Genesis 18:14

18:14 Is anything impossible ¹  for the Lord? I will return to you when the season comes round again and Sarah will have a son.” ² 

Genesis 21:2

21:2 So Sarah became pregnant ³  and bore Abraham a son in his old age at the appointed time that God had told him.

Genesis 1:14

1:14 God said, “Let there be lights ⁴  in the expanse ⁵  of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them be signs ⁶  to indicate seasons and days and years,

Genesis 17:21

17:21 But I will establish my covenant with Isaac, whom Sarah will bear to you at this set time next year.”

[18:14]  ¹ tn The Hebrew verb פָּלָא (pala’) means “to be wonderful, to be extraordinary, to be surpassing, to be amazing.”

[18:14]  ² sn Sarah will have a son. The passage brings God’s promise into clear focus. As long as it was a promise for the future, it really could be believed without much involvement. But now, when it seemed so impossible from the human standpoint, when the Lord fixed an exact date for the birth of the child, the promise became rather overwhelming to Abraham and Sarah. But then this was the Lord of creation, the one they had come to trust. The point of these narratives is that the creation of Abraham’s offspring, which eventually became Israel, is no less a miraculous work of creation than the creation of the world itself.

[21:2]  ³ tn Or “she conceived.”

[1:14]  ⁵ sn Let there be lights. Light itself was created before the light-bearers. The order would not seem strange to the ancient Hebrew mind that did not automatically link daylight with the sun (note that dawn and dusk appear to have light without the sun).

[1:14]  ⁶ tn The language describing the cosmos, which reflects a prescientific view of the world, must be interpreted as phenomenal, describing what appears to be the case. The sun and the moon are not in the sky (below the clouds), but from the viewpoint of a person standing on the earth, they appear that way. Even today we use similar phenomenological expressions, such as “the sun is rising” or “the stars in the sky.”

[1:14]  ⁷ tn The text has “for signs and for seasons and for days and years.” It seems likely from the meanings of the words involved that “signs” is the main idea, followed by two categories, “seasons” and “days and years.” This is the simplest explanation, and one that matches vv. 11-13. It could even be rendered “signs for the fixed seasons, that is [explicative vav (ו)] days and years.”