Abraham Walked the Land Before It Was His

God told Abraham to walk the land. Not to settle it. Not to farm it. Just walk.

“Arise, walk about the land to its length and to its breadth, as to you I will give it” (Genesis 13:17). The rabbis of Midrash Rabbah, compiled in fifth-century Palestine, were not satisfied with that simple reading. Walking, they insisted, was not a stroll. Walking was a legal act. In the ancient Near East, circumambulating land was a recognized form of acquisition. You claimed what your feet touched. God was teaching Abraham property law through his sandals.

But here is the part that gets overlooked. After God made that promise — the land, the inheritance, the future — Abraham did not simply nod and set off. He asked a question. A vulnerable, almost embarrassing question: “Lord, by what shall I know that I shall inherit it?” (Genesis 15:8).

This is the father of faith. The man who left his homeland, smashed his father’s idols, and walked into the unknown because God told him to. And here he is asking for proof. Not with arrogance. Not challenging God’s authority. But with the raw honesty of a man who needs something to hold on to when the night gets long.

The Midrash of Philo, drawing on Philo of Alexandria’s first-century CE reading of Torah, stops at that moment and refuses to move past it. Philo of Alexandria was a Jewish philosopher who lived in Egypt under Roman rule, and his interpretive tradition — preserved in a later Hebrew text called the Midrash of Philo — consistently reads the biblical patriarchs not as flat archetypes but as fully human figures navigating real uncertainty. Abraham’s question is not a lapse of faith. It is the question of a man who knows what he is committing to and wants to commit to it fully. “By what shall I KNOW?” is not doubt. It is the desire for a covenant solid enough to build a life on.

God answered with fire.

Abraham prepared the ritual animals: a heifer, a goat, a ram, a turtledove, a young pigeon. He split them and laid the halves opposite each other in the ancient ceremony of covenant-making, the kind where two parties walk between the pieces and swear by their lives: may what happened to these animals happen to me if I break my word. Then God sent a deep sleep over Abraham, and a smoking oven and a flaming torch passed between the pieces. God alone walked through. Abraham did not. The covenant was sealed not by mutual obligation but by divine unilateral promise. God was binding Himself. Abraham only had to receive it.

The Midrash of Philo lingers on the verb in (Genesis 15:10): “And he took unto him all these things.” What does it mean that Abraham “took” them? He did not passively arrange the ritual. He gathered the materials with intention, with agency, with the full weight of what he was entering. This was not ceremonial compliance. This was a man investing himself completely in the most consequential transaction of his life.

Bereshit Rabbah ties the walking back to the covenant in a way that makes the whole sequence cohere. The feet that measured the land were the same body that later received the sign of circumcision — the covenant carved into flesh, the promise made physical. God reminded Abraham of his origins in Ur of the Chaldeans not to diminish him but to underscore the distance already traveled: from a city of idols to a covenant ceremony at the border of Canaan, sealed in fire. Bereshit Rabbah, compiled from Palestinian rabbinic traditions across several centuries and reaching its final form around the fifth century CE, understands the walking, the doubting, the asking, and the cutting as one continuous act of covenant-making, not a sequence of separate events.

The doubt was part of the faith. The question was part of the commitment. The man who asked “by what shall I know?” was the same man who laid out the animals in the dark and waited for the fire to come. Abraham did not become the father of a people by having certainty. He became the father of a people by asking his questions honestly and then showing up anyway.

Walk the land. Ask your questions. Then let the fire pass through.

What the Midrash of Philo grasps that a simple reading of Genesis misses is that the covenant ceremony at night was also an act of pedagogy. God was not just making a promise. God was showing Abraham how a promise works in the world. Two parties. Animals split between them. A solemn oath sworn on the lives of the parties. Except that in this case, only God walked between the pieces. Only God swore. Abraham received. And that asymmetry was itself the covenant’s most important feature: it was not a business contract between equals but a gift given freely, the terms set entirely by the giver. Abraham’s faith, in this reading, consists not in blind obedience but in the willingness to receive what he did not earn and could not guarantee. He asked his question. He got his answer. The fire came. That was enough to walk the land on.