Abraham

Meaning

Abraham enters the fourth part as a recipient of a promise made intelligible through visible things. The stars, sea-sand and earth-dust figure the multiplication of his posterity. The linked words for seed and lineage therefore name descendants here, not matter for the chymical work. The surrounding sequence moves from Adam’s return to earth through Abraham’s promise to Christ’s parables: the example helps justify the treatise’s own use of earthly images for heavenly mysteries. The aligned English makes the familial sense explicit with “seed and his descendants,” whereas the German joins the forms Samens and Geschlechts. Their conjunction is important: the image is generative without becoming a laboratory identification.