The Seed & Seeds of Abraham

Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, “And to offsprings,” referring to many, but referring to one, “And to your offspring,” who is Christ.
Galatians 3:16 ESV

Some people believe Paul was saying that Genesis 12:7 was not a promise to give Canaan to a group of Abraham’s descendants, but to give it only to Christ. “Seed” in Genesis only ever referred to Christ, never to Isaac, Jacob, or all of Israel.

But Paul’s own writings disprove this.

In Romans 4:18 he quoted another verse from Genesis (15:5) with the same Hebrew word to show that Abraham would become the father of many nations. In Romans 11:1 and 2 Corinthians 11:22, he wrote that Israel, whether faithful or not, is the seed of Abraham. Hebrews 2:16 also says that the “flesh and blood” descendants of Jacob (v13) are the seed of Abraham.

Jesus himself, in John 8:37, told a group of unbelieving Jews who wanted to kill him, “I know that you are Abraham’s seed.”

These people, motivated by their hatred of the seed of Abraham, choose to read Paul in the most childish, hyper-literal manner because it allows them to twist it against his real meaning. They’ll recognize his use of metaphor and hyperbole when it suits them and play dumb when it doesn’t.

Seed, in both Hebrew and English, is often used in the singular when referring to an undifferentiated mass of individual objects. “A bag of seed” doesn’t contain a single seed, but potentially many thousands, but we still refer to the mass of seeds as “seed” in the singular. Hebrew does exactly the same thing.

In Galatians 3:16, Paul was combining this quirk of human language with the typological nature of Hebrew prophecy to show that a new covenant doesn’t replace or annul an older covenant, even if both covenants have the same parties. It wasn’t the only time he used a literary device that required some knowledge of Hebrew to understand.

Consider Romans 2:29.

“The Jew is one inwardly and circumcision is of the heart” does not mean that one born a Jew is not a Jew, nor does it mean that a Gentile Christian is the “real” Jew. Paul used the Hebrew meaning of the name Judah–the origin of the term Jew–to inform a metaphor. Judah means “praised” and therefore “Jews” means “praised ones”. Paul was saying that those who are truly praiseworthy are not so because of any physical characteristic, but because of the state of their hearts.

Paul’s letters are often difficult to understand. They are full of subtle–and not so subtle–rhetorical devices, and so are best left to grownups to interpret.

There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.
2 Peter 3:16 ESV