Abraham

• 1. Introduction

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  Abraham began his story under a different name: Abram. In the Book of Genesis, God tells him to leave the house of his father Terah and travel to a land God will show him, and from that single command grows a figure revered across three religions as far apart as Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Jews trace their covenant with God back to him as their founding father; Christians regard him as the forebear of Jesus and the spiritual ancestor of all believers; Muslims count him as a link in the chain of prophets running from Adam to Muhammad. Through his son Ishmael, Abraham is called the common forefather of the Arab people, and through his son Isaac, of the Jewish people. Yet by the early 21st century, archaeologists had stopped trying to recover any historical context that would make Abraham a credible historical figure at all. So who was Abraham, and how did a patriarch that scholars now read as literature rather than history come to anchor the faith of billions?

• 2. Leaving Home, Finding Land

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  The narrative that scholars call the Abraham cycle unfolds as mounting tension between a divine promise, that Abram would father a lineage and become ancestor to numerous nations, and a succession of crises that threaten to derail it. Storytellers call this pattern the "obstacle story," a device found across cultures and eras for its staying power. The cycle has no single unified plot built around one conflict and its resolution; its episodes are often only loosely linked, and the sequence is not always logical. What holds it together instead are two recurring "narrative programs," set out early on: the sterility of Sarah, and Abraham's order to leave the land of his birth for a land God will show him. Across the episodes that follow, Abraham gradually takes on the role of an ideal religious figure, tested again and again on the themes of blessing, promise, land and above all progeny. Terah, ninth in descent from Noah, fathered Abram, Nahor, Haran and Sarah, and Haran in turn fathered Lot, Abram's nephew; the family lived in Ur of the Chaldees. Haran died there while his father Terah was still alive. Abram married Sarah, known also as Sarai, but unlike his brother Nahor and Nahor's wife Milcah, the couple remained childless. According to Genesis 11, Terah set out with Abram, Sarai and Lot for Canaan but settled instead in a place called Haran, where Terah died at the age of 205. Genesis 12 then records God telling Abram to leave his country and his kindred for a land God would show him, promising to make him a great nation, bless him, make his name great, and bless or curse those who blessed or cursed him in turn. Abram was 75 years old when he and Sarai left Haran with Lot and everything they had acquired, traveling to Shechem in Canaan, where Abram built an altar to God, then built a second altar between Bethel and Ai before the party moved on toward the Negev. Some exegetes, among them Nahmanides, argue instead that Abram was actually born in Haran and only later relocated to Ur, while part of his family stayed behind. A severe famine in Canaan sent Abram, Lot and their households down into Egypt. On the way, Abram told Sarai to say she was his sister, fearing the Egyptians would kill him otherwise, and when they arrived, Pharaoh's officials praised Sarai's beauty to Pharaoh, who took her into his palace and gave Abram goods in exchange. God struck Pharaoh's household with plagues, and once Pharaoh discovered Sarai was a married woman, he ordered Abram and Sarai out of Egypt, escorting them to the frontier himself. Back in the Negev, near Bethel and Ai once more, Abram's herds and Lot's grew so large that their herdsmen began to clash over the same pastures, and Abram offered Lot first choice of land, left or right, to end the conflict. Lot chose the well-watered plain of the Jordan as far as Zoara, settling near Sodom, while Abram moved south to Hebron and the plain of Mamre, where he raised another altar to God.

• 3. War and Covenant

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  When Sodom and Gomorrah rebelled against Elam, invading Elamite forces took Lot and his entire household prisoner after crushing the king of Sodom's army; Lot's home on the outskirts of Sodom had made him an easy target. Word reached Abram, who assembled 318 trained servants and pursued the retreating Elamites, already weakened from the Battle of Siddim. Catching them at Dan, Abram split his force, launched a night raid, freed the captives and chased the Elamite king Chedorlaomer to Hobah, north of Damascus, killing him and recovering everything Sodom had lost. On Abram's return, the king of Sodom met him in the Valley of Shaveh, and Melchizedek, king of Salem and a priest of El Elyon, brought out bread and wine to bless Abram; Abram gave him a tenth of everything he had. Sodom's king offered to let Abram keep all the recovered goods if he would simply return the people, but Abram accepted only the share owed to his allies. Sometime later a vision promised Abram a reward, namely a son, along with the older promise of land and descendants as numerous as the stars; until then Abram had expected Eliezer of Damascus, the head of his household, to inherit his estate. In the covenant ceremony that followed, God told Abram his descendants would suffer bondage in a land not their own, meaning Egypt, before inheriting territory belonging to the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, the Rephaim, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites. Ten years into life in Canaan, still childless, Sarai offered her Egyptian slave Hagar to Abram to bear him a son. Once pregnant, Hagar began to despise Sarai, and after Sarai mistreated her in turn, Hagar fled into the wilderness, where an angel found her at a fountain on the way to Shur and told her to return, promising that her son would be "a wild ass of a man," his hand against every man and every man's hand against him, and instructed her to name the boy Ishmael. Hagar called God "El-roi," and the well where this happened, between Kadesh and Bered, was afterward named Beer-lahai-roi. Abram was 86 years old when Ishmael was born.

