Comentario sobre Génesis 15:12

'והנה אימה וגו AND, LO, AN HORROR etc. — This is symbolic of the woes and the gloom of the Jews in Exile (Genesis Rabbah 44:17).

AND LO, A DREAD, EVEN A GREAT DARKNESS FELL UPON HIM. The Rabbis in the Midrash have interpreted this fourfold²⁷³“A dread,” “a great,” “darkness,” “fell.” expression to be an allusion to the servitude of the four exiles,²⁷⁴Mentioned further in the text. for the prophet²⁷⁵See Ramban further, Verse 17, as to the nature of the prophetic vision. Abraham found his soul overtaken by “a dread,” followed by “darkness,” which in turn became “a great darkness,” and then he felt as if an overwhelmingly heavy load “fell” upon him. Thus the Rabbis have said:²⁷⁶Bereshith Rabbah 44:20. “A dread, this is Babylon. Darkness, this is Media that darkened the eyes of Israel with fasting²⁷⁷A reference to the fasting in the time of Mordecai and Esther. (Esther 4:16.) and affliction. Great, this is the kingdom of Antiochus.²⁷⁸By prohibiting the practice of the commandments of the Torah, the Greeks caused “a great” darkness to descend upon the descendants of Abraham. Fell upon him, this is Edom.²⁷⁹Edom being a synonym for Rome.
This experience came to Abraham because when the Holy One, blessed be He, made a covenant with him to give the land to his children as an everlasting possession, He said to him, by way of a residuary of His gift, that during the four exiles the nations will subjugate his children and rule in their land, subject to the condition that they sin before Him. Following this general allusion, He then informed him explicitly concerning another exile into which they will first go, namely, the Egyptian exile with which he had already been punished, as I have explained.²⁸⁰Above, 12:10.

ויהי השמש לבא, this verse proves that this whole paragraph describes a prophetic vision, that the entire sequence is a continuous vision, uninterrupted. Both the story about G’d taking Avraham out of his tent to gaze at the stars (did not have to have occurred at night) and the time frame mentioned here, i.e. the sun setting, did not have to refer to 12 hours having elapsed since the earlier reported part of this vision. The Torah reports matters in the sequence in which they appeared to Avram in the vision. The reason why “evening” “night” and, by implication, the preceding “daylight” is mentioned, is because they symbolise periods in Jewish history. Daylight symbolises when the fortune smiled on the Jewish people, whereas “sunset” symbolises the decline of the fortunes of the Jewish people, and “night, darkness” symbolises the periods during which the Jewish people are in exile. The approaching evening mentioned in our verse refers to the first Jewish exile in Egypt.