The City of God: Book 16

Tracing the city of God through the biblical record after the flood is genuinely difficult. Throughout all of canonical Scripture, from the moment Noah and his three sons, along with their wives, were saved in the ark, we cannot find a single person clearly commended for their piety until we reach Abraham. What we do have is Noah's prophetic blessing of two of his sons, Shem and Japheth, which shows that he understood what would unfold long afterward. Because of this, he cursed not his middle son directly, but his grandson, saying: "Cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." This Canaan was the son of Ham, the one who had not covered but rather exposed his father's nakedness. Noah then followed this with a blessing on his two elder sons: "Blessed be the Lord God of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant. The Lord make Japheth rejoice that he may dwell in the tents of Shem." All of this, together with Noah's planting of a vineyard, his becoming drunk on the wine, and his lying uncovered in his sleep, carries prophetic meaning and points to deeper spiritual realities.

Now that events have unfolded, what was once obscure has become clear: any careful reader can see it all fulfilled in Christ. Shem, from whose lineage Christ's humanity descended, means "Named." And who is more named than Christ, whose name is now so fragrant that the prophetic Song of Songs compares it to "an ointment poured forth" (Song 1:3), and in whose houses, that is, in whose churches, the scattered nations will make their home? For Japheth means "Diffused." Ham, meaning "Hot," was Noah's middle son, distinct from both brothers and standing between them, belonging neither to the firstfruits of Israel nor to the fullness of the nations. What does he represent but a type of our hot-tempered heretics, not burning with the spirit of wisdom but with a shifty, turncoat cunning that disturbs the peace of the saints? Yet even this serves the faithful who are growing in the church, as the apostle says: "There must be heresies among you, that those who are approved may be known" (1 Cor 11:19). And so it is also written: "The learned son will be wise, and use the fools as his minister." For there are many things belonging to the Catholic faith that heretics, by aggressively twisting and turning them, compel their defenders to observe more carefully, understand more clearly, and affirm more confidently. In this way, the enemy's challenge actually perfects understanding. And not only open unbelievers, but even those who hide their heresy under the name of Christian while living wickedly, can rightly be included in Noah's middle son: for in word they proclaim, and in deed they dishonor, the passion of Christ that was prefigured in Noah's nakedness. Of these it is said, "By their fruits you will know them" (Matt 7:16). This is why Ham was cursed in his son, as in his fruit, that is, his work. Canaan is fittingly interpreted as "their motion," which is to say, their work.

Shem and Japheth, prefiguring circumcision and uncircumcision, or as the apostle says, the Jews and the Greeks (those, I mean, who are called and justified), heard of their father's nakedness, that is, the Redeemer's symbolic passion, and took a garment. Placing it on their shoulders, they walked backward and covered their father's nakedness without looking at what they covered. In the same way, we reverence what was done for us in Christ's passion, while abhorring the villainy the Jews committed in it. The garment is the sacrament; their backs represent the remembrance of things past, because the church now celebrates the passion of Christ, with Japheth dwelling in the tents of Shem and Ham standing between them both. The church no longer looks for a passion yet to come, but the wicked brother serves his good brothers through his son, that is, through his work, because the good can make use of the evil for their own growth in wisdom. As the apostle says, there are some "that preach not Christ purely, but howsoever Christ be preached sincerely, or colourably, I do joy, and will joy therein" (Phil 1:18). For he had planted the vineyard of which the prophet says, "The vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel" (Isa 5:7), and he drinks of its wine: whether it be from that cup of which it is said, "Are you able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of?" (Matt 20:22) and "O My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me" (Matt 26:39), in which He doubtless meant His passion; or whether it was signified, since wine is the fruit of the vineyard, that He took our flesh and blood out of the vineyard, that is, the house of Israel, and was drunk and uncovered, meaning He suffered the passion. For there His nakedness was revealed, that is, His infirmity, of which the apostle says, "*He was crucified concerning His infirmity*" (2 Cor 13:4), and of which he also says elsewhere, "*The weakness of God is stronger than men, and the foolishness of God is wiser than men*" (1 Cor 1:25). And when Scripture says "*He was uncovered*" and adds "*in the midst of His own house*," it gives us a striking demonstration that He was to suffer death at the hands of His own countrymen, companions, and kinsmen in the flesh.

The reprobate preach this passion of Christ in words alone, for they do not understand what they preach. But the elect lay up this great mystery within themselves and honor it in their hearts: it is God's infirmity and foolishness, yet far stronger and wiser than humanity at its very best. The type of this is Ham going out to tell his brothers what he had seen of his father, while Shem and Japheth went in, that is, disposed themselves inwardly, to cover and reverence what he had seen and reported. So, as best we can, we search the meaning of Scripture, finding it more fitting to some interpretations than to others, yet never doubting that every part of it carries a meaning beyond the merely historical, and that this meaning points to none other than Christ and His Church, the City of God, which was proclaimed from humanity's first creation, as events have confirmed.

From these two blessed sons of Noah, and the cursed one between them, down to the days of Abraham, no righteous man is mentioned by name, a span of more than a thousand years. I don't imagine there were no just men in that time, but that listing them all would have been tedious and would have served the purposes of a chronicle rather than a prophecy. The writer of these divine books, or rather the Spirit of God working through him, concerns himself only with those things that both record the past and prefigure things to come, insofar as they pertain to the City of God. Whatever is said here about her enemies serves only to make her glory shine more brightly by contrast with their wickedness, or to advance her growth by teaching her to observe their ruin and take warning from it. Nor are all the historical accounts in these books symbolic; those that are not symbolic are included to shed light on those that are. It is the ploughshare alone that turns up the earth, yet the plough cannot do without its other parts. The strings alone produce the sound in harps and similar instruments, yet these require pegs and frets to make the music complete; and organs have other mechanisms connected to the keys, which the organist never touches directly but only through the keys, so that the sound comes out proportionate and harmonious. In the same way, in those prophetic narratives, some things are bare historical accounts, yet they are attached to the significant passages and, in a sense, bound to them.

Now we must examine what we can find about the generations of these sons, and set it down as we go, to trace the progress of both cities through their courses, heavenly and earthly. The generation of Japheth, the youngest, is recorded first. He had eight sons, two of whom had seven sons between them, one having three and the other four, giving Japheth fifteen descendants in all. Ham, the middle brother, had four sons, one of whom had five more, and one of those had two, making eleven in total. After counting these, Scripture circles back to the beginning, saying: "And Cush begat Nimrod, who was a giant upon the earth: he was a mighty hunter against the Lord, wherefore it is said, 'As Nimrod the mighty hunter against the Lord.' And the beginning of his kingdom was Babylon, Erech, Accad, and Calneh in the land of Shinar. Out of that land came Asshur and builded Nineveh, and the city Rehoboth, and Calah, and Resen, between Calah and Nineveh: this was a great city." Now this Cush, father of the giant Nimrod, is the first of Ham's line to be named, though five of his sons and two of his grandchildren had already been counted. Either he fathered this giant after all of them, or (and this is what I think more likely) Scripture names him on account of his fame, since his kingdom is also named, with Babylon as its chief city, along with the other cities and regions he possessed. As for the statement that Asshur came out of the land of Shinar, which belonged to Nimrod, and built Nineveh and the other three cities, this happened much later, but is mentioned here because of the greatness of the Assyrian kingdom, which Ninus, the son of Belus, expanded so remarkably. Ninus was the founder of the great city of Nineveh, which took its name from him. But Asshur, the father of the Assyrians, was not one of Ham's sons; he came from the line of Shem, Noah's eldest son. It is therefore clear that some of Shem's descendants later gained control of this great giant's kingdom, pushed beyond its borders, and built other cities, the first of which was called Nineveh after Ninus. From there, Scripture turns to another son of Ham, Mizraim, whose descendants are counted not as individuals but as seven nations, the sixth of which produced the Philistines, bringing the total to eight. Then it returns to Canaan, in whom Ham was cursed, and his line is counted as eleven, with their territories and some of their cities described. Adding it all together, Ham's descendants number thirty-one. It remains now to recount the line of Shem, Noah's eldest son, since the generations were counted beginning with the youngest and working upward to him. It is somewhat difficult to identify exactly where his line begins to be traced, but we must work through it, since it is the part most directly relevant to our purpose.

Thus we read: "Unto Shem also, the father of all the sons of Eber, and elder brother of Japheth, were children born." The order of the words is this: "And Eber was born unto Shem, and all his children, even unto Shem, who was Japheth's elder brother." This makes Shem the patriarch of all who were born from his stock, whether sons, grandsons, great-grandsons, or further descendants. For Shem did not beget Eber directly; Eber is the first of his line by lineal descent. Shem (among others) begot Arphaxad, Arphaxad begot Canaan, Canaan begot Salah, and Salah was Eber's father. It is not without reason, then, that Eber is named first among Shem's line, and before all of Shem's sons, even though he was only a great-great-grandson, unless it is because the Hebrews took their name from him, as if "Hebrews" derived from "Eber." It has also been suggested that they were called Hebrews as if from "Abraham," but the truth is that they were called Hebrews from Eber. Israel alone preserved that language, and was the people among whom God's City was both prefigured and made a pilgrim. So Shem's six sons are counted first, then four more sons born to one of them; then another of Shem's sons begot a son, and this son's son was the father of Eber. Eber had two sons: one called Peleg, meaning "division." Scripture gives the reason for his name: "For in his time the earth was divided," which will be explained later. Eber's other son had twelve sons, and so the lineage of Seth numbered twenty-seven in all. The grand total of all the generations of Noah's three sons is therefore seventy-three: fifteen from Japheth, thirty-one from Ham, and twenty-seven from Shem. Scripture then continues: "These are the sons of Shem according to their families and their tongues, in their countries and nations." And then of them all: "These are the families of the sons of Noah after their generations among their people," and from these the nations of the earth were divided after the flood. From this we gather that there were seventy-three, or rather (as will be shown later) seventy-two nations, not seventy-two individual persons. When the sons of Japheth were counted, the passage concluded: "Of these were the islands of the Gentiles divided in their hands, each one according to his tongue and families in their nations." The sons of Ham are plainly identified as the founders and settlers of nations, as shown earlier. Mizraim begot all those called the Ludimi, and so on with the other six. After counting Ham's sons, the text concludes in the same way: "These are the sons of Ham according to their tongues and families in their countries and their nations." Scripture could not account for many of their sons because those sons grew up and went to live in other lands, yet were not numerous enough to populate entire regions on their own. Why else are only two of Japheth's eight sons' lines named, only three of Ham's four, and only two of Shem's six? Did the others have no children? We cannot imagine that. Rather, they did not grow into nations significant enough to record, but were absorbed into other peoples.