• 4. A New Name and Divine Visitors

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  Thirteen years after Ishmael's birth, when Abram was 99, God appeared again and called him to be blameless so that a covenant could be made; Abram bowed to the ground, and God renamed him Abraham, meaning "father of a multitude," marking a new stage in his life, before instructing him in the practice of circumcision. God renamed Sarai as Sarah in the same encounter and promised Abraham a son by her, at which Abraham fell down again and laughed, asking in his heart whether a child could be born to a man of a hundred years or a woman of ninety. Immediately afterward, Abraham circumcised his entire household of men, including himself at 99 and Ishmael at 13. Sitting at his tent by the terebinths of Mamre during the heat of the day, Abraham looked up to see three men standing before him, ran to greet them, bowed, and offered to wash their feet and bring bread; he then had Sarah prepare ash cakes and a servant-boy prepare a calf, setting curds, milk and meat before the visitors as they ate beneath a tree. One visitor told Abraham that Sarah would bear a son within the year, and Sarah, listening at the tent entrance, laughed to herself, then denied it out of fear when questioned. After the meal, Abraham walked with the visitors to a peak overlooking Sodom and Gomorrah, where God revealed plans to judge the cities for their sins; as two visitors went ahead to Sodom, Abraham pleaded with God, bargaining down from fifty righteous people to ten, and God agreed not to destroy the city for the sake of ten. In Sodom, Lot insisted the two visitors lodge at his house rather than the square, and when a crowd of men demanded he hand over his guests, Lot offered his virgin daughters instead, a refusal that only confirmed the city's wickedness. The next morning Abraham looked out toward Sodom and Gomorrah and saw smoke rising like a furnace where not even ten righteous had been found.

• 5. Beersheba, Isaac and Moriah

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  Settling between Kadesh and Shur in Gerar, a region later associated with the Philistines, Abraham again claimed Sarah was his sister, and King Abimelech had her brought to him, until God warned Abimelech in a dream that taking a married woman would cost him his life. Abimelech protested his innocence, and God acknowledged his blameless heart while warning that Abraham, a prophet, would pray for him if Sarah were returned. The next morning Abimelech confronted Abraham, who admitted Sarah truly was his half-sister, daughter of his father but not his mother, before she became his wife; Abimelech returned her along with sheep, oxen, servants, an invitation to settle anywhere in his land, and a thousand pieces of silver as vindication for Sarah. Abraham then prayed for Abimelech's household, since God had made the women there infertile because of Sarah. Later, after a dispute at a well between Abraham and Abimelech's troop commander Phicol, Abraham gave Abimelech seven ewes as proof that he had dug the well himself, and the two swore an oath there, naming the place Beersheba, where Abraham planted a tamarisk grove and called on the name of the everlasting God. As promised at Mamre, Sarah bore Abraham a son on the first anniversary of the covenant of circumcision, when Abraham was a hundred years old; he named the boy Isaac and circumcised him at eight days old, and Sarah declared that God had made her laugh, so that all who heard would laugh with her. At the feast marking Isaac's weaning, Sarah caught Ishmael, then fourteen, mocking the younger boy and told Abraham to send Hagar and Ishmael away, declaring Ishmael would not share Isaac's inheritance; distressed, Abraham consulted God, who told him to do as Sarah asked, promising that Ishmael too would become a nation because he was Abraham's seed. The next morning Abraham sent Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness of Beersheba with bread and water, and when the water ran out and Hagar wept, an angel told her Ishmael would become a great nation living "on his sword," and a well appeared to save them; Later, God commanded Abraham to offer Isaac as a sacrifice on a mountain in the land of Moriah; after a three-day journey, Isaac carried the wood for his own sacrifice, and when he asked where the offering was, Abraham answered that God would provide a lamb. Just as Abraham was about to strike, an angel stopped him, and he found a ram caught by its horns in a thicket to sacrifice instead; the place was named Jehovah-jireh, and Abraham received a fresh promise of descendants and prosperity before returning to Beersheba. After Sarah died, Abraham buried her in the Cave of the Patriarchs near Hebron, land he had purchased along with an adjoining field from Ephron the Hittite. He then took a concubine named Keturah, who bore him six more sons, Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak and Shuah. Abraham lived to see Isaac marry Rebekah and to see the birth of twin grandsons, Jacob and Esau, before dying at age 175 and being buried in the cave of Machpelah by his sons Isaac and Ishmael.

