The Call of Abraham
THE DEPARTURE FROM UR. THE MAN OF FAITH. RELIGION OF THE PATRIARCHS. ABRAHAM IN HISTORY. ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN COVENANTS.
Abraham is claimed by three great religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—as their spiritual forefather. But who exactly was he—and did he exist at all? Opinions on the question are still divided.
After the Tower of Babel was abandoned, the now dispersed branches of humanity continued to grow unabated. While the earliest descendants of Adam and Eve had sometimes met with divine displeasure, that was not to be the case with those that followed. Notably, the genealogical line of Noah’s son Shem led, eight generations later, to the birth of Abraham. Beloved by God, Abraham became the father of Isaac and grandfather of Jacob, the founder of the people of Israel.
Abraham is certainly one of the most significant figures in Genesis, perhaps in the whole of the Hebrew Bible. He is often thought of as the first monotheist, as well as an exemplar of religious faith; his was not an untroubled life, but throughout it all he maintained his trust in God. Some of these ideas are indeed rooted in the biblical text, but—as has been the case with other figures examined thus far—a good bit of what people associate with Abraham derives not so much from the words of the Bible itself as from the way in which those words were read by the Bible’s earliest interpreters.
The Journey from Mesopotamia
Abraham truly steps onto the biblical stage in chapter 12 of Genesis (though his birth and other details are mentioned earlier, Gen. 11:26–31). His story is introduced in these terms:
Now the LORD said to Abram,24 “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that it will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and anyone who curses you I will curse; and by you will all the families of the earth be blessed.”
Scripture does not tell us how Abraham reacted to this announcement, but it is clear how ancient interpreters reacted: with bewilderment. Their question here was rather similar to the one they asked about God’s choice of Noah before the flood, only more so: why Abraham? To promise someone that he would become the ancestor of a great and mighty nation (in fact, as the Bible goes on to relate, several nations) and to grant him personally so many good things that his very name would turn into a blessing (that is, in the future people will say of their own child, “May he be like Abraham”)—this was certainly heady stuff. What exactly had Abraham done at that point to deserve such things? As far as an ancient reader of Genesis was concerned, the answer was: nothing! Abraham had just now been introduced.
Not finding an adequate answer to this question in the book of Genesis, interpreters looked elsewhere, and eventually (we cannot know exactly when, but it was certainly before the start of the second century BCE) their gaze fell on a particular passage in the book of Joshua:
And Joshua said to all the people, “Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel: Long ago, your ancestors—Terah and his sons Abraham and Nahor—lived on the other side of the Euphrates, and they worshiped other gods. Then I took your father Abraham from beyond the River and led him through all the land of Canaan and made his offspring many.”
This passage seemed to be referring to the same moment in history as that just seen in Gen. 12:1–4, when Abraham still lived in Mesopotamia, “on the other side of the Euphrates,” and God first told him to leave his homeland.
At first glance, the Joshua passage seems only to compound the problem of Abraham not having done much to deserve God’s blessing: it says that Abraham, along with his father and brother, “worshiped other gods”—certainly a very bad thing to do in Israelite terms. But interpreters were intrigued by the apparent lack of any logical connection between this and the next sentence, “Then I took your father Abraham . . .” It seemed like a complete non sequitur. They also noticed that this sentence seemed to single Abraham out: “Then I took your father Abraham,” God says, but, rather pointedly, not Terah and not Nahor. So . . . if worshiping other gods was a bad thing to do, and the next sentence says that God singled Abraham out and chose him to go to the land of Canaan and there receive the blessings of many offspring and mighty nationhood, then this sequence seemed to imply that Abraham must at some point have stopped worshiping other gods, while Terah and Nahor continued to do so. That was why God singled Abraham out from the rest of his family and rewarded him as He did. “They,” Terah and Nahor, “served other gods,” but not Abraham.