Scripture lists those nations each according to its own language, but then circles back to the time when they all shared a single tongue, and explains how that diversity came about. "Then the whole earth," it says, "was of one language and one speech. And as they went from the East, they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and there they abode: and they said one to another, come let us make brick and burn it in the fire: so they had brick for stone, and pitch for lime." They also said, "Come, let us build us a city and a tower whose top may reach to the heaven, that we may get us a name, lest we be scattered upon the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and tower which the sons of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold the people is all one, and have all one language, and this they began to do, neither can they now be stopped from whatsoever they have imagined to effect: come on let us down and confound their language there that each one of them understand not his fellow's speech. So the Lord scattered them from thence over the whole earth and they left off to build the city and the tower. Therefore the name of it was called Confusion, because there the Lord confounded the language of the whole earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them upon all the earth." This city called "Confusion" is none other than Babylon, whose remarkable construction is admired even in secular histories, for Babylon means "Confusion." From this we gather that Nimrod the giant was, as we noted earlier, its builder, since Scripture says: "The beginning of his kingdom was Babylon" (Gen 10:10), meaning it was the capital of his realm, the royal seat, and the greatest of all his cities. Yet it was never brought to that extraordinary perfection the wicked and the proud had envisioned, for it was built too high, said to reach "up to heaven." Whether this referred to one particular tower on which they labored more than the rest, or to all of them together, we speak in the same way when we say "the soldier" or "the enemy" meaning many thousands, and when the swarms of frogs and locusts that plagued Egypt are referred to simply as "the frog" and "the locust." But what did human vanity actually hope to achieve here? Even if they had managed to raise their structure above every mountain, could they ever have climbed above the very air itself? And what harm can any elevation, whether of body or spirit, do to God? Humility is the true path to heaven, lifting the spirit up toward God rather than against Him, unlike that giant who is said "to be a hunter against the Lord." Some, not grasping this, were misled by the ambiguity of the Greek and translated it "before the Lord," since the word ἐναντίον can mean both "before" and "against." The Psalms use it in the first sense: "And kneel before the Lord our maker." Yet Job uses it in the second: "He hath stretched out his hand against God." That is how we should read the phrase about the hunter against the Lord. And what is a hunter, after all, but one who traps, pursues, and kills earthly creatures? So this hunter and his people rose up and raised this tower against God, a monument to the impiety of pride. An evil intention, even when it never comes to fruition, still deserves to be punished. And how was it punished? Since all authority rests in command, and all command is carried by the tongue, pride was punished in precisely this way: the one who commanded men could no longer be understood, because he had refused to understand the Lord, his own commander. The conspiracy collapsed as a result, each person drifting away from those he could no longer follow, and attaching himself only to those he could understand. In this way, these new languages divided humanity into nations and scattered them across the whole earth, exactly as God, who brought about these extraordinary events, had determined.

When Scripture says, "The Lord came down to see the city and tower which the sons of men builded," it means not the sons of God, but that earthly-minded people we call the earthly city. We should not think God moved from one place to another, since He is always present everywhere; rather, He is said to "come down" when He acts on earth in ways that exceed the natural order, making His omnipotence directly felt. Nor does He gain new knowledge by seeing, since He can never be ignorant of anything. When Scripture says He "sees" or "knows" something, it means He makes that thing visible and known to others. So He did not so much observe that city as He made it observed, by revealing how deeply it had displeased Him. We can say God came down to it because His angels came down, and He dwells in them. This is confirmed by what follows: the Lord said, "Behold, the people are one, and they have all one language," and then, "Come, let us go down, and there confound their language." This is a recapitulation, explaining how the Lord came down. For if He had already come down, why would He say, "Let us go down"? He was speaking to the angels through whom He descended. And notice that He does not say, "Come, and go you down, and there confound their language," but "Come, let us go," showing that while they are His ministers, He works with them and they with Him, just as the apostle says, "For we are fellow-labourers with God."

"Let us make man in our image" could also have been understood as spoken to the angels, since God says not "I will make" but "in our image." Yet it would be wrong to think that God made man in the angels' image, or that God's image and theirs are the same. This phrase, then, hints at the Trinity: and since the Trinity is nevertheless one God, after saying "Let us make," He continues, "Thus God created the man in His image." He does not say "The Gods created," nor "In the image of the Gods." So the Trinity may be understood here just as the Father might have said to the Son and the Holy Spirit, "Come now, let us go down, and there confound their language" ; if, that is, there is any reason to exclude the angels from this passage. For it was more fitting for the angels to come to God, in holy devotion and godly thought, turning to the unchangeable truth, the eternal law of that higher court. They are not themselves the truth, but partakers of the truth that created them; they draw toward it as the fountain of their life, drawing from it what they lack in themselves, and this motion of theirs is steadfast, always turning toward that from which they never depart. Nor does God speak to His angels as we speak to one another, or as we speak to God; nor do His angels speak to us, nor we to them, nor does God speak through them to us, except in a way beyond words, shown to us in terms we can grasp. His high speech to them, before any effect is produced, is simply the unchanging order of that effect: it admits no sound, no vibration of air, but is an eternal power working on a temporal object. This is how God speaks to His angels; but to us, who are far from Him, He speaks in a very different way. When we grasp anything by the first manner, we draw near to the angels. But I will not pursue here the question of how God opens His will to others. The unchangeable truth speaks either in a way beyond words from Himself to rational creatures, or through rational creatures (whether changeable or spiritual) either to our imagination and spirit, or to our bodily senses. As for the saying, "No scheme of all their many shall fail, as they think," this is not a confirmation but rather a rhetorical question, of the kind we use in threatening, as Virgil illustrates in this verse:

"*Non arma expedient, totâque ex urbe sequentur?*"

"*And shall not all my powers take arms, and run?*"

We must therefore read this as a question: will none of their many schemes fail, as they imagine? Otherwise it reads not as a threat but as a statement, so we must add the interrogative mark. With that settled, the descendants of Noah's three sons numbered seventy-three, or rather (as we have said) seventy-two nations, who filled the earth and its islands. The number of nations far exceeded the number of languages, since even today in Africa there are many peoples who speak a single tongue. And who can doubt that, as the human population grew, various groups took to ships and went to settle the islands beyond?

But here a question arises about those animals that are not produced by decay, as frogs are, but only through the mating of male and female (such as wolves and the like): how, after the flood in which everything perished except what was in the ark, could they have reached those distant islands? We might suppose they swam to the nearest ones, but some islands lie so far out to sea that no beast could swim to them. If people wanted to catch and transport animals there, they could certainly have done so by hunting. Nor can we rule out that the angels, at God's command, might have carried them there. But if these creatures were produced from the earth itself, as they were at the beginning when God said, "Let the earth bring forth the living soul," then it becomes clear that the variety of beasts was preserved in the ark more as a symbol of the diverse nations than for the purpose of repopulation, since the earth could bring them forth again in those islands they could not otherwise have reached.

It is also worth asking whether the sons of Noah, or rather of Adam (from whom all humanity descends), fathered any of the monstrous races mentioned in secular histories: people with a single eye in the middle of their forehead; people whose heels face forward where their toes should be; people who combine both sexes in one body, with a man's right breast and a woman's left, capable of both fathering and bearing children; people born without mouths, living entirely on air and scent; people only a cubit tall, whom the Greeks call pygmies; people whose women give birth at five years old and die at eight; people with only one leg, which they never bend, yet who move with remarkable speed and are called Skiapodes because they sleep in the shade of that single foot; people without necks, whose faces appear on their chests; and other such figures depicted in the mosaic work along the seafront at Carthage, drawn from the most careful and detailed historical records. What should we make of the Cynocephali, who had dogs' heads and barked like dogs? We certainly don't need to accept every monstrous report that circulates on this subject. But whatever creature exists as a human being, that is, as a mortal rational creature, no matter how different its form, voice, or any other feature may be from an ordinary person's, no baptized Christian should doubt that it belongs to Adam's race. Nature's power is displayed, and displayed forcefully, in such beings. The same explanations we can offer for unusual births among us apply equally to those monstrous nations, because God made all things, and He alone knows best when and how He chose to shape each one, possessing perfect wisdom for adorning this universe through the contrast and variety of its parts. But whoever cannot contemplate the beauty of the whole will stumble over the deformity of a part, failing to perceive the harmony it holds with the whole. We see many people born with more than five fingers or toes, a variation no less remarkable than any other in proportion; yet God forbid that anyone should be foolish enough to think the Creator made an error in forming such a person, even if we don't know why He made them that way. However great the variation, He knows what He is doing, and no one may find fault with Him. At Hippo, a child was born with feet shaped like half-moons, and hands to match, with only two fingers and two toes. If an entire nation were like this, curious historians would record it as a marvel. But must we therefore say this child did not descend from Adam? Hardly any age passes without an hermaphrodite, though they are not common: people, I mean, who are so fully developed in both sexes that we cannot decide whether to call them male or female, though custom has given precedence to the dominant characteristic and they are still referred to as men, since no one speaks of them in the feminine. In our own time, just a few years ago, a child was born in the East who was two persons from the waist up and one from the waist down. He had two heads, two chests, four hands, one belly, and two feet, and he lived long enough that a great many people witnessed his form with their own eyes.

But who can count all the marvellous births in the world? Just as we cannot deny that all people are truly descended from the first man, so too must we acknowledge that any nation, however different its members' shapes may be from the common human form, belongs to Adam's lineage, provided its members are rational and mortal creatures (assuming, of course, that such diversity of form across entire nations is real). If we did not already know that apes, monkeys, and baboons are beasts rather than men, those bold and curious historians would confidently pass them off as nations and races of human beings. But if the people described in these wonders are genuinely human, then consider this: what if God's purpose was to show us, through the creation of whole nations from such unusual forms, that His wisdom did not fail in shaping them, as an unskilled sculptor might fail, but deliberately formed them this way? It is no absurdity, then, to believe that nations of strangely formed people may exist, just as we regularly witness unusual births among ourselves. To settle the question firmly: either the stories of such creatures are outright lies, or if such beings do exist, they are either not human at all, or if they are human, they are descended from Adam.

As for the fable about a people who live where the sun rises when it sets for us, and who walk with their feet pointing toward ours, it is simply incredible. Those who claim this have no real evidence for it; they rely entirely on the conjecture that such a thing might be possible, because the earth hangs within the celestial spheres and every part of the world is equally above and below every other part. From this they conclude that the opposite hemisphere cannot be uninhabited.

They fail to consider that even if such a land exists on the other side of the globe, it might be entirely covered by sea. And even if it is dry land, it doesn't follow that anyone lives there, since Scripture (which proves everything it says by the fulfillment of its prophecies) never mentions any such thing. It would be absurd, moreover, to claim that men could sail across that vast ocean and settle there, or that the descendants of the first man could have populated that region as well. But let us search among those seventy-two nations and their languages to see whether we can find that City of God, which remained a continual pilgrim on earth until the flood, and which is shown to persist among the sons of Noah after their blessing, chiefly in Shem, Noah's eldest son. Japheth's blessing, after all, was simply to dwell in the tents of his brother.

It is Shem's line, then, that we must follow to find the City of God after the flood, just as Seth's line carried it long before. Scripture, having shown the earthly city to be in Babylon (that is, in confusion), returns to the patriarch Shem and traces his line down to Abraham, recording each man's age when his son was born and how long he lived. Here I am reminded of my earlier promise to explain why one of Heber's sons was called Peleg: it was because in his days the earth was divided. And how was it divided? By the confusion of tongues.

