Genesis Genesis 24:29-67
Bethuel and Laban speak the Akedah blessing back over Rebekah without knowing what they echo. Isaac brings her into Sarah's tent and loves her in the canon's first husband-loves-wife, and is comforted by a verb that runs forward into Isaiah's promise and the Paraclete.
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 Genesis 20:1–18
Eighteen verses, two hundred eighty-two Hebrew words, and seven canonical first-mentions: prophet, dream, heal, fear-of-God, the verb to sin, integrity, innocence. The prophet enters Scripture as an intercessor for a Gentile king. The Gentile king speaks the integrity-of-heart formula David and Solomon will later inherit. The wombs of Gerar close so that the womb of Sarah can open. Genesis 20 is the canon's densest law-of-first-mention cluster outside Genesis 1–3, and the social location is the thing the chapter forces the reader to see.
Genesis 18:1-15
Yahweh comes to the door of Abraham's tent at midday and eats a meal of fine flour cakes and curds under a tree. The Hebrew names the visitor singular; the eyes see three men; the speaker is Yahweh; two leave for Sodom as angels. Sarah laughs inside the tent and the divine voice draws the laugh into the open. The vocabulary of her cakes is the vocabulary of the altar that does not yet exist; the formula of her birth-promise is the formula Elisha will speak to the Shunammite; her inner question about pleasure (ednah) is preserved by the Hebrew and erased by the Greek. At Mamre God comes to a domestic table and names the time of Isaac's life.
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.