True, such an interpretation seems to go against the plain sense of Josh. 24:2–3. As we have seen, however, one of the assumptions of ancient interpreters was that the Bible is perfectly harmonious and speaks with a single voice. Understanding these verses in Joshua as implying that Abraham did not serve other gods (or had stopped serving them at some point) fit well with everything else that was known about Abraham from elsewhere in the Bible. It not only explained why God chose Abraham to go to Canaan in Gen. 12:1–4, but it suited the rest of the Abraham stories in Genesis, which depict him as God’s faithful servant, and it seemed to resonate with passages that come later in the Bible as well. At one point, for example, God is said to refer to Abraham as the one “who loved Me” (Isa. 41:8—some texts translate, “My friend”). Indeed, many times in the Pentateuch God is specifically described as “the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob.” In another place in Scripture, God says, apparently alluding to this same moment of Abraham’s departure: “Consider Abraham your father, and Sarah who bore you: him alone did I call, and bless him and make him many” (Isa. 51:2). Singling out Abraham (“him alone”) sounded exactly like what interpreters wished to say about Josh. 24:2–3—that God had singled Abraham out from the rest of his family because Abraham, uniquely, did not worship other gods. Considering all this, it seemed to interpreters only reasonable to suppose that Josh. 24:2–3 was also referring to Abraham in a positive sense: his other family members may have served other gods, but not Abraham, and that explains why Abraham alone was summoned to Canaan.
The First Monotheist
As a result, Abraham came to acquire a specific image among ancient interpreters, and one that has carried through even to the present day: he was thought of as the discoverer of monotheism, the first person to figure out that there is really only one God,1 and that worshiping many gods and the things that they were identified with—the sun, the moon, and the stars, or statues or images of imagined powers—was useless, the practice of an illusion. This interpretation is very old; it is attested at the very beginning of the second century BCE:
And he [Abraham] said to his father, “What help or advantage do we have from these idols, before which you worship and bow down? . . . Do not worship them. Worship the God of heaven.”
Jubilees 12:2–4
The fact that the Bible says that Abraham came from the land of the Chaldeans (Gen. 11:27, 31, etc.) fit perfectly with this line of interpretation. For the Chaldeans were famous at the time of the ancient interpreters for one thing: their mastery of astronomy and astrology (the two pursuits were a single field in ancient times). So exact were their calculations concerning the sun, the moon, and the stars that the word “Chaldean” itself came to be a synonym for “astronomer” in Greek and Aramaic. If the Chaldeans pursued this science, it was not merely out of curiosity about the makeup of the universe: like many ancient peoples, they believed that the stars controlled human destiny, and that a careful study of astral movements might hold a clue to what was in store—indeed, by seeking the favor of this or that god identified with a certain celestial body, one might actually influence things for the good.
So, if Abraham was said to have left Chaldea, Astronomyland, for Canaan, interpreters saw this as a sign that he was turning his back on such foolish beliefs and devoting himself to God; indeed, perhaps it was precisely his training in this Chaldean science that led him, ultimately, to reject it:
And he was sitting alone [in Chaldea] making observations [of the stars] when a voice came into his heart saying, “All the signs of the stars and the signs of the sun and the moon are under the Lord’s control. Why am I seeking [them out]? If He wishes, He will make it rain morning and evening, and if He desires He will not make it fall, for everything is under His control.”
Jubilees 12:17–18
The same theme was taken up in the first century CE by another ancient interpreter, Philo of Alexandria. What he has to say is a good example of the allegorizing sort of interpretation that was popular with Alexandrian Jews and, later, early Christians:
The departing from one’s home as depicted by the literal text of Scripture was made by a certain wise man [Abraham]; but according to the rules of allegory, [it is made] by the soul [of anyone] fond of virtue who is searching for the true God. For the Chaldeans exercised themselves most especially with astronomy and attributed all things to the movements of the stars, believing that whatever is in the world is governed by forces encompassed in numbers and numerical proportions. They exalted the existence of what is visible, and took no thought for what is perceivable to the mind and [yet] invisible. But seeking out the numerical arrangement according to the cycles of the sun, moon, the planets and the fixed stars, as well as the changes of the yearly seasons and the overall connection of the things of heaven with what happens on earth, they supposed that the world itself was god, sacrilegiously making out that which is created to be like the One who had created it.