So the sons of Shem who fall outside our purpose are passed over, and Scripture traces only those who carry his line down to Abraham, just as it earlier traced Seth's line down to Noah before the flood. It begins as follows: "These are the generations of Shem: Shem was a hundred years old, and begat Arphaxad, two years after the flood. And Shem lived after he begat Arphaxad five hundred years, and begat sons and daughters, and died." It continues in the same way for each descendant, recording when each man fathered the son who belongs to this line leading to Abraham, and how long each man lived after that son was born, going on to father more sons and daughters. This detail is given to show us what enormous populations could spring from a single person, so that we don't raise the childish objection that too few names are listed. Shem's descendants were more than enough to populate many kingdoms, most notably the Assyrian empire, where Ninus, the conqueror of the entire East, reigned in splendor and left a vast empire that his descendants would hold for many generations. But let us not linger on minor details any longer than necessary. We will not count each man's total years until death, only the years until he fathered the son who appears in this genealogical line. Gathering these figures from the flood to Abraham, we will briefly note other events as they become relevant. In the second year after the flood, Shem, at two hundred years old, fathered Arphaxad. Arphaxad, at a hundred and thirty-five, fathered Canaan. Canaan, at a hundred and thirty, fathered Salah, who was also a hundred and thirty when he fathered Heber. Heber was a hundred and thirty-four when he fathered Peleg. Peleg was a hundred and thirty when he fathered Reu. Reu was a hundred and thirty-two when he fathered Serug. Serug was a hundred and thirty when he fathered Nahor. Nahor was seventy-nine when he fathered Terah. Terah was seventy when he fathered Abram, whom God later renamed Abraham. From the flood to Abraham, then, the total comes to one thousand and seventy-two years, according to the common translation, that is, the Septuagint. In the Hebrew text, however, the number of years is considerably smaller, and no satisfactory explanation for this difference has been offered.

Now, in this search for the City of God, we cannot say that during the time when those seventy-two nations spoke different languages, all of humanity had fallen away from the true worship of God. Rather, it survived in the line of Shem, passing down through Arphaxad to Abraham. The earthly city, on the other hand, was plainly visible in the arrogance of building that tower to heaven, the perfect symbol of diabolical pride. It was unmistakable there, and remained so ever after. But whether the other city existed before that point, or lay hidden, or whether both cities were present together in Noah's sons, the godly in the two blessed ones and the wicked in the one who was cursed, from whom that great hunter against the Lord descended, is difficult to say. It seems most likely that even before the building of Babylon, God had servants among some of Ham's children, and the devil had his among some of Shem's and Japheth's. We should not assume that the earth lacked either kind. When the Psalms say, "They are all gone out of the way, they are all corrupt, there is not one that doeth good, no not one," both Psalms that contain this line immediately follow it with: "Do not all that work iniquity know that they eat up My people as it were bread?" This shows that God had His people even then. The phrase "no not one" therefore applies specifically to the sons of men, not the sons of God, for the Psalmist first says, "The Lord looked down from heaven upon the sons of men, to see if there were any that would understand and seek after God." What follows makes clear that he is speaking only of those who lived by the law of the flesh, not of the spirit.

Even as sin found no shortage of followers when humanity still shared a single language (for so it was before the flood, and yet all deserved to perish in it except Noah and his family), so too when human presumption was punished by the confusion of languages, from which the city of Babylon took its name as a monument to their pride, the house of Heber did not fail but kept the original language intact. This is why, as I noted, Heber was counted first among all the sons of Shem who each fathered an entire nation, even though he was himself the fifth in descent from Shem. Because this language survived in his household while it was confused everywhere else (and it is reasonably held to have been the only language on earth before this event), it came to bear the name of the Hebrew tongue. Before that point, when it was the tongue of all humanity, it had no name at all; it was simply the language of mankind, spoken by everyone. Some have argued that if the earth was divided by languages in the days of Peleg, Heber's son, the language should have taken its name from Peleg rather than from Heber. But we must understand that Heber gave his son the name Peleg, meaning "division," precisely because the boy was born at the very moment the earth was divided. That is what Scripture means when it says, "In his days the earth was divided." If Heber had not been alive when the confusion occurred, the language that was to remain in his family could not have taken its name from him. We should also recognize that this language was originally universal, because the confusion of tongues was a punishment that God's people were not meant to suffer. Nor was it without purpose that Abraham could not pass this language on to all his descendants, but only to those who came through Jacob and who, as they grew into a visible people of God, were to receive His covenant and the Savior in the flesh. Not even all of Heber's children retained this language, but only that branch from which Abraham descended.

So while no godly men are explicitly named as living at the time the wicked built Babylon, this silence should not discourage inquiry but rather sharpen it. We read that at first all people shared one language; that Heber is listed first among all the sons of Shem, though he was only the fifth in that line; and that the language used by the patriarchs and prophets in all their words and writings was Hebrew. When we ask where that tongue was preserved during the confusion (since it had to be kept among those for whom confusion could be no punishment), what can we say except that it was preserved in the family of the man from whom it took its name? And this itself is a powerful sign of his righteousness: while all others were afflicted with the confusion of their tongues, Heber and his household alone were spared that affliction.

Yet another question arises: how could Heber and his son Peleg each become the founders of separate nations if they shared the same language? The Hebrew tongue descended from Heber to Abraham and from Abraham down until Israel became a great people. How then could every son in Noah's line become the head of a distinct nation, given that Heber and Peleg shared a single language? The most likely answer is that Nimrod also became a nation unto himself, yet was counted separately on account of his exceptional prominence and physical power, so as to preserve the number of seventy-two nations intact. Peleg, for his part, was not named because he grew into a separate nation, but because the remarkable event of the earth's division happened to fall in his days. In terms of nation and language, Peleg belonged to Heber's people. We need not be troubled by the question of how Nimrod could have lived at the same time as the building of Babylon and the confusion of tongues. The fact that Heber was the sixth from Noah and Nimrod only the fourth is no obstacle to their living at the same period, for we have already seen that those with fewer descendants often lived longer than those with more, and that those with fewer sons tended to have them later than those with many. We must also understand that when the earth was being populated, Noah's sons had not only produced all the individuals named as fathers of nations, but that these men had themselves built up large and numerous families worthy of being called nations. Nor should we assume that the order in which they are listed is the order in which they were born. Otherwise, how could Joktan's twelve sons (another son of Heber) have become nations in their own right, if he was born after Peleg as the listing implies? For it was in Peleg's days that the earth was divided.

We should understand it this way: Peleg is named first, but was actually born long after his brother Joktan, whose twelve sons had families large enough that each could account for one of the languages scattered at Babel. In the same way, the last-born could be listed first, just as Noah's youngest son Japheth is named first, Ham second, and Shem, the eldest, last. Some of these nations' names have survived so that we can still trace their origins today, as with the Assyrians from Asshur and the Hebrews from Heber. Others have been erased by time so thoroughly that even the most learned scholars can barely find a trace of them in ancient records. Some say the Egyptians descended from Mizraim, a son of Ham, though there is no resemblance between the names at all; the same is true of the Ethiopians, said to descend from Cush, another of Ham's sons. When we consider the full picture, we find far more names lost than preserved.

Now let us trace how the City of God advanced from the moment it became more prominent and visible in the promises made to Abraham, promises we now see fulfilled in Christ. The Holy Scripture tells us that Abraham was born in a region of Chaldea that fell under the Assyrian empire. By that time, idolatry had taken a firm hold in Chaldea, as it had everywhere else.

So it was only the household of Terah, Abraham's father, that truly served God and (in all likelihood) kept the Hebrew tongue pure, even though, as Joshua tells the Hebrews, just as they fell into idolatry while God's chosen people in Egypt, so too in Mesopotamia, all of Heber's other descendants either became separate nations or were absorbed into others. Therefore, just as in the flood of waters Noah's household alone survived to repopulate humanity, so in this flood of sin and superstition, Terah's household alone remained as the place where God's city was planted and preserved. And just as before the flood, after all the generations from Adam had been counted, the years tallied, and the reason for the flood explained, Scripture introduces Noah with the words, "*These are the generations of Noah*," so here too, after tracing the line from Shem, Noah's son, all the way down to Abraham, the text closes with this summary as a point of great significance: "*These are the generations of Terah.*" Terah fathered Abraham, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his birth, which was part of Chaldea. Abraham and Nahor both took wives: Abraham's wife was named Sarah, and Nahor's wife was Milcah, the daughter of Haran, who was father to both Milcah and Iscah. Some hold that Iscah is the same person as Sarah, Abraham's wife.

Scripture then describes how Terah and his family left Chaldea and came into Mesopotamia, settling in Haran. Notably, his son Nahor receives no mention, as though he had not made the journey with them. The text reads: "Thus Terah took Abraham his son, and his grandson Lot, the son of Haran, and Sarah his daughter-in-law, his son Abraham's wife, and he led them out of the country of Chaldea, into the land of Canaan, and he came to Haran and dwelt there." Nahor is entirely absent here, along with his wife Milcah. Yet later, when Abraham sent his servant to find a wife for his son Isaac, we read: "So the servant took ten of his master's camels, and of his master's goods with him, and departed and went into Mesopotamia, into the city of Nahor." This passage, along with others, confirms that Nahor did eventually leave Chaldea and settled in Mesopotamia, where Abraham and his father had previously lived. Why, then, does Scripture pass over him in silence when Terah departed to live elsewhere, while taking care to mention both Abraham and Lot (who was merely a grandson) and Sarah his daughter-in-law, all of whom joined in that migration? The most reasonable conclusion is that Nahor had abandoned his father's and brother's faith and embraced Chaldean superstition, and that he later left either out of regret or because the people of that land, suspecting his loyalties, drove him out. This interpretation finds support in the book of Judith, where Holofernes, the enemy of Israel, was inquiring about the nature of the Israelite people and whether he should make war against them. Achior, captain of the Ammonites, answered him: "Let my lord hear the word of the mouth of his servant, and I will show you the truth concerning this people that inhabit these mountains, and there shall no lie come out of your servant's mouth. This people come out of the stock of the Chaldeans, and they dwelt before in Mesopotamia, because they would not follow the gods of their fathers, that were glorious in the land of Chaldea: but they left the way of their ancestors and worshipped the God of heaven, whom they knew: so that they cast them out from the face of their gods, and they fled into Mesopotamia, and dwelt there many days. Then their God commanded them to depart from the place where they dwelt, and to go into the land of Canaan where they dwelt," and so on, as Achior the Ammonite relates. From this it is clear that Terah's family were persecuted by the Chaldeans on account of their religion, because they worshipped the one true God.

Terah died in Mesopotamia, where he is said to have lived two hundred and five years. After his death, the promises God made to Abraham began to be revealed. Of Terah, Scripture records: "The days of Terah were two hundred and five years, and he died in Haran." You should not take this to mean he spent all two hundred and five years there; rather, because he ended his life in that place, the text says so. Without this note, we would have no way of knowing how long he lived, since Scripture does not record when he arrived in Haran. It would be foolish to suppose that in a genealogy where every man's age is carefully noted, his alone should be omitted. When Scripture names certain individuals without recording their years, we should understand that they do not belong to the direct line of descent being traced. The lineage running from Adam to Noah, and from Noah to Abraham, never names a man without also recording the number of his years.

