Gen 17:17 in the KJV reads:
Then Abraham fell
upon his face, and laughed, and said in his heart, Shall a child be born unto
him that is an hundred years old? And shall Sarah, that is ninety years old;
bear?
The JST reads differently. In the 1867 Inspired Version, we read:
Then Abraham fell on
his face and rejoiced, and said in his heart, There shall a child be born unto
him that is an hundred years old, and Sarah that is ninety years old shall
bear. (Gen 17:23 | 1867 Inspired Version)
Old Testament Manuscript 1, page 42 reads:
Then Abraham fell on his face and rejoiced and said in his heart there shall a child be born unto him that is an Hundred years old
Old Testament Manuscript, page 44 reads:
Then abraham fell on his face And rejoiced, & said in his heart[;]<,> there shall a child be born unto him that is an hundred years old.
Joseph Smith interpreted
this as a positive, not negative, action on behalf of Abraham. Commenting on
this, Ruth Sheridan wrote:
Abraham’s laughter (Gen. 17.17)
At the age of ninety-nine, God ‘appears’ to Abraham and
reveals the covenant of circumcision (Gen. 17.1-14). All of Abraham’s (male)
‘seed’ are henceforth to be circumcised (17.11-12), and even Abraham’s
household slaves are to be circumcised too (17.13). God’s self-disclosure
prefaces the communication of the covenant and its promise: ‘I am El Shaddai,
walk before me and become whole’ (MT: לפני והיה תמים אני־אל שׁדי התהלך /LXX: Ἐγώ
εἰμι ὁ θεός σου εὐαρέστει ἐναντίον ἐμοῦ καὶ γίνου ἄμεμπτος). God promises to
‘make [Abraham] great’ – that is, to multiply his descendants (17.2). Abraham’s
response to God’s promise is to fall upon his face in evident reverence (17.3).
God also promises that Abraham’s wife Sarai – whose name is changed to Sarah
(17.15) – will be blessed with a son; she shall give rise to nations and kings
(17.16). At this, Abraham falls on his face a second time and laughs (MT: ויצחק
/ἐγέλασεν LXX 17.17a). Abraham’s ensuing monologue, however, suggests that this
strong response is the product of incredulity: ‘Can a child be born to a man
who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?’
(17.17b). Furthermore, Abraham takes God’s promise to mean that his son by
Sarah will replace Ishmael, as he cries out, ‘O that Ishmael might live in your
sight!’ (17.18). God replies that Sarah will bear a son, whom Abraham will call
Isaac (Hb lit. ‘he laughs’: יצחק ), and that God’s covenant will be established
through him, not Ishmael (17.19). Nevertheless, Ishmael will also be blessed
and made great (17.20).
It is not clear whether Abraham’s ‘laughter’ in ch. 17 v.
17 indicates faithless incredulity. One can be stunned into disbelief by
the prospect of unexpectedly good news, and laughter in these cases can be
understood as a natural response demonstrating mixed feelings: happiness, but
uncertainty over whether the good news would truly come to pass. That God
‘names’ Abraham’s yet-to-be-born son in this text is curious: it is only after
Abraham ‘laughs’ that God finds it appropriate to name Isaac after his father’s
reaction. This might suggest that God finds nothing inappropriate or condemnatory
in Abraham’s apparent incredulity. Abraham’s laughter could indeed be a sign of
positive emotion. But this is complicated by the fact that Abraham’s distress
over Ishmael’s fate follows so quickly on from his laughter over the coming
birth of Isaac (17.18).
The issue is hardly clarified by subsequent references to
Sarah’s ‘laughter’ in the narrative. When the three messengers visit Abraham
and Sarah at Mamre, and Sarah overhears their news that she will bear a son,
she ‘laughed to herself ’ ( /שׂרה בקרב ותצחק LXX: ἐγέλασεν δὲ Σαρρα ἐν ἑαυτῇ)
saying, ‘After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?’
(Gen. 18.12). The narrator also explains that Abraham and Sarah are beyond the
fertile years (18.11). This time, Yhwh interprets Sarah’s laughter as faithless
incredulity, asking Abraham why she laughed when ‘nothing is too wonderful for
the Lord’ (18.13-14). Sarah is afraid ( יראה ; LXX: ἐφοβήθη) and denies that
she laughed, but Yhwh replies ominously, ‘Oh yes, you did laugh’ (18.15).
However, when Isaac is born, and Abraham is 100 years old (Gen. 21.1-5), Sarah
responds by saying ‘God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will
laugh with me’ (21.6). Sarah expresses her expectation that others will be
astounded and incredulous by the birth: ‘Who would ever have said to Abraham
that Sarah would nurse children?’ (21.7). But Sarah’s speech, in this case,
evidently associates laughter with joy, and she perceives her ‘laughter’ – like
her son – as a gift from God. So, Genesis 21 contains positive connotations for
Sarah’s ‘laughter’, unlike Gen. 18.14-15. From a narrativecritical perspective
though, this diversity does open the possibility that, globally speaking,
Abraham and Sarah’s ‘laughter’ over Isaac’s conception and birth is not uniformly
perceived as negative. This nuance could have been what led later interpreters
of the texts to read Abraham’s ‘laughter’ in Gen. 17.17 as an instance of great
joy. (Ruth Sheridan, The Figure of Abraham in John 8: Text and Intertext [Library
of New Testament Studies 619; T&T Clark, 2020], 321-22)
Sheridan also noted that:
. . . The Church Fathers sometimes thought differently.
For example, Jerome interpreted Gen. 17.17 to refute the Pelagian ideas of
human sinlessness – even a holy man such as Abraham could sin, and did so when
he laughed at God (Dialogue against the Pelagians 3.2) . . . (Ibid,
321-22 n. 15)
Another scholar who believes Gen 17:17 portrays Abraham in a positive,
not negative light is Speiser:
17. he smiled.
Heb. way-yiṣḥaq anticipates, of
course, the personal name Isaac (Yiṣḥaq).
P does this here, J offers a variant explanation in 18:12,
and E still another in 21:6. Each
allusion operates with the verb ṣḥq,
which covers a wide range of meanings, including “to play, be amused,” and
notably also “to rejoice over, smile on (a newborn child).” A Hurro-Hittite
tale describes the father (Appu) as placing his newborn son on his knees and
rejoicing over him (ZA 49 [1956], 220, line 5). Such acts were often the basis
for naming the child accordingly. The shortened form Isaac (with the subject
left out) undoubtedly reflects some such symbolic gesture: (X) rejoiced over,
smiled on (the child).
To judge from the three separate explanations in our
documentary sources, this last application was no longer familiar at the time
of the writing, even as far back as the time of J. Tradition was thus reduced to speculations based on the later
connotations of the verb. The meaning chosen varied with the source and the
context. In the earthy treatment by J,
an incredulous Sarah could well be shown as laughing bitterly to herself
(18:12). But the concept of Abraham in a derisive attitude toward God would be
decidedly out of keeping with P’s
character. The above translation, therefore, should come close to the spirit of
the received text, though not the original use of the pertinent verb. (E.
A. Speiser, Genesis: Introduction, Translation, and Notes [AYB 1; New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2008], 125)
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