’t. Keturah’s sons’ descendants didn’t. You didn’t. I didn’t. Not even Christ did.

The Old-School Reformed Take on Genesis 15

That doesn’t stop Reformed Theologians interpreting “offspring” in Genesis 15 in a spiritual sense. Matthew Henry wrote:

“Observe here, Abram made no complaint in this matter, as he had done for the want of a child. Note, Those that are sure of an interest in the promised seed will see no reason to doubt of a title to the promised land. If Christ is ours, heaven is ours.”

Our readers will quickly catch what he’s doing here. Making “offspring” figurative makes it logical for Henry to do the same thing to verses 18-20, which describe the territory Abraham’s spiritual offspring were to receive. So then, when Henry reads “offspring”, he hears “believers” or perhaps “the Church”. When he reads the words “this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebusites”, he interprets it to mean “heaven”.

Whatever that may be, it’s surely not a consistent, natural interpretation. It would have confused Abraham no end, though he was a spiritual man.

Spiritualizing the entire passage effectively disinherits national Israel. That may not have been a big deal in Henry’s day, with Jews dispersed across the planet and hardly anyone imagining a revived national Israel the remotest of remote possibilities. However, it’s a much bigger deal for figurative interpreters of “offspring” today, who, against all odds, can look at a map and see the label “Israel” pointing to a tiny Mediterranean country fighting for its survival against its neighbors, many of whom are also probably genetically descended from Abraham.

“Hey guys, we’ve got competition for those precious promises of God.”

The Modern Reformed Take on Genesis 15

Three hundred years down the road from Henry, Reformed Theologians are still doing interesting and hermeneutically inexplicable things to this text. The difference is that some of them make even less sense than Henry’s dogged but consistent spiritualization. This 2004 sermon from John Piper does not quote directly from Genesis 15, but explains his view of a Christian’s relationship to the land of Israel:

“By faith in Jesus Christ, the Jewish Messiah, Gentiles become heirs of the promise of Abraham, including the promise of the Land.”

He’s not kidding. Though his reading of “offspring” in Genesis 15, like Matthew Henry’s, is non-literal (sense 4 above), unlike Henry’s, his reading of the verses that follow it is very literal indeed. Speaking of that ten-nation area between the two great rivers, he insists, “Gentile believers will inherit the land.” The nation of Israel, he says, will not, though individual Jewish believers will receive the promise along with us Gentile Christians. Nationally speaking, he says, “the sons of the kingdom [he means the nation of Israel] will be thrown into the outer darkness”.

I’m not sure that’s any kind of improvement on Henry’s interpretation of the passage. In fact, I’m sure it isn’t.

The Logic of the Position

However, it’s a twist that became necessary for Reformed Theologians once it became evident some of Abraham’s literal descendants were staking a claim to territory on the Mediterranean in the years after WWII. For Matthew Henry, Genesis 15 had no political implications at all. For Piper it certainly does. Paradoxically, he argues that while the secular state of Israel may not claim a present divine right to that territory (“neither side should preempt the claims of international justice by the claim of present divine rights”), Christians must not assert our own claim to that territory either at present, though he maintains our claim is scripturally legitimate. He writes, “We Christians must not take up arms to claim our inheritance; but rather lay down our lives to share our inheritance with as many as we can.”

That’s about as confusing and logically indefensible a conclusion as anyone could come to, but it results from the same muddled mindset that set Tucker Carlson against Mike Huckabee in yesterday’s post: the idea that God’s covenant with Abraham creates some kind of “right” for some group of people somewhere in history. To be fair, a lot of people think it. But neither the spiritualized nor the half-spiritualized readings of Genesis 15 can be correct. The intended meaning of the passage cannot turn on what was happening in the Middle East in 1706. Equally, it cannot turn on what’s happening there in 2026. The intended meaning of scripture doesn’t depend on the reader’s view of current events. That is the tail wagging the dog.

I prefer to understand the promise of Genesis 15 the same way Abraham did. The land is the Lord’s, and he will give it to whomever he will in his own good time on the basis of grace, not rights. I expect he will give it to a nation of repentant, saved Jews after they have been purified by unparalleled tribulation, because that’s what the Prophets teach.

Not only does that get me out of a nasty political scrap, it interprets the Genesis passage historically and consistently, which neither Matthew Henry nor John Piper can claim.