When we read that after Terah's death the Lord said to Abraham, "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house," and so on, we should not assume that this command followed immediately in time simply because it follows immediately in the text. If we do assume that, we fall into an inescapable contradiction. After recording those words to Abraham, Scripture continues: "So Abraham departed, as the Lord spake unto him, and Lot went with him: and Abraham was seventy-five years old when he went out of Haran." But how can this be true if Abraham did not leave Haran until after his father's death? As we noted earlier, Terah fathered Abraham at the age of seventy. Add Abraham's age at his departure from Haran (seventy-five years), and the total comes to a hundred and forty-five. That, therefore, was Terah's age when Abraham left that city in Mesopotamia. Abraham was seventy-five at the time, and since his father was seventy when he was born, Terah was necessarily a hundred and forty-five years old at the moment of Abraham's departure, and no more. So Abraham left not after his father's death (Terah lived to two hundred and five), but well before it: at his own seventy-fifth year, which corresponded to his father's hundred and forty-fifth. Scripture here follows its familiar pattern of circling back to a point in time that an earlier passage had already moved beyond. It did the same thing before, when it stated that the descendants of Noah's sons were divided into nations and languages, and then continued as though picking up where it left off: "Then the whole earth was of one language," and so on, as if that detail came afterward in sequence.

How then did each man have his own nation and language? The answer is that Scripture circles back to cover earlier events. The same thing happens here: after recording that "the days of Terah were two hundred and five years, and he died in Haran," Scripture returns to fill in what had already occurred before finishing the account of Terah. Then the Lord said to Abraham, "Get thee out of thy country," and so on, after which we read, "So Abraham departed as the Lord spoke to him, and Lot went with him: and Abraham was seventy years old when he went from Haran." This happened when his father was a hundred and forty-five years old, since Abraham was then seventy-five. This difficulty can also be resolved another way: by counting Abraham's seventy years from when he was delivered from the fire of the Chaldeans rather than from his birth, as though he had, in a sense, been born again at that moment. But Stephen, speaking of this in Acts, says: "The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Charran, and said unto him, Get thee out of thy country from thy kindred and come into the land which I will give thee." According to Stephen's account, God did not speak to Abraham after Terah's death (for Terah died in Haran), but before Abraham had settled in Haran, while he was still in Mesopotamia, having already left Chaldea. When Stephen says, "Then came he out of the land of the Chaldeans and dwelt in Charran," this describes what happened after God spoke to him, since he left Chaldea following God's word (Stephen says God spoke to him in Mesopotamia), and the word "then" covers the whole span of time from Abraham's departure until the Lord addressed him. The passage that follows, "After that his father was dead, God placed him in this land wherein he now dwells," should be understood to mean: "God brought him from the place where his father later died and settled him here." We should therefore understand that God spoke to Abraham while he was in Mesopotamia, before he had yet settled in Haran; that he came to Haran with his father, holding fast to God's command; and that in his seventy-fifth year he departed from there, which was his father's hundred and forty-fifth year. The text says he was placed in Canaan after his father's death, not that he left Haran at that point, because it was after Terah died that Abraham began to acquire land there and build up his wealth. As for God's words to him after he had left Chaldea and was in Mesopotamia, "Get thee out of thy country, from thy kindred and from thy father's house," these did not refer to a physical departure (which he had already made) but to a separation of his heart from them, since his mind had not truly left if he still harbored any hope or desire to return. That hope and desire were to be cut off by God's command. It is entirely plausible that when Nahor later followed his father to Haran, Abraham took the opportunity to fulfill God's command fully, taking Sarah his wife and Lot his brother's son, and so departed from Haran.

Now we must examine the promises made to Abraham, because in them the oracles of the true God first began to prophesy of our Lord Jesus Christ, who was to come from that godly people the prophecies had promised. The first of these promises reads: "The Lord said unto Abraham: Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house unto the land that I will shew thee. And I will make of thee a great nation, and will bless thee, and make thy name great, and thou shalt be blessed: I will also bless them that bless thee, and curse them that curse thee, and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed." Here we should notice a double promise made to Abraham. The first concerns his descendants possessing the land of Canaan, expressed in the words "Go unto the land that I will shew thee, and I will make thee a great nation." The second is far more significant, concerning his spiritual descendants, by which he becomes the father not only of Israel but of all nations that follow his faith. That promise is stated in the words: "And in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed." Eusebius believes this promise was made when Abraham was seventy-five years old, as though Abraham departed from Haran immediately afterward, since Scripture cannot be contradicted when it gives him that age at the time of his departure. But if the promise was made then, Abraham was still with his father in Haran, because he could not have departed from there without first having lived there. Does this not then contradict Stephen's statement that "God appeared unto him in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Charran"? We should understand, however, that all of this happened within a single year: first God's promise to Abraham, then Abraham's stay in Haran, and finally his departure. This is not only because Eusebius's calculation works out this way, counting four hundred and thirty years from that year to the Israelites' liberation from Egypt, but also because the apostle Paul refers to it in the same terms.

At this time there were several famous kingdoms on earth, meaning societies of people living according to the flesh and in the service of fallen angels. Three of these kingdoms stood above the rest: the Sidonians, the Egyptians, and the Assyrians, the last of which was the greatest of all. Ninus, the son of Belus, had conquered all of Asia, India alone excepted. I don't mean Asia as it is understood today, as a single province within a larger region, but Asia in its entirety, which some geographers treat as one third of the world, dividing the whole earth into Asia, Europe, and Africa. Others divide the earth into just two halves. Still others split it into three equal parts: Asia in the east, running from north to south; Europe from the north to the west; and Africa from the west to the south. On this last scheme, Europe and Africa together make up one half of the world, and Asia the other. The reason Europe and Africa are counted as two separate parts, rather than one, is that the ocean sends its waters between them, forming our great sea. So when the world is divided in two, Asia is one half and Europe and Africa together form the other. Sidonia, one of the three great kingdoms, was not under Assyrian rule, since it lay in Europe. Egypt, meanwhile, was necessarily inferior to Assyria, given that the Assyrians controlled all of Asia except India. The city of the wicked, then, held its greatest court in Assyria, whose chief city was Babylon, a name that fittingly means "confusion." There Ninus succeeded his father Belus, who had held that sovereignty for sixty-five years. Ninus himself lived fifty-two years and had already reigned forty-five years when Abraham was born, roughly twelve hundred years before the founding of Rome, that other Babylon of the West.

So Abraham, at seventy-five years of age and when his father was a hundred and forty-five, left Haran. He took with him Lot, his brother's son, and Sarah his wife, and came into the land of Canaan, as far as Sichem, where he received his second promise: "The Lord appeared unto Abraham and said, Unto thy seed will I give this land." This promise did not concern the seed through which Abraham was to become the father of all nations, but only his physical descendants through Isaac and Israel, for it was their seed that possessed this land.

There Abraham built an altar, then departed and dwelt in a wilderness, and from there was driven by famine into Egypt. In Egypt he called his wife his sister, and yet he did not lie. She was his cousin, and Lot, being his brother's son, was called his brother. So Abraham only concealed the fact that Sarah was his wife rather than denying it outright, commending the protection of her chastity to God and avoiding human deception as any man would. Had he not tried to escape danger by every means available to him, he would have been tempting God rather than trusting in Him, a point we have already argued against the slanders of Faustus the Manichee. And as Abraham trusted in God, so it came to pass: Pharaoh, king of Egypt, sought to take her as his wife, was severely afflicted, and was forced to restore her to her husband. God forbid that we should think she was defiled by him in any way; the severity of the plagues Pharaoh suffered would not have permitted him to commit any such outrage.

So Abraham departed from Egypt and returned to the place he had come from, while Lot (without any falling out between them) went to settle in Sodom. Both men were very wealthy, and their shepherds and herdsmen couldn't get along, so to avoid that trouble, they parted ways. Among people like these (as all people are imperfect) there were no doubt occasional quarrels arising, and to head off that conflict, Abraham said to Lot: "Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between thee and me, nor between my herdsmen and thine, for we be brethren. Is not the whole land before thee? I pray thee depart from me: if thou wilt take the left hand, I will go to the right, or if thou wilt go to the right hand, then I will take the left." From this, it may be, the world developed an honest and peaceable custom: that the elder should always divide the land, and the younger should choose.

When Abraham and Lot parted ways and settled in separate places (out of necessity, not conflict), Abraham in Canaan and Lot in Sodom, God spoke to Abraham a third time: "Lift up your eyes now, and look from the place where you are: northward and southward, eastward and toward the sea, for all the land you see I will give to you and your descendants forever. I will make your descendants as numerous as the grains of sand, so that if anyone could count the sand, your descendants could be counted too. Arise, walk through the land in its length and breadth, for I will give it to you." Whether these promises concern Abraham's becoming the father of all nations is not entirely clear. The words "I will make your descendants as the sands of the sea" may point in that direction, since they employ a figure of speech the Greeks call hyperbole. Anyone who has read Scripture understands how it uses this device and others like it. Hyperbole is when words far exceed the literal meaning. Who cannot see that the number of grains of sand exceeds the total of all Adam's descendants from the beginning to the end of the world? How much more, then, does it exceed Abraham's descendants, even counting both the Israelites and believers from every other nation? Compare that latter group with the number of the wicked, and it is but a handful, though even that handful is a multitude so vast that Scripture thought fit to express it hyperbolically through the image of the sands of the earth. Abraham's promised descendants are indeed beyond counting for human minds, though not for God's, and neither are the grains of sand beyond His reckoning. Since not only the Israelites but all of Abraham's spiritual offspring are fittingly compared to the sand, this promise encompasses both groups. We say, however, that this is not entirely obvious, because Abraham's physical descendants alone eventually grew so numerous that they filled nearly the whole world, and so could be compared hyperbolically to the sands of the earth, since such a multitude is simply uncountable by human means. That the land God referred to was Canaan specifically, no one disputes. Some may stumble over the phrase "I will give it to you and your descendants forever," wondering whether "forever" is meant literally and eternally. But if we understand "forever" to mean until the end of the present age, as we firmly believe it does, the difficulty dissolves. For even though the Israelites were driven out of Jerusalem, they still held other cities in Canaan, and if the whole land were inhabited by Christians, Abraham's descendants would be among them.

After receiving this promise, Abraham departed and settled in another place, by the oak grove of Mamre in Hebron. When Sodom was plundered and Lot taken prisoner by five kings who had attacked the city, Abraham set out to rescue him with three hundred and eighteen men born and raised in his household. He defeated those kings, freed Lot, and yet refused to take anything from the spoil, even though the king on whose behalf he had fought offered it to him. It was then that he was blessed by Melchizedek, priest of the Most High God, about whom the Epistle to the Hebrews (which most attribute to Paul, though some dispute this) says many remarkable things. For it was there that the sacrifice the whole Church now offers to God first became visible, and what was prefigured in that moment was fulfilled long afterward in Christ, of whom the prophet said before He came in the flesh: "Thou art a priest for ever, after the order of Melchizedek" (Ps 110:4): not after the order of Aaron, for that order was to be set aside when the realities arrived that those figures had only pointed toward.

