And he said unto Abram, Know of a surety—literally, knowing know—that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land which is not there, and shall serve them (i.e. the inhabitants of that alien country); and they (i.e. these foreigners) shall afflict them—three different stages of adverse fortune are described:—
or the two last clauses depict the contents of the first (Kalisch)—four hundred years. The duration not of their affliction merely, but either of their bondage and affliction, or more probably of their exile, bondage, and affliction; either a round number for 430 (Calvin, Rosenmüller, Keil, Alford), to Be reckoned from the date of the descent into Egypt (Kalisch, Lunge), as Moses (Exodus 12:1-51 :89) and Stephen (Acts 7:6) seem to say, and to be reconciled with the statement of Paul (Galatians 3:17) by regarding the death of Jacob as the closing of the time of promise (Lange, Inglis); or an exact number dating from the birth of Isaac (Willet, Murphy, Wordsworth), which was thirty years after the call in Ur, thus making the entire interval correspond with the 430 years of Paul, or from the persecution of Ishmael (Ainsworth, Clarke, Bush), which occurred thirty years after the promise in Genesis 12:3.