Moussar sur La Genèse 15:7

The eighth quality: The pious man would not worry about the laughter of those who scoff and the shame of those who would shame him. Our sages have said that from his earliest youth, our father, Abraham, peace be upon him, began to cleave to the service of God, blessed be He. Though the men of his generation reviled him, he did not pay any attention until finally they cast him into the fiery furnace¹⁹Our Hebrew Text reads: Holeechuhu. However, the British Museum MS Add. 27, 174 reads Hishleechuhu as does the Cracow edition p. 5a.. And the Creator, blessed be He, saved him, as it is said (ibid., 15:7), “I am the Lord that brought thee forth out of Ur of the Chaldees.”

Here is an instance that shows that the sequence in which the Torah reports events is not necessarily the chronological order in which things occurred. Remember that Abraham was seventy years old at the time of the covenant between the pieces in 15,18 (as we know on the authority of סדר עולם). Our sages also consider the count of the four hundred years that the Torah mentions in that covenant (15,13) as commencing with the birth of Isaac. When Exodus 12,40 mentions a period of 430 years that the Israelites "resided" in Egypt, our sages compute that period as having commenced at the ברית בין הבתרים "the covenant between the pieces," i.e. when G–d revealed Himself to Abraham in 15,1. [Rashi's commentary that this number includes the years spent elsewhere as strangers by Abraham and his descendants, may be based on the letter ו (and), before the word מושב in 12,40. Ed.]

We now understand why the promise of the land of Israel to Abraham and his descendants is repeated three times in our פרשה, each time including a dimension not previously revealed. The first promise was made at the ברית בין הבתרים. At the beginning of the story of creation the eventual four exiles of the Jewish people had been hinted at according to the view of Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish in Bereshit Rabbah 2,4. He understands the words והארץ היתה תהו as a reference to the Babylonian exile; the word בהו refers to the exile of the Medes; the word חשך refers to the exile under the Greeks, and the words על פני תהום refer to an exile that has no limit, whereas the words ורוח אלוקים מרחפת, refer to G–d's spirit, i.e. the era of the Messiah. In our portion, too, G–d hinted to Abraham during the covenant of the pieces that his descendants would undergo four periods of exile, as indicated by the words: אימה, חשיכה גדולה נופלת עליו "fear, great darkness, descending upon him"(15,12). The word אימה refers to Babylonia, the word חשיכה to the exile under the Medes; the word גדולה refers to the exile under the Greeks, and the word נופלת refers to the exile under the Romans, all according to Bereshit Rabbah 44,17.