Page:Keil and Delitzsch,Biblical commentary the old testament the pentateuch, trad James Martin, volume 1, 1885.djvu/213

 being (the Logos, or an angel), or one of the primeval patriarchs (Enoch or Shem), as Church fathers, Rabbins, and others have conjectured, and we can see in him nothing more than one, perhaps the last, of the witnesses and confessors of the early revelation of God, coming out into the light of history from the dark night of heathenism; yet this appearance does point to a priesthood of universal significance, and to a higher order of things, which existed at the commencement of the world, and is one day to be restored again. In all these respects, the noble form of this king of Salem and priest of the Most High God was a type of the God-King and eternal High Priest Jesus Christ; a thought which is expanded in Heb 7 on the basis of this account, and of the divine utterance revealed to David in the Spirit, that the King of Zion sitting at the right hand of Jehovah should be a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek (Psa 110:4). The Covenant - Genesis 15 With the formula “ after these things” there is introduced a new revelation of the Lord to Abram, which differs from the previous ones in form and substance, and constitutes a new turning point in his life. The “ word of Jehovah” came to him “ in a vision;” i.e., neither by a direct internal address, nor by such a manifestation of Himself as fell upon the outward senses, nor in a dream of the night, but in a state of ecstasy by an inward spiritual intuition, and that not in a nocturnal vision, as in Gen 46:2, but in the day-time. The expression “in a vision” applies to the whole chapter. There is no pause anywhere, nor any sign that the vision ceased, or that the action was transferred to the sphere of the senses and of external reality. Consequently the whole process is to be regarded as an internal one. The vision embraces not only Gen 15:1-4 and Gen 15:8, but the entire chapter, with this difference merely, that from Gen 15:12 onwards the ecstasy assumed the form of a prophetic sleep produced by God. It is true that the bringing Abram out, his seeing the stars (Gen 15:5), and still more especially his taking the sacrificial animals and dividing them (Gen 15:9, Gen 15:10), have been supposed by some to belong to the sphere of external reality, on the ground that these purely external acts would not necessarily