• 6. Searching for a Historical Abraham

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  Archaeologists William F. Albright and G. Ernest Wright, alongside biblical scholars Albrecht Alt and John Bright, argued through the early and middle 20th century that the patriarchs were either real people or believable composites drawn from a genuine "patriarchal age" in the second millennium BCE. That consensus broke down in the 1970s, when Thomas L. Thompson's The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives, published in 1974, and John Van Seters' Abraham in History and Tradition, from 1975, challenged it directly. Thompson, working from archaeology and ancient texts, found no compelling evidence the patriarchs lived when tradition claimed, and noted that biblical texts reflected first millennium conditions instead; Van Seters, examining names, social setting and message, concluded the stories were Iron Age creations. Their work triggered a paradigm shift, and although some conservative scholars pushed back in the years that followed, their defense found no lasting acceptance. Most scholars now treat the patriarchal age, alongside the Exodus and the era of the biblical judges, as a late literary construct with no tie to a specific historical period, and conclude the Torah itself was composed during the Persian period, shaped by tension between Jewish landowners who stayed in Judah through the Babylonian captivity and traced their land rights to "father Abraham," and returning exiles who grounded their own claim in Moses and the Exodus. Like the other patriarchs, Abraham's story likely circulated orally long before it was written down; he appears already in the Book of Ezekiel and the Book of Isaiah. His name, like Moses', is apparently ancient enough that Genesis no longer preserves its original sense, likely "father is exalted," with "father of a multitude" standing as later folk etymology. Most scholars place the point where oral tradition entered the written Pentateuch in the Persian period, roughly 520 to 320 BCE, though the mechanism remains uncertain: one hypothesis, Persian Imperial authorisation, holds that the post-Exilic community devised the Torah as a legal basis for operating within the Persian system; another holds it was written to define who belonged to the post-Exilic Jewish community and to fix the relative standing of groups like the priesthood and the lay elders. Writing during the Exile, in the first half of the 6th century BCE, the prophet Ezekiel described exiles in Babylon watching those who stayed in Judah claim the land through inheritance from Abraham, only for Ezekiel to insist they had no such claim because they did not observe Torah; the Book of Isaiah shows similar tension between the people of Judah and the returning "gôlâ," insisting Israel's history begins with the Exodus, not Abraham. Together with evidence from Ezra-Nehemiah, this suggests Abraham had become preeminent among the great landowners of Judah around the time of the Exile, useful precisely for defending their claim to the land against the returning exiles. Nissim Amzallag reads Genesis as portraying Abraham with Amorite origins, tracing his home region of Harran to the Amorite homeland and drawing parallels to the Amorite migration into the Southern Levant during the second millennium BCE. Scholars Daniel E. Fleming and Alice Mandell likewise argue that the patriarchs' lifestyle in the Bible echoes Amorite culture of that era, as recorded in texts from the city-state of Mari, suggesting Genesis preserves real memories of some Israelites' ancestral origins; Alan Millard adds that the name Abram is itself Amorite, attested at Mari as ʾabī-rām, in a form typical of the Middle Bronze Age rather than later periods,. A rival theory points toward Canaan instead. The Bubastite Portal inscription of Pharaoh Sheshonq I, biblical Shishak, names a Negev town as "the Fortress of Abraham," i-bi-ra-ma, hinting an Abraham tradition may already have existed in the 10th century BCE, and orientalist Mario Liverani has proposed that Abraham's name recalls the eponymous ancestor of a 13th century BCE tribe called the Raham, mentioned on a stele of Seti I found at Beth-Shean and dated to around 1289 BCE,. Israel Finkelstein and Thomas Römer instead trace the oldest Abraham traditions to the Iron Age monarchic period, arguing the earliest references outside Genesis show no sign of a Mesopotamian origin and center on just two themes, land and offspring, suggesting Abraham began as a hero worshipped locally in Hebron, tied above all to the altar he built there.

