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ABRAHAM

(Heb. ʾaḇrāhām)

The son of Terah, husband of Sarah, father of Ishmael and Isaac, and grandfather of Jacob. He is the common patriarch of the three “Abrahamic” religions: Jews trace their ancestry to Abraham through his son Isaac and his grandson Jacob-Israel, Muslims trace theirs through his son Ishmael, and Christians claim descent from Abraham through faith (Gal. 3:6-7, 29).

The biblical story of Abraham describes his divine selection as the ancestor of Israel and sets in motion the long process by which his descendants eventually become a populous nation in a land of their own. At the beginning Abraham is living with his wife Sarah and his nephew Lot in the Mesopotamian city of Haran. Yahweh commands him to leave his ancestral home and move to a new land, where his descendants will be divinely blessed and grow into a great nation (Gen. 12:1-3). This promise cannot be fulfilled within Abraham’s own lifetime, but its realization is foreshadowed in the ensuing events, as Abraham and Sarah take up residence in the land promised to them, and Isaac, the son from whom the nation will descend, is born.

The great patriarch first appears as “Abram” (ʾaḇrām, Gen. 11:26), but eventually God changes his name to ʾaḇrāhām (17:5). The two forms probably originated as dialectal variants — the longer form, with internal -h-, corresponds to a pattern especially common in Aramaic; the meaning in either form was “the Father is exalted,” the God of Abraham being praised as divine father of kinsmen. Even so, the author of Gen. 17, , in which Abram is promised a multitude of offspring, gives a thematic interpretation of the new name as “the father of a multitude (ʾaḇ-hămôn) of nations.” This chapter contains the formal articulation of the Priestly (P) version of the covenant between God and Abraham’s descendants, and the change of name is an indication of the change of status that occurs when the covenant is established, signifying a new identity in relation to the name-giver (cf. 2 Kgs. 23:34). The name of Abram’s wife is also changed — from Sarai to Sarah (Gen. 17:15) — and his grandson’s name will be changed from Jacob to Israel (17:15; 32:28[MT 29]).

It is difficult to say whether the traditional stories about Abraham were based on the life of a historical individual and, if so, exactly when the historical Abraham might have lived. The biblical writers regarded him as a figure of the distant past, living many generations before the establishment of Israel as a political entity, and modern scholars have attempted to identify a pre-Israelite context into which the stories might fit. Following a nonurban period at the end of the 3rd millennium b.c., there were two centuries of gradual resettlement in Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine (Middle Bronze I or IIA), followed by an age of increased population and cultural expansion characterized by the development of large urban centers (MB II or IIB). Since Abraham and his family are presented as nomads, even after arriving in Canaan, historians have attempted to associate the travels of Abraham and his family with the movements of peoples during the settlement period of MB I, or to understand their activities in terms of our knowledge of nomadic peoples living alongside the great cities of MB II.

The earliest surviving reference to Abraham may be in a 10th-century Egyptian text, which refers to a place in the Negeb called “the Fortress of Abraham,” listed among places conquered by the 22nd-Dynasty king Sheshonq (Shishak) in his incursion into Palestine during the reign of Rehoboam (cf. 1 Kgs. 14:25-26; 2 Chr. 12:2-12). If the Abraham for whom this fortress was named is the biblical patriarch, then the Abraham tradition was well established in the Negeb by the 10th century. This would be consistent with the geographical setting of the biblical narrative, in which Abraham has strong ties to the Negeb — especially to Beer-sheba, where Isaac is born and raised — and to other southern locations, most notably Hebron, near which Abraham’s family had its principal residence at the “oaks of Mamre” (Gen. 13:18; 14:13; 18:1). These geographical associations are sometimes taken as an indication that the Abraham tradition originated in the south, but they are more likely the result of a southern orientation of the tradition that developed after the settlement of the Negeb in the 11th century and, more especially, after the establishment of the Davidic dynasty with its strong associations with Hebron, the traditional capital of the tribe of Judah. Indeed, there are some indications that Abraham’s earliest geographical associations were not with Hebron but with the original Israelite homeland in the hill country north of Jerusalem. Whether the Abraham tradition originated in the south or the north, however, in the present form of the tradition Abraham is not a regional figure but a patriarch of the entire land. This is perhaps shown most clearly by the places of worship he is said to have founded, which range across the heartland of ancient Israel, north and south. He builds an altar to Yahweh at Shechem in the central Samarian hills (Gen. 12:6-7), another north of Jerusalem at a point between Bethel and Ai (v. 8), and a third at Hebron in the southern Judean hills (13:18). At Beer-sheba in the northern Negeb he plants a sacred tree (21:33).

