Genesis Genesis 25:1-18
Eighteen verses close the Abraham cycle by collecting five outstanding promises and dispatching the overflow eastward. Abraham dies at one hundred seventy-five and is buried by his estranged sons together; Ishmael receives a twelve-prince fulfillment in the same words God spoke to Hagar; the death-formula closes a canonical set restricted to six covenant figures; and the eastward dispatch quietly seeds a vocabulary chain the canon will reverse at Isaiah 60 and Matthew 2.
Genesis Genesis 21:1–34
Genesis 21 opens with the verb that will become the canon's word for divine intervention and closes with the divine epithet that will become the canon's word for God's eternity. Between them the narrator stages a birth, an expulsion, a wilderness rescue, a seven-fold oath, and a tamarisk planted at a well. Sarah speaks the Edenic expulsion-verb in the imperative; Yahweh ratifies her. God opens Hagar's eyes the way Eden's were opened, but to a well of water this time. The chapter is built as the Akedah's dress rehearsal, and two of its verses become the most exact verbatim citations of Genesis in the New Testament.
Genesis 17:15-27
Same theophany, second petuchah. Gen 17:15-27 names what Gen 17:1-14 inscribed. Sarai becomes Sarah; Abraham laughs inwardly at the announcement and the child is named for the laugh; God says aval - truly - and the covenant narrows from Abraham's seed generally to one named son not yet conceived. Ishmael receives the creation-mandate blessing every nation can receive; Isaac receives the berit olam. At Mamre the angel will quote this annunciation back: shall a word be impossible with God? Luke quotes the angel back over Mary. The child's name is the disbelief converted into gift, and the seed-bearer is the woman God blesses by name.
Genesis 16:1-16
An Egyptian slave woman flees into the desert, and the angel of Yahweh finds her at a spring. By the time she leaves the spring, she has named God — the only human in the Hebrew Bible ever to do so. Gen 16 is the chapter where humanity first tries to help the covenant along, and the chapter where the helper, broken and named El-Roi by the woman she abused, hears for the first time the Exodus formula a slave will hand to a nation.