He [Abraham] grew up with this idea and was a true Chaldean [i.e., astronomer] for some time, until, opening the soul’s eye from the depth of sleep, he came to behold the pure ray in place of deep darkness, and he followed that light and perceived what he had not seen before, One who guides and steers the world, presiding over it and managing its affairs.
Philo, On Abraham 68–70
For Philo, the literal text of Scripture is true: there really was someone named Abraham who lived in Chaldea and left his home. But so what? The importance of this text (and of all of Scripture), he says, lies below the surface, in the hidden, allegorical meaning: Abraham here really symbolizes any soul looking for God. At first that soul is always a bit of a “Chaldean” in Philo’s definition, since we all grow up using our senses of sight and hearing to perceive the world, and we all come to think that these senses are the only kind of perception that exists. But then at some point, Philo says, something happens: “opening [its] eye from the depth of sleep,” the soul suddenly becomes aware of God’s presence. At that point God will say to the soul, as He said to Abraham, “Leave Chaldea!”—that is, leave your old way of thinking, in which the human senses are considered to be the only form of perception, and proceed on to a new way of thinking and, ultimately, to the Promised Land of knowing God.
Another interesting version of Abraham’s departure from Chaldea is found in the writings of the first-century historian Josephus:
He [Abraham] thus became the first person to argue that there is a single God who is the creator of all things, and that whatever any of these other things contribute to the good of the world, they are enabled to do so at His command, and not by any inherent force of their own. He was able to figure this out by the changes which land and sea undergo, and those that are connected with the sun and the moon, and from all those occurring in the skies. For if these bodies had any power over themselves, they would surely have arranged for themselves to be regularly ordered; but since this is not so, it is clear that they come together for our benefit not by any authority of their own, but by the power of One who commands, to whom alone it is proper to give honor and thanks. Because of these ideas the Chaldeans and the other people of Mesopotamia rose up against him, and having resolved, in keeping with God’s will and with His help, to leave his home, he settled in the land of Canaan.
Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 1.154–57
Josephus’s argument is as follows: as a good astronomer, Abraham knew that the length of the solar year is exactly 365¼ days. (We actually know that the Chaldeans had indeed calculated the length of the solar year with great accuracy, even in those ancient times.) But what kind of a number is 365¼? Certainly, if the sun were the supreme god, Josephus reasoned, it would have assigned itself a more handsome, rounder number—a hundred days, or a thousand days. The fact that the length of its cycle is this odd fraction proved to Abraham, according to Josephus, that the sun cannot be running things. Similarly with the moon: its annual cycle (that is, twelve full lunar months) comes out to 354 days. That’s not much better. Moreover, the fact that neither the sun nor the moon can force the other to conform to its number and make its annual cycle the same shows that neither of them is in charge. Likewise for all the heavenly bodies and the cycles of tides and so forth—none of these seems to have arranged for itself to be what Josephus calls “regularly ordered,” that is, having a cycle that comes out to some nice, round number. The conclusion was inescapable: some Higher Power had assigned all these insultingly odd numbers as a way of tipping off a sharp fellow like Abraham that there was indeed one Supreme Being, and one who was not to be identified with any observable body on earth or in the heavens.
The tradition of “Abraham the monotheist” is one of the oldest and best-known ideas about Abraham to this day. It of course passed from Judaism into early Christianity but also, somewhat later, became a central element in Islam.2 Here, for example, is the Qur’an’s description of Abraham’s enlightenment:
And when Abraham said to his father Azar, “Takest thou idols for gods? I see thee, and thy people, in manifest error.”
So We [God] were showing Abraham the kingdom of the heavens and earth, that he might be of those having sure faith.