Then the word of the Lord came to Abraham in a vision. Abraham had received many great promises, yet he doubted he would have any children, and said that his steward Eliezer would be his heir. But immediately he was promised an heir, not Eliezer, but a child of his own body. Beyond that, his descendants would be countless, not like the sands of the earth, but like the stars of heaven, which seems to clearly suggest the heavenly glory of his posterity. As for their number, who can fail to see that the sands far exceed the stars? You might say the two are comparable in that both are beyond counting. We cannot assume that anyone can see all the stars; the more intently one gazes, the more appear, so that we can reasonably suppose some escape even the sharpest eye, besides those that rise in other horizons beyond our view. As for those who claim to have recorded a fixed and definite number of the stars, such as Aratus, Eudoxus, or others, this passage refutes them entirely. And here we find what the apostle cites in praise of God's grace: Abraham believed the Lord, and it was counted to him as righteousness (Gen 15:6), so that circumcision could not exalt itself and bar the uncircumcised nations from access to Christ. For Abraham was still uncircumcised when he believed, and it was credited to him as righteousness.

God also said to him in the same vision: "I am the Lord that brought thee out of the country of the Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it." Then Abraham said, "Lord, how will I know that I will inherit it?" And God said to him, "Take me a heifer of three years old, a she-goat of three years old, a ram of three years old, a turtledove, and a pigeon." So he did, and divided them in the middle, laying each piece against the other, but he did not divide the birds. Then, as the book says, birds of prey came down on the carcasses and settled on them, and Abraham sat beside them. Around sunset, a deep sleep fell on Abraham, and with it a horror of great darkness. God said to Abraham, "Know this for certain: your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs for four hundred years, and they will serve there and be harshly treated. But the nation they serve I will judge, and afterward they will come out with great wealth. You yourself will go to your fathers in peace and die at a good old age. In the fourth generation they will return here, for the wickedness of the Amorites is not yet complete." When the sun went down and darkness fell, there appeared a smoking furnace and a blazing torch that passed between those pieces. On that same day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham, saying, "To your descendants I have given this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river Euphrates: the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites." All of this Abraham heard and saw in his vision. To dwell on each particular would be tedious and beside the point. It is enough to understand that, although Abraham had believed before and that faith was counted to him as righteousness, he did not fall away from that faith when he said, "Lord, how will I know that I will inherit it?" He was asking about the land God had promised him, and notice that he does not ask *from where* he will know, but *how*, or *by what means*: by what sign will his belief be further confirmed? Nor did the Virgin Mary show any distrust when she said, "How shall this be, seeing I know no man?" She knew it would happen; she was only asking about the manner of it, and she received this answer: "The Holy Ghost shall descend upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee."

And in this way Abraham had his parallel in his three animals: the heifer, the goat, and the ram, along with the two birds, the turtledove and the pigeon. We need not trouble ourselves over how what he was firmly convinced would happen was actually going to come about. Either the heifer signified the people's yoke under the law, the goat their sin, and the ram their dominion (all three animals being three years old because three great spans of time were so significant: from Adam to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, and from Abraham to David, who was the first true king of Israel, since Saul was rejected). Of these three periods, this third one, from Abraham to David, contained Israel's full rise to glory. Or these animals may signify something else more fittingly. But without any doubt, the turtledove and the pigeon represent his spiritual offspring, which is why Scripture says, "Them he divided not." The carnal are divided among themselves, but the spiritual never are, whether they withdraw from the affairs of the world like the turtledove, or live among them like the pigeon.

Both these birds are simple and harmless, signifying that even within Israel, which would possess that land, there would be individual sons of promise and heirs of the kingdom of eternity. The birds that fell on the sacrifice signified nothing but the airy powers that feed on the contentions and divisions of carnal men. But Abraham's sitting by them signified that there would be faithful people among these contentions, even to the end of the world. The heaviness that fell on Abraham toward sunset, and that fearful darkness, signifies the severe trouble that the faithful will endure toward the end of this world, of which Christ said in the Gospel: "Then shall be a great tribulation, such as was not from the beginning," etc. And when God said to Abraham, "Know assuredly that thy seed shall be a stranger," etc., this was a plain prophecy of Israel's servitude in Egypt, not that they were to serve four hundred years in this condition of slavery, but that within four hundred years this would befall them. For just as the passage about Terah, the father of Abraham, states that "he lived in Haran two hundred and five years," we should note that he did not live there for all of that time, but that he ended his days there; so here it says, "They shall be strangers in a land that is not theirs, four hundred years," not that their bondage lasted all this time, but that it ended at this time. It says four hundred years for the fullness of the number, although there were somewhat more years in the actual count, whether you reckon from Abraham's first receiving of the promise or from the birth of his son Isaac, the first of the seed to whom this was promised. From Abraham's seventy-fifth year, in which, as I noted earlier, he first received the promise, to the departure of Israel out of Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years, which the apostle mentions in these words: "This I say, that the law which was four hundred and thirty years after, cannot disannul the covenant which was confirmed of God before, or make the promise of none effect" (Gal 3:17). Now these four hundred and thirty years could reasonably be called four hundred, because they are not much more, especially since some of them had already passed when Abraham had this vision, or when Isaac was born to his father, who was then one hundred years old, it being twenty-five years after the promise, so that four hundred and five years of the four hundred and thirty still remained, and it pleased God to call these four hundred. Likewise, no one doubts that the other words of God in this passage belong to the people of Israel. But what follows, "When the sun went down there was a darkness, and behold, a smoking furnace and a firebrand went between the pieces," signifies that at the end the carnal are to be judged by fire. For just as the great and overwhelming affliction of the City of God was signified by the heaviness that fell on Abraham toward sunset, that is, toward this world's end, so too at sunset, meaning at this world's end, this fire signifies that fire which will purge the righteous and devour the wicked. The promise then made to Abraham is a plain reference to the land of Canaan, naming eleven nations from the river of Egypt to the great river Euphrates: not from the Nile, the great river of Egypt, but from that smaller river which divides Egypt and Palestine, on whose bank the city of Rhinocorura stands.

Next come the times of Abraham's sons: one born of Hagar the bondwoman, the other of Sarah the freewoman, whom we also discussed in the previous book. But in this matter, Abraham did not sin by taking Hagar as a concubine. He did it for the sake of offspring, not out of lust, and not to insult his wife but to obey her. Sarah believed it would ease the pain of her barrenness if she could obtain children through her bondwoman by choice, since she could obtain none herself by nature. She was acting on the principle the apostle describes: "The husband hath not power over his own body, but the wife." A woman may secure children from another's womb when she cannot bear them herself. There is neither indulgence nor impurity in such an act. The maid was therefore given by the wife to the husband for the purpose of bearing children, and for that purpose alone he accepted her. Neither of them was seeking the gratification of desire, but the fruit of nature. When the bondwoman, now pregnant, began to despise her barren mistress, and Sarah suspected her husband of tolerating this insolence, Abraham showed that he was not a captive lover but a free father in this arrangement: that it was not his own desire he had followed, but his wife's will, pursued at her own initiative. He had lain with Hagar, yet was in no way entangled by desire for her. He had sown the seed of future offspring in her without surrendering to any disordered affection. He told his wife: "Thy maid is in thine hand: use her as it pleaseth thee." What a remarkable man, who could treat his wife with restraint and his servant with deference, and both without any trace of impurity!

After this, Ishmael was born of Hagar, and it might have seemed that God's promise to Abraham had been fulfilled in him, since when Abraham had spoken of making his steward his heir, God had said, "Nay, but thou shalt have an heir of thine own body." But lest Abraham should build his hopes on this, in the ninety-ninth year of his age God appeared to him and said: "I am the all-sufficient God, walk before Me, and be thou upright: and I will make My covenant between Me and thee, and will multiply thee exceedingly." Then Abraham fell on his face, and God spoke with him, saying: "Behold I make My covenant with thee, thou shalt be a father of many nations. Nor shall thy name be called Abram any more, but Abraham: for a father of many nations have I made thee. I will make thee exceeding fruitful, and many nations, yea even kings shall proceed of thee: and I will establish My covenant between Me and thee, and thy seed after thee in their generations; for an everlasting covenant to be God to thee and thy seed after thee. And I will give thee and thy seed after thee a land wherein thou art a stranger, even all the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession, and I will be their God." And God said further to Abraham: "Thou shalt keep My covenant, thou and thy seed after thee in their generations, this is My covenant which thou shalt keep between thee and Me, and thy seed after thee: let every man-child of you be circumcised: that is, you shall circumcise the foreskin of your flesh, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between Me and you. Every man-child of eight days old among you shall be circumcised in your generation, as well he that is born in thine house as he that is bought of any stranger which is not of thy seed: both must be circumcised, so My covenant shall be eternally in you. But the uncircumcised man-child, and he in whose flesh the foreskin is not circumcised, shall be cut off from his people, because he hath broken My covenant." And God said more to Abraham: "Sarai thy wife shall be no more called Sarai, but Sarah, and I will bless her, and will give thee a son of her, and I will bless her, and she shall be the mother of nations, yea even of kings." Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed in his heart, saying: Shall he that is a hundred years old have a child? and shall Sarah that is ninety years old bear? And Abraham said to God, Oh let Ishmael live in Thy sight. And God said to Abraham: Sarah thy wife shall bear a son indeed, and thou shalt call his name Isaac. I will establish My covenant with him as an everlasting covenant, and I will be his God, and the God of his seed after him. As concerning Ishmael, I have heard thee: for I have blessed him, and will multiply and increase him exceedingly: twelve princes shall he beget, and I will make him a great nation. But My covenant will I establish with Isaac, whom Sarah shall bear unto thee next year by this time.

Here the calling of the nations is plainly promised in Isaac, that is, in the son of promise, who signifies grace and not nature. A son is promised to an old man by a barren old woman, and although God ordinarily works through the course of nature, where that nature is withered and exhausted, such an outcome is clearly God's own work, making His grace all the more evident. And because this was to come not through natural generation but through regeneration, circumcision was commanded at the very moment this son was promised to Sarah. The fact that all children, unborn servants, and strangers are commanded to be circumcised shows that grace belongs to the whole world. What does circumcision signify, after all, but the putting off of corruption and the renewal of nature? And what does the eighth day signify but Christ, who rose again after the week was complete and the Sabbath fulfilled? Even the names of these parents were changed, and all of this points to that newness which is foreshadowed in the types of the Old Testament, in which the New lies prefigured. Why is it called the Old Testament, except that it foreshadows the New? And what is the New Testament but the opening of the Old? Now Abraham is said to laugh, but this was the overflow of his joy, not any sign that he doubted or mocked the promise. His thoughts, "Shall he that is a hundred years old...," are not expressions of doubt about the outcome but of wonder at so extraordinary an event.