• 7. One Patriarch, Many Faiths

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  In Judaism, Abraham founds the covenant that makes the Jews, in traditional belief, the chosen people of God; in Christianity, Paul the Apostle taught that Abraham's faith, which preceded the Mosaic law, made him the model for all believers, Jewish or gentile, and in Islam he stands in the chain of prophets running from Adam to Muhammad. The name change to "Abraham," meaning father of many nations, marks him in the Bible as ancestor to the Israelites, Ishmaelites, Edomites, Amalekites, Kenizzites, Midianites and Assyrians, and through his nephew Lot, to the Moabites and Ammonites as well; through Jacob, renamed Israel, the promise of many nations continues into Jacob's blessing of his grandson Ephraim. Jewish tradition calls him Avraham Avinu, "our father Abraham," both biological ancestor and first Jew, and his story anchors the Torah portions Lech-Lecha, Vayeira, Chayei Sarah and Toledot. Christian writers from Augustine of Hippo to Ambrose and Martin Luther called believers "children of Abraham by faith," and the Roman Catholic Church names him "our father in Faith" in the Eucharistic prayer of the Roman Canon; churches mark his memory on the 20th of August in the Maronite calendar, the 28th of August in the Coptic and Assyrian churches, and the 9th of October in the Roman Catholic and Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod calendars. In the Quran, ʾIbrāhīm appears in 35 chapters, more than any biblical figure besides Moses, called both hanif and muslim and revered as reformer of the Kaaba in Mecca, while the Druze count him as their third spokesman after Adam and Noah, and Baháʼís regard him as a Manifestation of God, born, according to ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, in Mesopotamia, and remembered in Bahá'u'lláh's writings as the one commanded to offer up Ishmael as a sacrifice.

• 8. Abraham in Art and Story

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  Painters returned again and again to the same handful of scenes from Abraham's life: the sacrifice of Isaac, the meeting with Melchizedek, the three visiting angels, and Hagar in the desert. Albrecht Dürer, Caravaggio, Donatello, Raphael, Philip van Dyck and Claude Lorrain all painted Abraham; Rembrandt made at least seven works on the subject, Peter Paul Rubens several, Marc Chagall at least five, Gustave Doré six, and James Tissot more than twenty. The Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus, carved for the burial of a man who died in 359, depicts Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac among its scenes and is described as probably the single most famous piece of early Christian relief sculpture; rediscovered in 1597 after standing in or under Old St. Peter's Basilica, it now sits beneath the modern basilica in the Vatican's Museo Storico del Tesoro della Basilica di San Pietro. In 1987, sculptor George Segal, who built his figures by molding plastered gauze over live models, made Abraham's Farewell to Ishmael, portraying Sarah's rage, Hagar's resignation and Abraham's tenderness together; the work went to the Miami Art Museum after Segal's death in 2000. As early as the 3rd century, Christian art treated the sacrifice of Isaac as a foreshadowing of Christ's death, an idea repeated on an 11th century altar linking Abraham's sacrifice to the Eucharist, while a 5th century mosaic in Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome portrayed the three visitors as the Trinity, a reading Eastern Orthodox art still favors, though Andrei Rublev's Trinity shows only three beardless youths at a table, without Abraham or Sarah at all. Søren Kierkegaard published Fear and Trembling in 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio, wrestling with the anxiety Abraham must have felt when God demanded Isaac's sacrifice; W. G. Hardy fictionalized Abraham's life in his 1935 novel Father Abraham, and Lynne Reid Banks retold the story from Sarah's perspective in her collection Sarah and After. In music, Marc-Antoine Charpentier released the oratorio Sacrificim Abrahae in 1681, and Sébastien de Brossard composed the cantata Abraham ou le sacrifice d'Isaac between 1703 and 1708; in 1994 Steve Reich released the opera The Cave, its title drawn from the Cave of the Patriarchs, built around the story of Abraham and his family as remembered across different cultures and religious traditions. On Bob Dylan's 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited, the title track's five stanzas each describe an unusual problem resolved on Highway 61, opening with God telling Abraham to "kill me a son" on that same highway; Abram, Abraham's birth name, was also the name of Dylan's own father, and in 2004 Rolling Stone ranked "Highway 61 Revisited" number 364 on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.