What Does Genesis 15:11 Mean?

Then birds of prey came down on the carcasses, but Abram drove them away. The detail of the birds of prey attacking the divided carcasses, and Abram's vigilance in driving them away, is both a realistic narrative detail and a symbolic one. While Abram waited in the afternoon for the divine response to his covenant preparation, the natural world intruded: vultures drawn to the smell of blood and fresh meat. He drove them away, protecting the integrity of the covenant materials throughout the long wait.

Some interpreters have seen the birds of prey as symbolic of the threats to the covenant and its people that would come from surrounding nations, with Abram's driving them away representing the covenant family's resistance to those threats. Whether or not that symbolism is intended by the narrator, the practical picture is vivid: an old man in the afternoon sun, standing over the carefully arranged halves of five animals, repeatedly driving away the large birds that were drawn to the scene. The covenant ceremony required vigilance, not just obedience in preparing it.

The patience the vigil required is itself a picture of Abram's faith. He did not prepare the animals and then go inside to wait; he stayed with the ceremony through the heat of the afternoon until the sun set and the vision came. The willingness to maintain the stance of expectation through the long afternoon, driving away opposition repeatedly, is the physical enactment of the stance of faith the chapter has already described verbally in verse 6. Waiting for God's response while guarding what one has prepared in obedience is the active form of trusting the one who speaks and then acts in His own time.