Romans 4:13 → Genesis 12:2-3

Paul summarizes the entire Abrahamic promise complex as "the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be heir of the world" (κληρονόμον... κόσμου, Rom 4:13). No single Genesis verse says "the world" in those words; the phrase is Paul's interpretive enlargement of the promise to its full canonical scope. Its headwater is the universal-blessing clause of Genesis 12:2-3 — God will make Abraham "a great nation," make his "name great," and through him "all the families of the earth (kōl mišpəḥōt hāʾădāmāh) will be blessed." Paul reads the land-inheritance promise (developed at Gen 13:14-17; 15:18; 17:8) through the universal lens of Gen 12:3, so that the inheritance is no longer a strip of Canaan but the cosmos, and Abraham's heirs are no longer one ethnic line but "all the families of the earth." The link is therefore an Allusion to the whole Abrahamic blessing — Gen 12:2-3 supplies the universal scope, the cosmic-land dimension also drawing on Gen 15/17 — not a verbatim quotation. The method is Promise-Fulfillment, not typology (anti-default: Gen 12:2-3 is a promise God speaks, not a person or institution that prefigures Christ); and it is Redemptive-Historical Progression in that Paul fixes how the promise advances — "not through the law, but through the righteousness that comes by faith" — locating its guarantee in grace rather than works (Rom 4:16), exactly as Abraham himself was justified (Gen 15:6). The telos: the world-wide inheritance promised to Abraham is secured and possessed in the risen Christ, the true Seed, and in him every believing family of the earth becomes a fellow heir of all things (Rom 8:17, 32). To behold this is to see Christ not as the gatekeeper who narrows the inheritance but as the One in whom the cosmos itself is handed to those who simply believe — the supremely desirable Heir who shares everything He owns with all who trust the God who justifies the ungodly.