If anyone stumbles over the passage where God says He will give Abraham all the land of Canaan as an eternal possession, wondering how this can be fulfilled when no man's descendants can inherit the earth forever, they should understand that "eternal" is used here in the sense the Greeks give to *αἰώνιον* (derived from *αἰών*, meaning an age or *seculum*). The Latin translators were reluctant to render it as *seculare* here, lest it be taken in the wrong sense, since both *seculare* and *transitorium* are commonly used for things that last only a short while. But *αἰώνιον* refers to something that is either entirely without end, or that endures until the end of the age, and it is in this latter sense that "eternal" is used here.

Some may also struggle with these words: "The man-child in whose flesh the foreskin is not circumcised, that person shall be cut off from his people, because he has broken My covenant." There is no fault in the child who faces this destruction: he broke no covenant of God's, but his parents did, by neglecting his circumcision. Unless, that is, you hold that even the youngest child has broken God's command and covenant along with everyone else, in the first man, in whom all humanity sinned. For God has made many covenants beyond the two great ones, the old and the new, that anyone can read and know. The first covenant was this, spoken to Adam: "Whenever you eat of it, you shall surely die." On this point, Ecclesiasticus says: "All flesh grows old like a garment, and it is a covenant from the beginning that all sinners shall die." Now, the law was given later, and it brought greater clarity to human understanding of sin. As the Apostle says, "Where there is no law, there is no transgression" (Rom 4:15). How, then, can the Psalmist's words be true, "I counted all the sinners of the earth as transgressors" (Ps 119:119), unless every person is guilty in their own conscience of something done against some law? Since little children, as the true faith teaches, are guilty of original sin though not of actual sin, and since we therefore confess that they must receive the grace of forgiveness, they are indeed breakers of God's covenant made with Adam in Paradise. Both the Psalmist's saying and the Apostle's are thus true. Since circumcision was a type of regeneration, the child's original sin, which breaks the first covenant ever made between God and man, will rightly cut him off from his people unless regeneration grafts him into the body of the true religion. We must understand God to have said this: "He who is not regenerate shall perish from among his people, because he has broken My covenant by offending Me in Adam." Had He said "he has broken this my covenant," it could only have referred to circumcision. But since He does not specify which covenant the child breaks, we must understand Him to mean a covenant that the child was genuinely capable of transgressing. If anyone insists on tying this to circumcision and argues that it is the covenant the uncircumcised child has broken, let him be careful not to fall into the absurdity of saying that the child breaks a covenant that is not broken by him but only in him. However we resolve the question, we will find that the child's condemnation flows entirely from original sin, not from any negligence of his own in bringing about this breach of the covenant.

So this great and unmistakable promise was made to Abraham in these words: "A father of many nations have I made thee, and I will make thee exceeding fruitful: and nations, yea even kings shall proceed from thee" (a promise we see most clearly fulfilled in Christ). From that point on, the man and his wife are no longer called Abram and Sarai, but by the names we have used all along, and by which the whole world knows them: Abraham and Sarah. But why was Abram's name changed? The reason follows immediately after the change: "a father of many nations have I made thee." This is what Abraham signifies. His former name, Abram, means "high father." As for the change of Sarah's name, no reason is given; but those who have interpreted the Hebrew names tell us that Sarai means "my princess," while Sarah means "strength." This is why it is written in the letter to the Hebrews, "By faith Sarah received strength to conceive seed" (Heb 11:11), and so on. Now both of them were old, as Scripture says, but she was also barren. The natural cycle had ceased for Sarah, so that even if she had not been barren, she could no longer have borne children on that account alone. And while a woman who is advanced in years but still retains the natural cycle of women might conceive by a young man, she could never do so by an old one. Likewise, an old man may still father children, but only with a young woman, as Abraham himself did with Keturah after Sarah's death, since Keturah was still of a youthful age.

This, then, is what the apostle marvels at so deeply, which is why he says that "Abraham's body was dead" (Rom 4:19): not because Abraham was unable to father a child on any woman at all, but because he could no longer do so with a woman who was past her childbearing years. His body was dead for some purposes, though not for all; otherwise he would have been a corpse fit for burial, not an elderly patriarch still living on the earth. Beyond this, the gift of fathering children that God gave him outlasted Sarah's death, since he went on to father several children by Keturah, and this settles the question: his body was not simply dead to the act of generation. But I find the other answer more persuasive, because a man in those days was not at his weakest at a hundred years old, even though men of our own time are, and can no longer father children on any woman. Those ancient men could, because they lived far longer and had stronger bodies than we do.

God appeared to Abraham at the plain of Mamre in the form of three men, who were undoubtedly angels, though some believe that one of them was Christ appearing visibly before His Incarnation. It is certainly within the power of the unchangeable, incorporeal, and invisible Deity to appear visibly to human beings whenever He pleases, without any alteration of Himself: not in His own form, but in some creature subject to Him. After all, what is there that He does not rule over? But if those who argue that one of the three was Christ base that claim on the fact that Abraham, upon seeing three men, addressed the Lord specifically, bowing to the ground at the door of his tent and saying, "Lord, if I have found favour in Thy sight," and so on, why do they not notice what happened when two angels came to destroy Sodom? Abraham spoke only to one of them who remained, calling him Lord and pleading with him not to destroy the righteous along with the wicked. Those same two were welcomed by Lot, who likewise called each of them Lord. Speaking to them both, he said, "My Lords, I pray you turn in unto your servant's house," and so on. Yet afterward we read that the angels took him, his wife, and his two daughters by the hand, the Lord being merciful to him, and they brought him out and set him outside the city. When they had done this, the angels said, "Escape for your life, look not behind you, neither tarry in all the plain, but escape to the mountains lest you be destroyed." And he said, "Not so, I pray you, my Lord," and so on. Afterward, the Lord, present in these two angels, answered him as though speaking with one voice, saying, "Behold, I have received your request," and so on. It is therefore far more likely that Abraham recognized the Lord to be present in all three, and Lot in the two, and that both men continually addressed them in the singular even when they still took them to be ordinary men. They welcomed them at first simply to offer food and shelter out of charity, as one would for strangers in need. Yet there was something unmistakably remarkable about these visitors, something that assured their hosts that the Lord was present in them, as He had been present in the prophets. This is why they sometimes addressed them as Lords in the plural, speaking to the men themselves, and sometimes as Lord in the singular, speaking to God within them. Scripture itself confirms that they were angels, not only in this passage in Genesis but also in the letter to the Hebrews, where the apostle, commending hospitality, says that "some have entertained angels unawares" (Heb 13:2). These three men, then, confirmed the promise concerning Isaac a second time and said to Abraham, "He shall be a great and mighty nation, and in him shall the nations of the earth be blessed." This is a clear prophecy of both the physical nation of the Israelites and the spiritual community of the righteous.

After this promise, Lot was delivered from Sodom, and the entire territory of that wicked city was consumed by a shower of fire from heaven, including all those regions where men had made a custom of the most degraded sexual perversions, treating them as acceptable under their own laws. Beyond this, their punishment served as a foreshadowing of the day of judgment. And what does the angels' command not to look back signify, if not that the regenerate must never return to their old ways, if they hope to escape the terror of the last judgment? Lot's wife, at the very moment she looked back, was fixed in place, turned into a pillar of salt, and so she stands as a warning to season the hearts of the faithful, urging them to take heed from her example. After this, Abraham did with his wife Sarah at Gerar, in King Abimelech's court, what he had done before in Egypt: her chastity was preserved in the same way, and she was returned to her husband. When the king rebuked Abraham for concealing that she was his wife, Abraham explained his fear and added, "She is truly my sister, for she is my father's daughter, though not my mother's, and she is also my wife." And so she was indeed both, and of such beauty that she was still lovely even at her age.

After this, Abraham received the son God had promised him through Sarah, and named him Isaac, meaning "Laughter." Abraham himself had laughed with joy and wonder when the promise was first made, and Sarah laughed too when the three men confirmed it again, caught between joy and doubt. The angel pointed out that her laughter lacked full faith, even if it was joyful. From this the child took his name, for this laughter was not a mark of reproach but a celebration of gladness, as Sarah herself made clear when Isaac was born and given his name. She said, "God has made me to laugh, and all who hear me will rejoice with me." Shortly after, the slave woman and her son were cast out of the house, signifying the old covenant, just as Sarah represents the new (as the Apostle says), along with that glorious City of God, the Jerusalem that is above.

To omit many details for the sake of brevity: Abraham was commanded, as a test, to go and sacrifice his beloved son Isaac. This was so that his true obedience might be displayed to all the world in the form God already knew it to take. This was a temptation blameless in itself (and there are such temptations), and it was to be received with gratitude, as one of God's trials of humanity. In general, the human mind can never truly know itself except by putting itself forward through trials and the hazards of experience; through their outcomes, it comes to understand its own condition. If, in that process, it acknowledges that God has enabled it, it becomes godly and is confirmed in the solidity of grace, guarded against all the hollow swellings of empty pride. Abraham would never have believed that God could take delight in the sacrifice of human flesh; and though God's thundering commands are to be obeyed rather than questioned, Abraham is nonetheless commended for holding firm to the faith and belief that his son Isaac would rise again after being sacrificed. For when Abraham refused to obey his wife in casting out the bondwoman and her son, God said to him: "In Isaac shall thy seed be called," and added: "Of the bondwoman's son will I make a great nation also, because he is thy seed." How, then, is Isaac alone called Abraham's seed, when God applied that same name to Ishmael? The apostle explains it in these words; that is,

"Those who are children of the flesh are not the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as the seed" (Rom 9:8). And so the sons of promise are called to be Abraham's seed in Isaac, meaning they are gathered into the Church through Christ's free grace and mercy. Holding fast to this promise, and seeing that it must be fulfilled in the very son God commanded him to kill, Abraham had no doubt that God could restore him after the sacrifice, since God had given him in the first place against all hope. This is how Scripture understands his faith and records it: "By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac: and he who had received the promises offered up his only-begotten son, of whom it was said, 'In Isaac shall your seed be called,' accounting that God was able to raise him even from the dead" (Heb 11:17-19). Then follows the phrase "from which he also received him in a figure," meaning in the same way that God received His own Son, of whom it is said, "Who spared not His own Son, but gave Him to die for us all" (Rom 8:32). And so Isaac carried the wood of the sacrifice to the place, just as Christ carried the cross. Finally, since Isaac was not actually to be killed and his father was commanded to hold back his hand, what was the ram that was offered as a full and typological sacrifice? It was the one Abraham first spotted caught in the bushes by its horns. What was this but a type of Jesus Christ, crowned with thorns before He was crucified? Notice the angel's words: "Abraham," says the Scripture, "lifted up his hand and took the knife to kill his son, but the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven saying, 'Abraham!' and he answered, 'Here, Lord.' Then he said: 'Lay not your hand upon the lad, neither do anything to him, for now I know you fear God, seeing that for My sake you have not spared your only son.'" "Now I know" means "now I have made known," for God knew it already. Then Abraham, having offered the ram in place of his son Isaac, called the place "The Lord hath seen," as it is said to this day: "In the mount the Lord appeared." And the angel of the Lord called to Abraham again out of heaven, saying: "By myself have I sworn, says the Lord, because you have done this thing and have not spared your only son for Me: surely I will bless you and multiply your seed as the stars of heaven or the sands of the sea, and your seed shall possess the gate of his enemies, and in your seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed My voice." This is the promise God confirmed with an oath concerning the calling of the Gentiles, made after the offering of the ram that prefigured Christ. God had promised many times before, but He had never sworn an oath. And what is God's oath but a confirmation of His promise and a rebuke to the faithless? After this, Sarah died at one hundred and twenty-seven years of age, in the hundred and thirty-seventh year of her husband's life, since he was ten years older than she, as he himself had indicated when Isaac was first promised, saying, "Shall I, who am a hundred years old, have a child, and shall Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear?" Then Abraham bought a piece of ground and buried his wife in it, and it was then, as Stephen says, that he was settled in that land, for it was then that he first became a property owner, specifically after the death of his father, who had died some two years before.

