Why was the Genesis account NOT written by Abraham?

Answer 1

A:

Much of the Book of Genesis concerns events that supposedly happened after the time of Abraham, so it was not possible for Abraham to have written this material. Even the stories about Abraham himself contain anachronisms that prove they were written many centuries after the time attributed to Abraham. For example, Genesis speaks of Abraham travelling from Ur of the Chaldees, although the Chaldees were an Arabian tribe that only settled in Mesopotamia around 800 BCE. The book speaks of Abraham travelling through the land of the Philistines and meeting their kings, yet the Philistines did not even arrive in the Levant until around 1250 BCE. Domesticated camels play an important part in the story of Abraham, although new research by two archaeologists at Tel Aviv University, published 2013 in Tel Aviv: Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University has established that camels were domesticated in the Levant sometime between 930 and 900 BCE.

The biblical legend of Abraham arose in the first millennium BCE.