As the founder of these shrines, Abraham initiates the process by which the worship of Yahweh is established throughout Canaan. He also engages in a number of other foundational activities — territorial negotiations, land purchases, even military expeditions — which determine and clarify the relationships of his family to the neighboring peoples. These are the actions of a founding patriarch, whose deeds define the social roles and ethnic consciousness of his descendants. The most important vehicle of this social and ethnic definition is the elaborate genealogy in which Abraham is introduced and which he extends by the marriages he makes and the children he begets. His family background is documented primarily in Gen. 11:10-32, a continuation of the genealogy of Noah’s eldest son Shem, begun in 10:21-31. Shem was “the father of all the children of Eber” (10:21), i.e., the Hebrews, who in biblical tradition are contrasted with the Canaanites and other indigenous peoples of the Promised Land. Abraham himself was the eldest of the three sons of Terah (Gen. 11:26), during whose lifetime the family is said to have moved from Ur, in southern Mesopotamia, to Haran on the Balikh River in northwestern Mesopotamia. In the time of the biblical writers Haran was a major caravan city, from which travelers could cross the Euphrates and proceed south via the oasis of Tadmor (Palmyra) to Damascus, picking up the King’s Highway and continuing, east of the Jordan, to Canaan and points farther south. This is evidently the route that Abraham’s family was believed to have taken, and the family ties to Haran, and ultimately to Ur, reflect the Israelite belief that their earliest ancestral connections were with the peoples of Transeuphrates, not with the indigenous peoples of Canaan. Thus the names of Abraham’s immediate ascendants (Gen. 11:22-26; 1 Chr. 1:26-27) correspond to the names of cities in the vicinity of Haran: Serug, the name of Abraham’s great-grandfather, was the name of a city situated between Haran and the Euphrates; Nahor, the name of both Abraham’s grandfather and one of his two brothers, was the name of a city (Nakhur) located SE of Haran on the upper Balikh; and Terah was the name of a city (Til-[sha]-Turakhi) in the Balikh River basin. The name of Abraham’s other brother Haran (hārān) is similar but not identical to the name of the city of Haran (ḥārān) itself.

The names of the descendants of the three sons of Terah — Abraham, Nahor, and Haran — correspond to the names of the peoples recognized by the biblical writers as belonging to Israel’s larger kinship group. Nahor’s sons bear the names of the 12 tribes of the Arameans. Eight of these were located in the Syrian Desert, the Aramean homeland (Gen. 22:20-23), while the remaining four eventually expanded westward into Syria (v. 24). Haran’s son Lot was the father of Moab and Ben-ammi, the eponymous ancestors of the Transjordanian Ammonites and Moabites (Gen. 19:37-38), who are therefore known in biblical tradition as “the children of Lot” (Deut. 2:9, 19; Ps. 83:8[9]). By attributing their patrimony to Abraham’s nephew, the tradition accorded them a junior kinship to Israel, and by presenting the circumstances of their conception as an incestuous union between Lot and his daughters (Gen. 19:30-38), the tradition cast a shadow over their lineage, especially in contrast to the auspicious circumstances of the birth of Israel’s ancestor, Isaac.

Abraham’s own descendants fall into three groups: those descended from Ishmael (Ishmaelites or Arabs), those descended from Isaac (Edomites and Israelites), and those descended from the various sons of Keturah (a collateral line of Arabs). Their relative status in Israelite tradition is reflected in the status of their mothers. Isaac was the son of Abraham’s wife Sarah and the father of Jacob-Israel, whose 12 sons were the ancestors of the 12 tribes who eventually would inherit the land promised to Abraham in Canaan. As shown by the “Edomite Genesis” of Gen. 36, , Esau-Edom, Isaac’s other son, was the eponymous ancestor of the Edomites, whom Israelite tradition divided into three groups descended from Esau’s three wives. Abraham’s other sons were the sons of concubines, Hagar and Keturah, and he sent them away “to the east” (Gen. 25:6), i.e., to Arabia. Thus the 12 sons of Ishmael, the son of Hagar, bear the names of 12 peoples of northern Arabia (Gen. 25:13-15; 1 Chr. 1:29-31), who inhabited the Syrian Desert east and southeast of Gilead. These were the Hagrite or Hagarene tribes (1 Chr. 5:10, 19-20; cf. Ps. 83:6[7]; Bar. 3:23); most of their names are those of tribes mentioned in biblical or extrabiblical sources. The names of Keturah’s sons (Gen. 25:2; 1 Chr. 1:32) are more difficult to explain than those of Hagar, but in general they too seem to correspond to the names of Arabian groups and places.

Taken altogether, therefore, the genealogical traditions associated with Abraham identify Israel within three kinship groups of progressively narrowing boundaries and increasing affinity. The most general group is that of the Semites or descendants of Shem and, more particularly, the descendants of Eber or Hebrews. The next group comprises the Terachic peoples — the descendants of the three sons of Abraham’s father, Terah. These include the Arameans and the Transjordanian peoples of Ammon and Moab. The narrowest group is that of the Abrahamic peoples, descendants of Abraham himself. They include the Ishmaelites or northern Arabian tribes, the Edomites, and the Israelites themselves.

The most striking characteristic of Abraham’s portrayal in the Genesis narrative — and for which he is most admired in later tradition — is his passive obedience to the divine directives he receives. At the beginning of his story he is told to leave his homeland behind and travel “to the land that I will show you,” a place about which he knows nothing. That he seems to accept this summons without question or hesitation may be a consequence of the literary economy of the narrative, but in postbiblical interpretation his passive acceptance has been seen as a paradigm of the unquestioning obedience that arises from trust in God. This is all the more true of the story of the “binding” (ʿăqēḏâ) of Isaac, told near the end of the Abraham narrative (Gen. 22:1-19). After Isaac is born and the divine promise of progeny, which had been jeopardized by Abraham’s old age and Sarah’s barrenness, seems on the way to fulfillment, God tests Abraham by instructing him to take Isaac to “one of the mountains that I shall show you” and sacrifice him there as a burnt offering. Again Abraham obeys without hesitation and is at the point of putting his son to death when God intervenes and substitutes a ram for the offering. Principally on the basis of this remarkable story, Abraham came to be regarded as a paragon of faith or trust in God for Jews and Christians — and also for Muslims, in whose tradition it is Ishmael, rather than Isaac, whose sacrifice is demanded.

P. Kyle McCarter, Jr.

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

ABRAHAM

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)