Did Abraham exist

Answer 1

Another answer from our community:

"The interesting discovery of the name Abi-ramu on Babylonian contracts of about 2000 BC/BCE does not prove the Abraham of the Old Testament to be an historical person, even as the fact that there were Amorites in Babylonia at the same period does not make it certain that the 'patriarch' was one of their number..... (more)"

source; see link "Abraham Wikipedia" on left..

Another answer

To start off with, Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldees, and that has been discovered by archaeologists. To end with, the Jewish religion, the Christian religion, and the Islamic religion all believe Abraham was a literal person who actually lived. There is no evidence to prove he did not exist .

Answer 2

Biblical scholars are confident that Abraham never really lived. Even if he did exist, the stories written about Abraham in Genesis are not historically true. For example, Abraham could not have walked to the land of the Philistines centuries before these sea people came ashore in the Levant. While this alone does not prove his non-existence, it points in that direction. Of course, Archaeology can not be expected to prove or disprove the existence of a man like Abraham.

The name Abraham means 'Father of many', Isaac means 'He laughs' (a reference to Abraham laughing when told that Isaac would be born) and Jacob means 'Takes by the heel', but also seems related to the verb meaning to supplant and could thus be given as 'supplanter'. Notice how all these names relate to the stories around them, as if oral storytellers had created the names and/or events to help them remember the storylines. This militates against Abraham's existence.

Genesis 17:17 says that Abraham was exactly 100 years old and Sarah was 90 years old when Isaac was born. These seem improbable ages for them to have their sons, not only because of their extreme ages but because they are such nice, round numbers, implying that Abraham was not really a hundred years old. Coincidences like this, and Isaac being exactly 60 years old when Jacob was born, point to legend not fact.

Even Abraham's age is a giveaway, as are the ages of Sarah, Isaac and Jacob. Not just because they were so impossibly long, but because they point to the secret use of numerology based on the number 17:

1. Abraham lived to 175 (5 X 5 X 7)
2. Isaac lived to 180 (6 X 6 X 5)
3. Jacob lived to 147 (7 X 7 X 3

• Each lifespan involves a perfect square (5, 6, then 7 in a numeric series),
• the third factor also forms a series (7, 5, 3)
• in each case the sum of the factors is 17.

Then we find that Genesis says Sarah lived to 127 years, which is the sum of these consecutive square numbers plus 17 (127 = 52 +62 + 72 + 17). All too much of a coincidence to be plausibly true.

If the Patriarchs lived, then the Israelites should have sojourned in Egypt, but there is no evidence of this in the Egyptian records. If Moses did not live then it is unlikely that Abraham lived. For Moses to have lived, there would have to have been an Exodus from slavery in Egypt and a military conquest of the land of the Canaanites. Not only do almost all scholars say there was no biblical Exodus from Egypt and that there was no unified conquest of the Canaanites, they say that the Hebrew people were really Canaanites who left the region of the rich coastal cities to settle in the hitherto sparsely populated hinterland. There was no biblical Moses and there was no Hebrew Patriarch called Abraham.