When night outspread over him, he saw a star and said, “This is my Lord.”
But when it set he said, “I love not setters.”
When he saw the moon rising, he said, “This is my Lord.” But when it set he said, “If my Lord does not guide me I shall surely be of the people gone astray.”
When he saw the sun rising, he said, “This is my Lord—this is greater!” But when it set he said, “O my people, surely I am quit of that you associate. I have turned my face to Him who originated the heavens and the earth; [I am] a man of pure faith. I am not of the idolators.”3
Qur’an 6:74–79 (trans. A. J. Arberry)
At the same time, these traditions about Abraham continued to be passed on by Jews and Christians and ultimately came to be part of the general culture. Here, for example, is how the poet John Milton introduced his readers to Abraham in Paradise Lost. God spied Abraham, he says,
on this side Euphrates yet residing
Bred up in Idol-worship; O that men
(Canst thou believe?) should be so stupid grown,
While yet the Patriark liv’d, who scap’d the Flood,25
As to forsake the living God, and fall
To worship thir own work in Wood and Stone
For Gods! yet him God the most High voutsafes
To call by Vision from his Fathers house . . .
He leaves his Gods, his Friends, and native Soil
Ur of Chaldaea, passing now the Ford
To Haran.
XII:115–31
Thus, Abraham the monotheist, the one who rejected his father’s idolatrous worship of the stars, has been part of Abraham’s “image” in each of these three great monotheistic religions. But what do modern scholars know about Abraham and his religious beliefs?
Historicity’s Zigzag
Modern biblical scholars like to ask the same questions again and again about different biblical texts: How reliable is this as history? Can we believe that this is what actually happened? This is sometimes referred to as the issue of the text’s “historicity.” In the case of Abraham, scholarship has performed something of a zigzag over the last hundred years or so.
In the late nineteenth century, when modern, critical scholarship was hitting its stride, scholars were often skeptical of the biblical account, particularly after the rise of the Documentary Hypothesis. They believed that someone (that is, J or E) who lived long after Abraham, indeed, long after the people of Israel had settled in Canaan, made up these stories in order to justify that settlement: the Abraham narrative, they said, was designed to claim that although Israel’s illustrious ancestor had arrived in Canaan from a distant region, he was no mere squatter or land grabber; God Himself had granted the land to Abraham. In point of fact, scholars thought, this was no more than a retrospective fantasy (though they were kind enough not to use those words); nothing of the kind happened. In fact, Abraham may never have existed.
Then, early in the twentieth century, archaeologists began turning up evidence that seemed to confirm, or at least coincide with, elements of the Genesis narrative. Abraham’s hometown, Ur, turned out to be an actual city that archaeologists rediscovered at the mouth of the Euphrates.4 In its heyday it was a bustling metropolis of some twelve thousand people (that was bustling for those days!), with a magnificent ziqqurat and other urban niceties. Over the centuries the Persian Gulf coastline has moved drastically southward, but in Abraham’s day it was not far from Ur, and ships could easily proceed up the Euphrates to this city to unload their wares.
Other excavations in the region turned up additional details connected with Abraham. Far to the north of Ur, archaeologists unearthed the ancient town of Nuzi, a provincial outpost in the land of the Hurrians (referred to in the Bible as the Horites or Hivites; the capital city of this kingdom today lies buried under the Iraqi city of Kirkuk). Nuzi was east of the Tigris and a few hundred miles from Haran, the place to which Abraham’s family is said to travel after they leave Ur (Gen. 11:31). Particularly intriguing was Nuzi’s collection of clay tablets, on which were recorded the day-to-day dealings of its citizens in the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BCE. These texts seemed to reveal legal practices, customs, and a way of life that suited the Abraham narratives. Suddenly what had been altogether vague and hypothetical could be placed at actual excavation sites and in a social context that seemed to match the biblical accounts.
