When the Lord frames the covenant in Genesis 17:7, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan slips in one of its most telling technical terms. The covenant is established between My Word and thee.
Not between God and Abraham, as the Hebrew simply says. Between the Memra of the Lord and Abraham.
The Targum's Memra is the way the Aramaic paraphrase names God's active, speaking, covenanting Presence without ever violating divine transcendence. When God walks in the garden, it is the Memra walking. When God speaks at Sinai, it is the Memra speaking. When God cuts a covenant with a ninety-nine-year-old in Canaan, it is the Memra binding itself to him.
The covenant is everlasting — ad le-alma in the Aramaic — and extends to thy sons after thee in their generations. That is what makes it a covenant and not a mood. It outlives its signatories. Abraham will die; his sons will die; the Memra will not. Every generation walks into a contract already in force before they arrived.
The Maggid notices the promise inside the grammar. The Lord says, I will be a God to thee and to thy sons after thee (Genesis 17:7). The after is the point. A covenant is a promise that still applies when you are no longer in the room. Abraham signs, and his great-grandchildren are suddenly parties to a contract none of them ever read. This is the theology Jewish parents hand down on the way to the circumcision of an eight-day-old boy — you were already loved before you could understand the word love.