The promise is there at the beginning, from one nation to an abstract and numberless blessing upon all mankind. And when the promise is made, it can hardly even be conceptualized. But we see how, impossibly, the following grows from one man to a family, from a family to a clan, from a clan to a tribe, from a tribe to a nation, from a nation to a persistent national identity and tradition that can be displaced and scattered and wiped out in places but persists and returns and survives is reborn, and then to something else entirely.
It becomes an inheritance that transcends race and tradition and becomes part of a universally available category of identity that gathers nations, races, divisions of class and social station and gender and age and sweeps them all up into its unity. A unity that started with a promise made to a single man.
The promises made to Abraham, whatever he imagined them to be, however long he saw as them taking to play out, were kept. His people were preserved, made ineradicable from the Earth, the inheritors of his legacy made as numerous as the stars. Take that to mean whatever you want from a historical and critical perspective, the promises of God to Abraham came true.
So we have here two curious facts. First that, rather than following the mode of being at the time, the conception of God being revealed in the Bible was always instead running just ahead of it. Second, that this process of progressive revelation did, in fact, fulfill its ultimate stated aim in a way that makes sense looking backward in a way it never could have looking forward and trying to guess what was ahead and how it would come to be. Hindsight and perspective are, of course, useful tricks. But viewing great journeys through their lens can often obscure the actual process of the journey as it was made by those who made it. They did not know how the promised destination would be reached.
I suppose one question that must be asked is, if God is not personal but rather an archetypal reality, and his revelation is actually the story of the evolution of our own awakening to those archetypal truths of species knowledge within us, how did God, or Abraham, know that his promises would come true, considering how it took so much time and effort and teaching and mistakes and explication and dramatization and expansion and elaboration for them to come to fruition?
On the other hand, if God is personal, why did it take so long, and why was it so difficult? Was it really so hard to bring mankind along? Was there really so much ground to cover, such a depth to raise us up from, that it had to grow into us so slowly? Or is it more plausible to suppose that God is not personal, but is an ultimate ideal, whose knwoldge is present in us through our archetypal understanding of the world and ourselves and the deep structured that underly our mode of being?
I suppose the answer the Bible provides is its own telling. And according to its story, the followers of God were not the ideal, mythological figures of other religions, who were given gifts by the Gods and were elevated to power and greatness and perfection. Instead, they were very human figures who could barely navigate the most basic burdens of instruction placed upon them at any level of development sufficiently to proceed to the next rung of maturity that would enable them to confront the next lesson.
God seems to have gradually raising his people up like children, gradually adding to the burden of their responsibility, gradually widening their scope as they grew with each lesson sufficiently to be able to take on the next. Slowly he helps them take on more and more territory, inherit more and more of the promise. And at every step there is always a catastrophe waiting to happen, and a promise almost unfulfilled.
That, I suppose, is the best Biblical answer to such a hard question. If God really was God, and was personal, and really was moving his people along and revealing himself rather than being gradually revealed or uncovered by his people like a kind of archeology of the soul, uncovering the hidden depths of the species knowledge (and even if we accept that view then there are problems such as how do we know that that is the species truth, and not something else that’s quite contradictory, and why was it this strange, small people and how did they survive all that the world has tried to do to them?), why did it take so long and involve so much complication, and track so closely to the mode of being at the time (relatively) if God is God.
One answer to one part of that conundrum might be to question, how close really was their representation of God to that of the current mode of being and what could be expected to be said, based on how the world and its universal structures seemed?
But I think the primary answer of the Bible to this problem is the story of the people. If you accept as a starting point what the project of God is supposed to be, beginning with Abraham, and you accept the conditions under which this project was begun, in a very difficult and brutal time of earliest recorded history. And you accept that Abraham and his descendents aren’t mythological figures but actual historical people who had to go through all this process with little idea of where it was leading, mostly concerned with how they were simply going to survive the next few years, find food, find safety, and produce the next generation. And you accept that God is putting limits on himself in two keys ways.
First, that he won’t violate free will. He comes to Abraham and asks him to make a fairly one sided deal that fairly nearly strips him of his power in the contract. Second, that he has to work with and within the materials available to him, the actual children of Abraham and the actual times and spaces they live in, in such a way that develops them into who he wants them to be without cheating and simply making them so (and that’s a problem any good parent faces, if you do everything for your kids and don’t force them to grow into you and instead try to do the work for them, they will never develop).
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