Genesis 12:5-7
Unto thy seed will I give this land
The promise is made at Shechem with the Canaanite in the land, and an altar goes up on the spot. It is given to descendants, not to him.
Places of the Bible
Canaan
Promised to a man who never owned a field in it except the one he bought to bury his wife.
Canaan is a strip of land between a desert and a sea, and the account is careful to say who was already there: and the Canaanite was then in the land. The promise is given standing in it, at Shechem, to a man who is passing through with tents and livestock. He walks its length, builds altars at the places he stops, and goes down to Egypt when the famine comes. He is a resident alien in the country he has been given.
Scroll down to the story
The movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Canaan
- 01
- 02
Genesis 13:14-17
Walk through the land
He is told to look north, south, east and west and then to walk its length and breadth. Surveying is the only form of possession he is offered.
- 03
Genesis 15:13-21
From the river of Egypt unto the great river
The boundaries are given and so is the delay: four hundred years of affliction first, because the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.
- 04
Genesis 17:8
An everlasting possession
The land of thy sojournings, given for an everlasting possession, in one sentence. Both halves of that are true at once.
Why it matters
The gap between the promise and the possession is the point, and Scripture never closes it quietly. Abraham is told his seed will be a stranger in a land that is not theirs for four hundred years first. Isaac and Jacob live there in tents. Joseph dies in Egypt and asks for his bones to be carried back. Hebrews reads the whole thing as deliberate: they confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth, and looked for a city which hath foundations.
4 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
