An old man, and full— There is nothing for, of years, in the Hebrew: the word is שׂבע sabang, full, satiated, satisfied: having completed the business of his life, and being fully satisfied with it. Perhaps the metaphor is taken from an entertainment, where the guests, after they have fared liberally, rise from table fully satisfied, and thankful for the feast. The Greek and Latin poets have thus applied it; and, after them, Mr. Pope, in one of his epitaphs, says,
From nature's temperate feast rose satisfied, Thank'd Heaven that he had liv'd, and that he died.
The death of Abraham is mentioned here a little out of time, in order to finish his history without interruption; for Esau and Jacob were born fifteen years before his death. Isaac was born when his father Abraham was a hundred years old, ch. Genesis 21:5. and he married when his father was one hundred and forty. It was twenty years before his wife bare him any children, Genesis 21:26. Abraham died at the age of one hundred and seventy-five, Genesis 21:7 so that he lived fifteen years after Esau and Jacob were born.
And was gathered to his people— The same is said of Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, &c. and in other places of Scripture the faithful are said to be gathered to their fathers, Judges 2:10. Acts 13:36. Genesis 15:15 expressions which must refer to the soul, not to the body. Jameson has very justly observed, that the phrase here used cannot refer to Abraham's body, for that was deposited among strangers in Canaan, and not in Chaldea among his ancestors. It must therefore belong to the soul, which by this expression is plainly intimated to be immortal, and to subsist in a separate state, after its union with the body is dissolved. Accordingly, by Abraham's being gathered to his people, it is reasonable to understand, his being joined to the spirits of just men made perfect, those kindred souls, whose tempers and manners he imitated while on earth. So it is explained by some of the fathers, particularly Theodoret. Neither does it make any thing against this explication, that the phrase is applied promiscuously to good and bad men; for each may be gathered to his own people, and yet these two sorts of people, or societies, to which they are joined, be extremely different.
Le Clerc thinks the expression might take its original from a prevailing opinion, that the souls of the dead were joined to the souls of their ancestors, or to those of their own nation and family. This, I doubt not, is true in respect to the faithful: and the Scripture condescends to the common modes of expression, as far as the truth will allow. To the above mentioned opinion, Le Clerc thinks that Ezekiel alludes, ch. Genesis 32:22. where, speaking of the world of spirits, he says, Ashur is there, and all her company. To shew the general opinion even of the heathens on this subject, he quotes Lucian, who, in his vision of the Acherusian plains, says, there we found the demi-gods and heroines, and all the classes of departed spirits, distributed according to their nations and tribes. And indeed the desire of meeting again in the other world with our friends and those whom we highly loved and esteemed on earth, is perhaps almost as natural to mankind as the desire of immortality itself. Hence it is, that Cicero is so transported with the view of death, and breaks forth into that beautiful exclamation at the end of his book de Senectute (on old age); "O glorious day, when I shall be joined to that divine assembly and congregation of souls, when I shall leave this impure promiscuous throng, and be ranked not only with those brave men I now mentioned, but with my Cato, &c."