In this week’s parshah the war between the Arabs and the return of the Jews to Zion begins a war that is still being fought today. And the seeds of this war are actually found in last week’s reading.
There we notice a seeming contradiction between Hashem’s two separate promises. At the Covenant Between the Parts Avraham receives a promise that his offspring will inherit quite a large strip of land:
“On that day Hashem made a covenant with Avram saying ‘To your seed I have given this land from the River of Egypt to the great river the Euphrates. The Kenites the Kenizzites and the Kadmonites and the Hittites and the Perizzites and the Rephaim and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Girgashites and the Jebusites” (Bereishis 15: 18-21).
Yet two chapters later the promise is limited to the narrow borders of the western side of the aforementioned land the part we know as Eretz Yisrael:
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