Another ancient site, Mari, was explored by French archaeologists starting in 1933. Mari sits nowadays on the border between Iraq and Syria, about 250 miles southwest of Nuzi; there archaeologists found a huge library of clay tablets—including diplomatic correspondence and royal archives, as well as numerous administrative and commercial documents. Here are mentioned, among other things, the names of cities in the neighborhood of nearby Haran. Thus, at one point, they refer to a city called Nahur; this is the same name as that of Abraham’s brother, Nahor (Gen. 11:27), and “the city of Nahor” (Gen. 24:10) is where Abraham sends his servant to find a wife for Isaac. (Several of Abraham’s ancestors similarly turn out to have the same name as places mentioned in other ancient tablets: Abraham’s father, Terah, and his forebears Peleg [Gen. 11:18] and Serug [Gen. 11:22] all bear the names of actual sites.) The Mari tablets are quite ancient, extending from the mid–third millennium BCE to the early eighteenth century BCE. The lower date would do pretty well as the time of the historical Abraham, so any overlap between Genesis and the Mari texts seemed to support, if only indirectly, the historicity of the Bible’s account of Abraham.
W. F. Albright
The connection of these archaeological finds with Genesis was highlighted by one of the central figures of biblical scholarship in the twentieth century, William Foxwell Albright. Born in 1891, Albright was the son of American Methodist missionaries working in Chile, where he spent his early years. (The family returned to the United States in 1903.) As the child of committed Christians, Albright had naturally been raised on the Bible and soon chose to make it the focus of his life; he studied at Johns Hopkins University with the great German biblicist Paul Haupt (1858–1926), completing his doctorate in Semitic languages. Albright traveled to Jerusalem to become the director of the American Schools of Oriental Research in 1920, a post he occupied until 1929 and then again from 1933 to 1936. His stay in the Holy Land allowed him to lead excavations at various sites, most notably at Tel Beit Mirsim; at the same time, he authored numerous studies on the whole gamut of subjects relating to the Bible and the ancient Near East. He also trained a good percentage of the entire next generation of American biblical scholars, all the while making a distinguished name for himself in a half-dozen different fields over the course of more than fifty years. Albright died in 1971.
This recital of the bare facts of his life will hardly suffice to explain Albright’s great influence over the course of biblical studies in the twentieth century; much of his importance was tied up in the sort of man he was and the times in which he worked. Brought up a conservative Christian, Albright was inclined to believe in the basic historicity of the biblical record, but he was too much of a scholar to be a mere apologist or to waste his considerable talents on doctrinaire casuistry. Instead, he simply proceeded on the not unreasonable assumption that, although inaccuracies and anachronisms may occur here and there in the Bible, a great many biblical traditions probably go back to a period not long after the one they describe; what they have to say may thus contain a good deal of historically reliable material. Therefore, archaeology and the things that it unearths—walled cities and palaces and household artifacts and (sometimes) written texts—may prove to be a valuable independent source of information about some of the places and events mentioned in the biblical text. Under Albright’s leadership, a whole school of American archaeologists set out to discover what they could about the history, particularly the political history (that is, wars and conquests, the rise of new centers of power and their eventual destruction) of the biblical period through excavations in the whole region of ancient Israel. This was the movement that came to call itself “biblical archaeology”—going out to do fieldwork “with the spade in one hand and the Bible in the other.”5
The influence of this school of biblical archaeology was enormous. Apart from the specific discoveries and the new arguments it inspired, biblical archaeology breathed new life into a discipline that, for the preceding decades, had spent much of its energies on texts alone—analyzing the Bible in keeping with the Documentary Hypothesis or similar pursuits. Now, suddenly, the ground underfoot held the promise of new information, information that, in the course of things, might lead to solid new evidence about Abraham the man and the nations he founded. Although Albright’s own training had been highly text-oriented—his teacher, Haupt, was a champion of the Documentary Hypothesis and close, philological analysis of the Bible—as time went on he became increasingly suspicious of what he considered the methodological fuzziness and subjectivity involved in such an approach. At the very least, Albright felt, textual work needed some outside correlative, some solid, objective, “scientific” basis for biblical studies—and archaeology seemed to hold the key.
