What Does Genesis 17:2 Mean?

"I will confirm my covenant between me and you and will greatly increase your numbers." The covenant is not being made for the first time; it is being confirmed. The language of confirmation connects this appearance of God to every prior covenant engagement with Abram: the original call in Ur, the restatements at Bethel and Hebron, the formal ratification of chapter 15 with the smoking firepot. All of these are one continuous covenant; this chapter is its formal expansion and its sign, circumcision, being added as the covenant's bodily Mark.

The promise to "greatly increase your numbers" at ninety-nine years old, when biology has long since foreclosed ordinary human reproduction, stakes the promise entirely on divine power rather than natural process. El Shaddai, God Almighty, is the God who acts where nature has stopped acting. The name given in verse 1 matches the promise given in verse 2: only the Almighty can multiply the offspring of a ninety-nine-year-old man beyond natural limits. The promise is proportional to the power of the one making it.

The pattern established here, God acting beyond what nature permits, at a time when nature has definitively foreclosed the ordinary path, in fulfillment of a promise made years earlier, is the template of the entire New Testament. The resurrection of Jesus is the definitive act of God in exactly this pattern: beyond what nature permits, at the moment when natural possibility is most completely foreclosed, in fulfillment of promises made through the entire prophetic tradition. El Shaddai of Genesis 17 is the same God who raised Jesus from the dead, acting in the same register of power against the same boundary of natural impossibility.