What is the story of the patriarch Abraham?

Answer 1

Abraham (at first "Abram") was born in Babylonia, where Nimrod the idolatrous tyrant had relocated his (Abraham's) father Terah. The whole populace was taken in by the ubiquitous idolatry; but the young Abraham, after contemplation, concluded that there must be One God. Over time, Abraham arrived at the attitudes which would later be embodied in the Torah. He remonstrated with passersby in public, demonstrating to them the falsehood of their idols; and tradition tells how he was threatened and endangered by Nimrod. Later in life, God said to Abraham in prophecy to move to the Holy Land, which is where Abraham raised his family. Genesis, end of ch.11, through ch.25.

Answer 2

Abram's (Abraham) wife Sarai was barren and could have no children. It was important back then to have a son to carry on the family name. Sarai (Sarah) wanted a son so she told Abram to sleep with her servant Hagar to give them a son. This caused great strife between Hagar and Sarai which in tern caused Abram great grief. You can find this in the book of Genesis, chapter 16.

Answer 3

A:Genesis 11:31 reports that Abraham's father, Terah took Abraham, and his grandson Lot the son of Haran, from Ur in Chaldea to Haran (or Harran) in southeastern Turkey, on the way to Canaan.

When three men appeared to Abraham in the plains of Mamre (Genesis 18), the English translation is given as 'angels', but we are left in no doubt that the Lord was present and no attempt is made to assert that the men were angels. Abraham negotiated with one of the men, the Lord, to spare the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah if good men could be found to live there. Here, the Lord was the God of the Israelites.

Abraham was obedient to God and was willing to sacrifice the object in his life that was most valuable to him, his son Isaac. There are numerous tantalising fragments in the Old Testament referring to traditions of human sacrifice by the early Hebrews, but by the time the Pentateuch was being written the practice faced opposition, at least from the monotheists, and most of the traditions appear to have been censored to remove this infamy. So, Abraham's promise to sacrifice Isaac was not an isolated incident where God was merely testing Abraham, but part of an established Hebrew tradition.

Genesis gives two parallel stories of Abraham where he got tangled up in his deviousness. First he told the Pharaoh that his wife Sarah was his sister, for fear that the Pharaoh would kill him in order to have sex with her,(Genesis 12:13) only to be found out and banished from Egypt. Later, (Genesis 20:2ff) for the same reason, he told the king of Gerar that his by now quite elderly wife (Sarah was now over 90 years old and stricken with age) really was his sister.

The archaeological evidence is strongly against the biblical account of Abraham. A vague legend or folk memory was fleshed out into a detailed history of the Hebrew people, but the biblical Abraham, ancestor of the Hebrew and Arabian peoples, never existed.

J Bright (A History of Israel) comes out strongly in favour of the historicity of Abraham: "When the traditions are examined in the light of the evidence, the first assertion to be made is that already suggested, namely, that the stories of the patriarchs fit authentically in the milieu of the second millennium ... far better than in that of any later period. The evidence is so massive and many-sided that we cannot begin to review it all." The basic problem in this argument is that the only information preserved was what could be found in the text of Genesis - there was no direct external confirmation, either epigraphic or literary. And Bright was wrong to say that the story of the Patriarchs fits better in the second millennium BCE than in any later period, if only because the most recent evidence for the domesticated camel in Palestine seems no earlier than the Iron Age, and to a large extent not before the seventh century BCE.

Much of what we know, or believe we know, about Abraham comes from extra-biblical traditions. Bruce Feiler (Abraham) says that probably less than one per cent of the stories told about Abraham appear in The Bible, with an explosion of detail beginning to appear in Jewish tradition from the third century BCE onwards.