Abraham’s Seed, the Messiah
Paul’s messianism
is thoroughgoing and central to his self-understanding as a herald of the good
news and to his understanding of what Israel’s God is now doing to redeem the
world, gentiles included. But Paul situates this messianism within a larger
context of God’s dealings with Israel’s primordial ancestor, Abraham. In his
letter to the Galatians, Paul makes a claim that has frustrated or flummoxed
many of his readers (3:16). He states that God made a series of promises to
both Abraham and Abraham’s seed (Greek: sperma). (Similar claims can be
found in Rom. 4.) He then makes what looks very much like a specious grammatical
argument, noting that the Jewish scriptures say “seed” (sperma), not “seeds”
(spermata). On the basis of the singular form of the noun, Paul claims
that Abraham’s seed refers not to all of Abraham’s offspring but to one
particular individual. Who? The Messiah. For Paul, Jesus is Abraham’s seed. Consequently,
the promises that God gave to Abraham centuries earlier are now coming to fulfillment
in relation to Jesus the Messiah.
Now it’s
true that the Greek of Genesis refers to Abraham’s sperma, a
grammatically singular noun (the Hebrew zera is also singular), but just
as with the English word seed, sperma frequently functions as a
collective singular. (We don’t know for certain which passage from the Abraham
narrative Paul has in mind since the phrase “to your seed” [always sperma
and never spermata] occurs several times: Gen. 12:7; 13:15; 15:18; 17:8;
22:18]) We all know that if someone says that they scattered seed onto a field,
this does not mean they threw only a single seed onto the field. Out of the
almost 250 times that the Septuagint uses the word sperma, only five
times does it use the grammatically plural form spermata. (Lev. 26:16; 1
Sam. 8:15; Ps. 125:6; Isa. 61:11; 4 Macc. 18:1) Instead, it frequently uses the
singular form, but it refers to numerous individual seeds, such as in the creation
narrative of Genesis 1, where God creates seed-bearing plants (1:11-12). So
Paul’s claim that the singular form must mean one singular offspring is shaky.
Numerous
interpreters have tried to explain how Paul came to this conclusion. Most
rightly point to the use of seed language in God’s words to King David: “I will
raise up your seed [sperma] after you, who shall come out of your inwards,
and I will establish his kingdom” (2 Sam. 7:12). But one relatively common word
(sperma) is an admittedly slim link between the Abraham narrative and
King’s David seed. Strengthening this connection, Novenson points to the fact
that both 2 Samuel 7:12 and Genesis 17:7 use the language of seed in
connection with related verbs: 2 Samuel uses anistēmi, while Genesis 17
uses histēmi as well as the phrase “after you” (meta sou). (Novenson,
Christ among the Messiahs, 141-42) I have elsewhere sought to connect 2
Samuel 7:12 to yet another passage in the Abraham narrative, Genesis 15:4,
since the Hebrew both passages refer to seed that comes forth from David’s and
Abraham’s inwards. (See Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem,
124-27)
Whatever
one thinks of his interpretative moves here, Paul’s point is that the promises
that God made to Abraham were also promises he made to the Messiah promises of
a blessing (Gen. 12:2-3; Gal. 3:14), promises of territory (Gen. 12:7; 13:15;
17:8; Rom. 4:13), promises of a covenant (Gen. 17:7; Gal. 3:17), promises of a
kingdom (Gen. 17:6, 16; cf. Eph 5:5; Col. 1:13), promises of, in short,
inheritance (Gen. 15:4; Gal. 3:18). Anyone who wants to inherit all these
promises must somehow become connected to both Abraham and the Messiah. What,
then, are gentiles to do? After all, they are not genealogically descended from
Abraham. Can they somehow forge a new connection to Abraham and the Messiah to
access these promises? If so, how? (Matthew Thiessen, A Jewish Paul: The
Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2023],
78-80)