Isaac was forty years old when he married Rebecca, the granddaughter of his uncle Nahor, three years after his mother's death, at a time when his father was one hundred and forty years old. When Abraham sent his servant to Mesopotamia to bring her back, he said to him: "Put your hand under my thigh, and I will make you swear by the Lord God of heaven and the Lord of earth that you will not take a wife for my son Isaac from the daughters of Canaan." What does this mean, if not that the Lord God of heaven and the Lord of earth was to proceed from those very loins? These are no small prophecies and foreshadowings of what we now see fulfilled in Christ.

But what does it mean that Abraham married Keturah after Sarah's death? God forbid we should suspect any incontinence in a man so old, so holy, and so faithful. Did he desire more sons, when God had already promised "to make the seed of Isaac as the stars of heaven and the sands of the earth"? But if Hagar and Ishmael signified those belonging to the Old Testament (as the apostle teaches), why should Keturah and her sons not signify those belonging to the New Testament? Both women were called Abraham's wives, and both were called his concubines. Sarah, however, was never called his concubine, only his wife, as the text makes clear when describing how she gave Hagar to Abraham: "Then Sarah, Abraham's wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her maid, after Abraham had dwelt ten years in the land of Canaan, and gave her to her husband Abraham for his wife." Of Keturah, we read this account of his taking her after Sarah's death: "Now Abraham had taken him another wife called Keturah." Here you hear both women called his wives. Yet Scripture also calls them both his concubines, saying afterward, "Abraham gave all his goods unto Isaac," but to the sons of his concubines he gave gifts, and sent them away from Isaac his son (while he yet lived) eastward, into the east country. So the sons of the concubines receive some gifts, but none of them inherit the promised kingdom, neither the carnal Jews nor the heretics, for no one is an heir but Isaac: "For they which are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God: but the children of the promise are counted for the seed, of whom it was said: In Isaac shall thy seed be called" (Rom 9:8). I cannot see how Keturah, whom he married after Sarah's death, could be called his concubine except in this sense. But anyone who refuses to read these things this way should at least not slander Abraham. Consider this: perhaps God arranged this very marriage to show those future heretics who condemn second marriage that, in this great father of so many nations, marrying after the death of a first wife is no sin. Abraham died at the age of one hundred and seventy-five, and Isaac, whom he had fathered at the age of one hundred, was seventy-five years old at his death.

Now let us look at the history of the City of God after Abraham's death. From Isaac's birth to his sixtieth year, when his children were born, one thing stands out: he had prayed for his barren wife's fruitfulness, God heard him, opened her womb, and she conceived. The two twins struggled within her, and troubled by this, she asked the Lord what it meant. He answered: "Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be divided out of thy bowels, and the one shall be mightier than the other, and the elder shall serve the younger." The apostle Peter sees in this a profound mystery of grace: before they were born, before either had done good or evil, one was chosen and the other rejected. As for original sin, both were equally guilty; as for actual sin, both were equally innocent. My purpose in this work, however, restrains me from pursuing that point further, since we have treated it at length in other volumes. As for the saying "the elder shall serve the younger," everyone interprets this as the Jews serving the Christians. It may seem to have been fulfilled in Idumea, which descended from the elder twin, Esau or Edom (for he had two names), since that nation was later conquered by the Israelites, who descended from the younger. Yet that prophecy must carry a deeper meaning than this, and what else can that meaning be but its fulfillment in the Jews and the Christians?

Now Isaac received the same kind of instruction from God that his father had received many times before. The record reads: "There was a famine in the land, besides the first famine that was in Abraham's time: and Isaac went to Abimelech, king of the Philistines in Gerar. And the Lord appeared unto him and said: Go not down into Egypt, but abide in the land which I shall shew thee: dwell in this land, and I will be with thee and bless thee: for to thee and thy seed will I give this land, and I will establish mine oath which I sware to Abraham thy father: and will multiply thy seed as the stars of heaven, and give all this land unto thy seed: and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because thy father Abraham obeyed My voice, and kept My ordinances, My commandments, My statutes, and My laws." This patriarch had no wife or concubine beyond his first, and was content with the two sons God gave him at a single birth. He also feared for his wife's beauty among those strangers, and did as his father had done before him: calling her his sister rather than his wife. She was indeed his kinswoman on both sides, but when the strangers discovered she was his wife, they left her quietly with him. We should not, however, rank him above his father simply because he had only one wife. His father's obedience was without question the greater, so much so that God promises to bless Isaac for Abraham's sake: "In thy seed shall all the nations of the world be blessed, because thy father Abraham obeyed My voice," and so on. Again He says, "I am the God of Abraham thy father, fear not: for I am with thee, and have blessed thee, and will multiply thy seed for my servant Abraham's sake." This passage answers those who are carnally minded and think that lust drove Abraham to act as he did: he acted with no lust at all, but with a chaste intent. It also teaches us that we should not measure a person's worth by any single quality, but consider all their qualities together. A man may surpass another in one virtue while falling short in another that is equally good. And while it is true that celibacy is better than marriage, a faithful married man is better than a celibate unbeliever, since such a person deserves no praise for his celibacy if he does not believe, but rather deserves strong criticism for his unbelief precisely because he is celibate. Granting that both are good, a married man of great faith and obedience in Jesus Christ is better than a celibate man with less of those qualities. But if they are equal in faith and obedience, who would question that the celibate man is the more excellent?

So Isaac's two sons, Esau and Jacob, were raised together. The younger obtained the elder's birthright through a bargain struck over lentils and pottage that Jacob had prepared and Esau desperately craved, so Esau sold his birthright for a portion of it and sealed the deal with an oath. Here we can learn that it is not the kind of food that harms a person, but the consuming desire for it. To continue: Isaac grows old, and his sight fails him. He wants to bless his elder son, but not recognizing who stands before him, he blesses the younger instead, who had imitated his brother's rough skin by draping goatskins over his neck and hands so his father could feel them. Now, lest anyone think this was fraudulent deception on Jacob's part, Scripture says beforehand: "Esau was a cunning hunter, and lived in the fields, but Jacob was a simple plain man, and kept at home." The Greek word used is *ἄπλαστος*, meaning without pretense or deceit. What, then, was the deception of this straightforward man in obtaining the blessing? What can the apparent guile of a guileless, honest soul be in such a case, if not a profound mystery of truth? And what was the blessing itself? "Behold," says Isaac, "the smell of my son is as the smell of a field which the Lord hath blessed; God give thee therefore of the dew of heaven and the fatness of earth and plenty of corn and wine: let the nations be thy servants, and princes bow down unto thee, be lord over thy brethren, and let thy mother's children honor thee: cursed be he that curseth thee, and blessed be he that blesseth thee." This blessing of Jacob, then, is the proclamation of Christ to all nations. That is the whole point: in Isaac we have the law and the prophets, and through the mouths of the Jews Christ is blessed, unknown to them because they do not truly know Him. The fragrance of His name fills the world like a field; the dew of heaven is His divine teaching; the fertile earth is the faithful Church; the abundance of corn and wine is the multitude grafted into Christ through the sacraments of His body and blood. Nations serve Him and princes adore Him. He is Lord over His brethren, for His people rule over the Jews. The sons of His father, that is, Abraham's sons in faith, honor Him, for He is Abraham's son in the flesh. "Cursed be he that curseth him, and blessed be he that blesseth him": Christ, I mean, our Savior, is truly blessed when He is rightly proclaimed by the prophets, even by those Jews who marvel at Him; and He is still blessed by others among them who, though mistaken, continue to await His coming. Then the elder son comes for the promised blessing, and Isaac is afraid, realizing he has blessed one son in place of the other. He is astonished, asks who it was, yet raises no complaint about the deception. Instead, with the mystery of it opened in his heart, he holds back his distress and confirms the blessing. "Who was it then," he says, "that hunted and took venison for me, and I have eaten of it all before thou camest, and I have blessed him, yea and he shall be blessed?" Who would not have expected a curse here rather than a confirmation, unless his mind had been changed by divine inspiration? These were real events, yet all prophetic; earthly deeds, yet all directed from heaven; done by men, yet all for God. Whole volumes could not contain all the mysteries they hold, but we must restrain ourselves, for the progress of this work calls us on to other matters.

Jacob's parents sent him to Mesopotamia to find a wife. His father dismissed him with these words: "You shall take no wife from the daughters of Canaan. Arise, go to Mesopotamia, to the house of Bethuel your mother's father, and take a wife from the daughters of Laban, your mother's brother. May God bless you, increase you, and multiply you, so that you become a multitude of people, and may He give the blessing of Abraham to you and to your descendants after you, that you may inherit the land where you now live as a stranger, the land God gave to Abraham." Here we see Jacob, one half of Isaac's seed, separated from Esau, the other half. When it was said, "In Isaac shall your seed be called," meaning the seed belonging to God's holy city, Abraham's other seed (the son of the slave woman) was separated from this line, just as Keturah's descendants would later be as well. But now a question had arisen about Isaac's two sons: did the blessing belong to one of them, or to both? And if to only one, which one? Isaac resolved this when he said, "That you may become a multitude of people, and that God give the blessing of Abraham to you," meaning to Jacob. As Jacob traveled on toward Mesopotamia, he had a vision in a dream, recorded as follows: "And Jacob departed from Beersheba, and came to Haran: and he came to a certain place and tarried there all the night, because the sun was down, and he took of the stones of the place, and laid under his head, and slept. And he dreamed, and behold a ladder, and the top of it reached up to heaven, and lo the angels of God ascended and descended by it, and the Lord stood above it and said: I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac, fear not: the land on which thou sleepest, will I give thee and thy seed, and thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread over the sea, the east, the north, and the south. And lo, I am with thee and will keep thee wheresoever thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land, for I will not forsake thee, until I have performed that which I promised unto thee." And Jacob woke from his sleep and said, "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not," and he was afraid and said, "How dreadful is this place! Surely this is none other but the house of God and the gate of heaven." He rose up, took the stone he had laid under his head, set it up as a memorial, poured oil on the top of it, and called that place the house of God. This was prophetic: he did not commit idolatry by pouring oil on the stone, nor did he make it a god, worship it, or sacrifice to it. Rather, because the name of Christ was to come from *Chrisma*, meaning anointing, this act carried a deeply significant mystery. As for the ladder, our Savior himself refers to it in the Gospel. Having said of Nathanael, "Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile" (because Israel, that is Jacob, had seen this very vision), he adds, "Verily, verily I say unto you, hereafter ye shall see heaven open and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man." But to continue. Jacob went to Mesopotamia to seek a wife, and ended up with four women, by whom he fathered twelve sons and one daughter, without pursuing any of them out of lust, as Scripture makes clear. He had come for one woman, and when he was deceived into taking another in her place, he refused to send away the one he had unknowingly slept with, not wanting to make her an object of ridicule. Since the law at that time did not prohibit a man from having multiple wives for the sake of increasing his family, he also took the woman he had originally promised to marry. She was barren, and so she gave him her maidservant to bear children on her behalf, just as her sister had done, though her sister was not barren and simply wanted more children. Jacob, however, desired only one wife. He took the others solely to build up his family line, and only within the bonds of marriage. He would not have done even this had his wives not pressed him to it, since they had lawful claim over his body as his wives. By these four women, Jacob fathered twelve sons and one daughter. Then came the path into Egypt, through his son Joseph, whom his brothers envied and sold into slavery there, and who rose to great honor in that land.

