Three men visit Abraham in the middle of the day. Abraham immediately recognizes one of them as Lord. Does Abraham believe that God is standing before him? Either way, Abraham ran to bow down to the one he called Lord and called himself a servant.
Genesis 18 is the first time we see God appearing to Abraham in human form. It’s called a theophany, which is a temporal and spatial manifestation of God in tangible form. Temporal means being in time, and spatial means occupying space. On the first day of creation, when God said, ‘Let there be light,’ I mentioned that God put Himself inside of time. That is how God can appear to Abraham temporally. The Messiah told the Samaritan woman that God is Spirit, and Paul told the Colossians that the Messiah was the visible image of the invisible God. How is it that Abraham can see Him spatially? When we get to Moses, you’ll see that God says that no one can look on Him and live. All of God’s glory is too much for sinful humans to endure. So God chose a human form as a means to express Himself to Abraham. And Abraham was able to recognize that form as the one he calls Lord.
On a side note, chapter 17 ends with the circumcision of Abraham and all the males in his household. Chapter 18 begins with Abraham sitting at the door of his tent at midday. Is Abraham recovering from the circumcision, or has some time passed? It is also interesting that God comes to visit Abraham personally after his circumcision. Is there any significance in that?
Abraham encourages the visitors to stay for some food and has a young calf butchered for a meal. After dinner, God tells Abraham that He will return in a year and Sarah will have a son. Sarah laughs. The reason seems plausible enough, but it is also perplexing.
Sarah says that she and Abraham are old and advanced in years. And her menstruations had ceased. The menstruation situation is understandable, but the problem of being old doesn’t make sense. Regardless of the discrepancy of years between the LXX and the Masoretic, both texts say that Abraham’s father was 70 when he had his first son. We did the math to show that Terah was 130 when Abraham was born. Why would Abraham’s 100 years be considered old? I think the skepticism is twofold.
The age difference between Sarah and Abraham is ten years. Throughout history, we see that men typically took much younger wives for themselves. Sarah is closer in age to her husband. Sarah may be thinking more about her advanced age and just including Abraham in her doubt. There is no way of knowing the age of the oldest woman to give birth. Maybe 90 is too old for a woman to have a child at that time in history. But secondly, Sarah may be thinking about her barrenness. She and Abraham have been together for a long time and she remains without child. Her doubt is based on experience. She even says in verse 12, ‘Well, it has not yet happened to me up to now.” And again she mentions that Abraham is old.
But Abraham’s age isn’t the problem, as we’ll see in next week’s Torah portion. After the death of Sarah, Abraham takes a concubine that gives him six children, and he lived to be 175 years old.