After these things — in the fourth year of this week [1964], on the first of the third month — the word of the Lord came to Abram in a dream: ‘Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your protector; your reward will be very large’.

He said: ‘Lord, Lord, what are you going to give me when I go on being childless. The son of Maseq — the son of my maid servant — that is Damascene Eliezer — will be my heir. You have given me no descendants. Give me descendants’.

He said to him: ‘This one will not be your heir but rather someone who will come out of your loins will be your heir’.

He brought him outside and said to him: ‘Look at the sky and count the stars, if you can count them’.

When he had looked at the sky and seen the stars, he said to him: ‘Your descendants will be like this’.

He believed the Lord, and it was credited to him as something righteous.

He said to him: ‘I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you the land of the Canaanites to occupy forever and to become God for you and your descendants after you’.

He said: ‘Lord, Lord, how will I know that I will inherit (it)’?

He said to him: ‘Get for me a three-year-old calf, a three-year-old goat, a threeyear- old sheep, a turtledove, and a dove’.

He got all of these in the middle of the month. He was living at the oak of Mamre which is near Hebron.

He built an altar there and sacrificed all of these. He poured out their blood on the altar and divided them in the middle. He put them opposite one another, but the birds he did not divide.

Birds kept coming down on what was spread out, but Abram kept preventing them and not allowing the birds to touch them.

At sunset, a terror fell on Abram; indeed a great, dark fear fell on him. It was said to Abram: ‘Know for a fact that your descendants will be aliens in a foreign land. They will enslave them and oppress them for 400 years.

But I will judge the nation whom they serve. Afterwards, they will leave from there with many possessions.

But you will go peacefully to your fathers and be buried at a ripe old age.

In the fourth generation they will return to this place because until now the sins of the Amorites have not been completed’.

When he awakened and got up, the sun had set. There was a flame and an oven was smoking. Fiery flames passed between what was spread out.

On that day the Lord concluded a covenant with Abram with these words: ‘To your descendants I will give this land from the river of Egypt as far as the great river, the Euphrates River: the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Phakorites, the Hivites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites’.

It passed (along), and Abram offered what had been spread out, the birds, their (cereal) offering, and their libation. The fire devoured them.

During this night we concluded a covenant with Abram like the covenant which we concluded during this month with Noah. Abram renewed the festival and the ordinance for himself forever.

Abram was very happy and told all these things to his wife Sarai. He believed that he would have descendants, but she continued not to have a child.

Sarai advised her husband Abram and said to him: ‘Go in to my Egyptian slave-girl Hagar; perhaps I will build up descendants for you from her’.

Abram listened to his wife Sarai’s suggestion and said to her: ‘Do (as you suggest)’. So Sarai took her Egyptian slave-girl Hagar, and gave her to her husband Abram to be his wife.

He went in to her, she became pregnant, and gave birth to a son. He named him Ishmael in the fifth year of this week [1965]. That year was the eighty-sixth year in Abram’s life.