Jacob was also called Israel (as I mentioned earlier), and his descendants carried that name after him. The angel who wrestled with him as he returned from Mesopotamia gave him this name, and that angel was a clear type of Christ. Jacob prevailed against the angel, but only because the angel allowed it, in order to enact this mystery: what it signifies is the passion of Christ, in which the Jews appeared to prevail against Him. And yet Jacob received a blessing from the very one he had overcome, and that blessing took the form of a new name. "Israel" means "seeing God," which will come to pass at the end of the world. The angel touched Jacob on the breadth of his thigh as Jacob prevailed, and Jacob walked away with a limp. So the blessed and the lame were, in a sense, one and the same Jacob: blessed in his faithful descendants, and lame in the unfaithful. The breadth of his thigh represents the multitude of his offspring, "of which the greatest part," as the prophet says, "have halted in their ways."

The tradition holds that seventy-five souls accompanied Jacob into Egypt, counting himself, his sons, his daughter, and his granddaughter. But if you look carefully, you will find that his family was not nearly that large when he actually arrived in Egypt. The count includes Joseph's great-grandchildren, who could not possibly have been there at the time. Jacob was a hundred and forty years old when he entered Egypt, and Joseph was thirty-nine. Since Joseph had only married at thirty, how could his sons have had children of their own within those nine years? Ephraim and Manasseh, Joseph's two sons, were only nine years old at the time of Jacob's migration. How, then, could their children and grandchildren be counted among the seventy-five who made that journey? Yet the list includes Machir, the son of Manasseh; Gilead, the son of Machir; Shuthelah, the son of Ephraim; and Ezer, the son of Shuthelah and great-grandson of Joseph. None of these could have been present, since Jacob arrived to find that Joseph's own children, the fathers and grandfathers of those four, were still nine-year-old boys. The account of Jacob's departure with seventy-five souls does not describe a single day or even a single year; it encompasses the entire remaining span of Joseph's life, during which he settled his family in Egypt. Scripture itself says: "Joseph dwelt in Egypt, and his brethren with him, a hundred years, and Joseph saw Ephraim's children even run to the third generation" (Gen 50:22-23), meaning he lived to see the birth of Ephraim's grandchild, making Joseph that child's great-grandfather. Scripture then continues: the sons of Machir, the son of Manasseh, were brought up on Joseph's knees. This refers to Gilead, the grandchild of Manasseh. Scripture speaks in the plural here, just as it refers to Jacob's one daughter as "daughters," in the same way that Latin speakers use the word *liberi* (children) even for an only child. Given that Joseph was blessed enough to see the fourth generation after him, we cannot assume all those descendants had already been born when he was thirty-nine and his father first came to Egypt. This is what has misled careless readers, because the text says: "These are the names of the children of Israel which came into Egypt with Jacob their father." The phrase is used because the seventy-five are counted together with him, not because every one of them literally traveled with him. The full number belongs to the entire period of migration and settlement in Egypt, spanning the whole of Joseph's life, through whose influence the family came to be established there.

If we trace the physical lineage of Christ from Abraham (for the benefit of the City of God, still a pilgrim on earth), the line runs through Isaac, then through Jacob or Israel (Esau or Edom being passed over), and from Israel through Judah (all the other tribes set aside), for it was from Judah's tribe that Christ came. This is why, when Israel lay dying in Egypt and blessed his sons, he gave Judah this prophetic blessing: "Judah, thy brethren shall praise thee: thine hand shall be on the neck of thine enemies: thy father's sons shall adore thee. As a lion's whelp (Judah) shalt thou come up from the spoil, my son. He shall lie down and sleep as a lion, or a lion's whelp; who shall rouse him? The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a law-giver from between his feet, until Shiloh come, and the people be gathered unto him. He shall bind his foal unto the vine, and his ass's foal unto the choice vine: he shall wash his robe in wine, and his garment in the blood of the grape, his eyes shall be red with wine, and his teeth white with milk." I have explained these words against Faustus the Manichee, as fully as the prophecy seems to require. The word "sleep" foreshadows Christ's death, not as something forced upon Him, but as something He chose, just as the lion chooses to lie down: a power He openly claims in the Gospel: "I have power to lay down My life, and power to take it again: no man taketh it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself," and so on. So the lion roared, and so fulfilled what had been spoken. The question "Who shall rouse him?" points to the resurrection, for no one could raise Him but He Himself, who said of His body: "Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up again." The manner of His death on the high cross is suggested in the phrase "shalt thou come up," while the words "He shall lie down and sleep" correspond to "He bowed down His head and gave up the ghost." Or it may refer to the tomb where He slept, from which no one else could raise Him as the prophets and He Himself had raised others, but from which He rose as if waking from sleep. His robe, washed in wine (that is, cleansed from sin in His blood, pointing to the sacrament of baptism, as the added phrase "and His garment in the blood of the grape" makes clear), is nothing other than the Church. His "eyes red with wine" are His spiritual children, made drunk with her cup, as the Psalmist says: "My cup runneth over." His teeth, whiter than milk, are His nourishing words, by which He feeds His weakest ones as with milk. He is the one in whom all the promises made to Judah were stored up, and until He came, there was never a lack of kings over Israel from the line of Judah. And to Him the peoples will be gathered: a truth easier to see than to put into words.

Just as Esau and Jacob, Isaac's two sons, prefigured the two peoples of Jews and Christians (though in the flesh, the Idumeans descended from Esau, not the Jews, and the Christians came not from Jacob but rather the Jews, since that is how we must understand the words, "The elder must serve the younger"), so too with Joseph's two sons: the elder prefigured the Jews and the younger the Christians. When Jacob blessed them, he laid his right hand on the younger, who stood at his left, and his left hand on the elder, who stood at his right. This troubled their father, who told Jacob about it and tried to get him to correct what seemed like a mistake, pointing out which boy was the elder. But Jacob refused to switch his hands, saying, "I know, my son, I know very well: he shall also be a great people; but his younger brother shall be greater than he, and his seed shall fill the nations." Here we have two promises: a people for one, and a fullness of nations for the other. What stronger proof could we need to establish that the Israelites and all the rest of the world are contained in Abraham's seed, the first in the flesh and the latter in the spirit?

Jacob and Joseph being dead, the Israelites spent the remaining hundred and forty-four years before their departure from Egypt multiplying at a remarkable rate, even as the Egyptians oppressed them severely and at one point ordered the killing of all their male children out of fear at their extraordinary growth. Moses, however, was spared from that slaughter and raised in the royal court by Pharaoh's daughter (Pharaoh being the title of the Egyptian kings), for God had great purposes in store for him. He grew into a man of such stature that he was deemed fit to lead his people out of that crushing bondage, or rather, God accomplished it through him, in fulfillment of His promise to Abraham. Moses first fled to Midian after killing an Egyptian in defense of an Israelite, and when he returned, filled with God's Spirit, he defeated Pharaoh's enchanters at every turn and brought ten great plagues on Egypt because Pharaoh refused to let Israel go: the water turned to blood, then came the frogs and lice, the flies, the murrain of cattle, the boils and sores, the hail, the locusts, the darkness, and finally the death of every firstborn. At last, after all the suffering Egypt had endured, the Israelites were allowed to leave, though the Egyptians pursued them again. The people crossed the Red Sea on dry ground and left the entire Egyptian army drowned in its depths: the sea parted before the Israelites, then closed behind them, sweeping back over their pursuers and swallowing them whole.

For forty years after that, Israel wandered in the desert under Moses, and there they had the tabernacle of testimony, where God was worshipped through sacrifices that were all figures pointing to future realities. The law was given with terrifying ceremony on Mount Sinai, where the fearsome voices and thunders were unmistakable proof of God's presence. This happened shortly after their departure from Egypt, and there in the wilderness they celebrated their Passover fifty days later, offering a lamb as the true type of Christ's passing to His Father through His passion in this world. The Hebrew word "pascha" means a passing over, and so it was that fifty days after the opening of the New Testament and the offering of Christ our Passover, the Holy Spirit descended from heaven (He whom the Scriptures call the Finger of God) to renew in our hearts the memory of that first miraculous prefiguration, because the law written on the tablets is said to have been written by the finger of God. When Moses died, Joshua took charge of the people, led them into the promised land, and divided it among them. Through these two great commanders, remarkable battles were won and brought to a happy conclusion, with God Himself declaring that it was the sins of the defeated, not the merits of the victors, that had decided those conquests.

After these two, the promised land was governed by judges, so that Abraham's descendants might see the first promise fulfilled concerning the land of Canaan, even if not yet the promise concerning all the nations of the earth. That fulfillment was reserved for the coming of Christ in the flesh and the faith of the gospel, not the precepts of the law, a truth hinted at by the fact that it was not Moses, who received the law, but Joshua (whose name God also changed) who led the people into the promised land. During the time of the judges, the people's fortunes in war rose and fell according to whether they obeyed or offended God. Moving on to the kings: Saul was Israel's first king, but he proved a reprobate, died on the battlefield, and his entire line was stripped of any right to succession. David was then enthroned, and it is as David's son that our Savior is most particularly named. In David there is, as it were, a turning point from which the people of God flow forward, and the origin of that people, in its youthful age, runs from Abraham to David. It is no oversight that Matthew the Evangelist counts the generations in such a way as to place fourteen between Abraham and David, for a man is capable of fathering children in his youth, and so Matthew begins his genealogy with Abraham, who upon the changing of his name was made the father of many nations. Before Abraham, the Church of God was in its infancy, so to speak, from Noah onward; and it was in that period that the first language, Hebrew, came into use. For it is from the end of infancy that a person begins to speak, the very word "infant" deriving from the Latin for "not speaking" (*à non fando*), and each person forgets that age of his life as completely as the world itself was wiped away by the flood. Who, after all, can remember his own infancy?

In this account of the progress of the City of God, then, as the previous book covered its first age, let this one cover the second and the third: the age when the yoke of the law was laid on their necks, the abundance of sin became apparent, and earthly kingship began, all of it foreshadowed by "the heifer, the goat, and the ram of three years old," among whom there were never lacking some faithful souls, as "the turtle-dove and the pigeon" signified.