Alongside the everlasting covenant comes an everlasting land. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 17:8 sets the promise out cleanly: the land of Abraham's habitation — all of Canaan — for an everlasting possession.
The Aramaic phrase ahasanat alam does not mean a long lease. It means a holding that does not expire. The Targum pairs it with a closing promise that the Hebrew makes only once: and I will be to them Eloha — their God. The land and the God arrive together. You cannot separate the geography from the theology.
This is striking because, by Abraham's ninety-ninth year, he owns almost none of this land in practice. He has walked across it (Genesis 13:17). He has dug some wells. He has bargained with neighbors for the shade under certain trees. Legal possession of a single plot, the cave at Machpelah, is still chapters away. And yet the Lord says: this land is already yours, in a deeper ledger than the one kept by the locals.
The Maggid reads this as the Torah's most durable real-estate contract. The deed is not stored in Canaan. The deed is stored in the covenant itself. Which is why, through every exile — the Babylonian, the Roman, the dispersions that would last centuries — Jews kept praying toward a land they were not standing on (Genesis 17:8). The Targum understood already: the land is possessed even when you are not in it, because the covenant guarantees the return before the departure has begun.