Like any good archaeologist, W. F. Albright was a meticulous sorter. All human artifacts change over time; this is true of the design of automobiles and living-room chairs and can openers and ladies’ jewelry and one-horse plows and ancient writing implements. Not only do such artifacts change, they develop, with this year’s model being a modification of, but rarely a wholly new departure from, last year’s. It was Albright who helped perfect the careful examination of pottery remains in order to trace the history and development of clay pots and jars and dishes over a long period. Pottery styles turned out to change fairly quickly, making them a rather accurate tool for dating things: once a particular style of pot could be connected with a specific date or period, the near and distant variants on that style could be put into chronological order and then used to date undated sites. Since pottery was also quite a common commodity, it could be used to fit almost any excavated site into an overall history of the region.
Albright handled such detailed work with great accuracy, both at home and in the field, but he hardly limited himself to archaeology alone: anything touching on the ancient Near East interested him, from the biblical text itself to comparative philology to the Hebrew onomasticon (the corpus of proper names) to the development of the alphabet and epigraphy (the decipherment of ancient writing) to the rise of Israelite religion and (after they were discovered in the late 1940s) the Dead Sea Scrolls. He made significant contributions to all these fields and wrote at a furious clip. Nor was he a particularly self-effacing figure. He had, a former student once observed, “a personality the size of a large lake.” He was extremely generous to students and friends and possessed an undeniable magnetism, an unmistakable ego, and an intellect of sometimes breathtaking dimension.
It’s Really True
Albright himself summarized in brief the zigzag in the scholarly consensus on the historicity of the Abraham narratives and the other stories of Israel’s founders:
Until recently it was the fashion among biblical historians to treat the patriarchal sagas of Genesis as though they were artificial creations of Israelite scribes of the Divided Monarchy or tales told by imaginative rhapsodists around Israelite campfires during the centuries following the [Babylonian exile]. Eminent names among scholars can be cited for regarding every item of Gen. 11–50 as reflecting late invention, or at least retrojection of events and conditions under the Monarchy into the remote past, about which nothing was thought to have been really known to the writers of later days.
Archaeological discoveries since 1925 have changed all this. Aside from a few die-hards among older scholars, there is scarcely a single biblical historian who has not been impressed by the rapid accumulation of data supporting the substantial historicity of patriarchal tradition.6
Among the new bits of data Albright went on to mention was the very connection of Abraham’s family to Ur; this, he said, bespoke a truly ancient element in the Genesis story, since the historical Ur was destroyed in the seventeenth century BCE and “disappears from history for centuries.” If the text says that Abraham came from Ur, this assertion must come from the distant past—perhaps not long after the time when the historical Abraham himself was still alive, and of course well before the time when there even was a people of Israel.7 As for the journey from Ur to Haran and thence to Canaan, the Mari archives gave ample testimony to the free movement of individuals throughout this Amorite-controlled area in the late eighteenth century BCE. Abraham, Albright suggested, was probably a wealthy “donkey caravaneer” who went west to Canaan and eventually made it his home.
Influenced by this approach, other scholars sought to bolster it with further evidence unearthed in Mesopotamia. One commentator thus pointed out that Abraham refers to his servant Eliezer as his legal heir in Gen. 15:2–3. Since Eliezer was apparently not a blood relative, he argued, Abraham must have legally adopted him; such adoptions of mature adults are to be found in various legal documents discovered among the Nuzi archives. Indeed, it was suggested that this adoption might have actually been a legal fiction through which Abraham had obtained a loan. That is, in a legal system where real estate could not be sold to an outsider, Abraham might have adopted the wealthy Eliezer as his heir and then willed to him some piece of property in order to secure a loan.8 Another scholar pointed to the Bible’s odd narration of how Abraham twice ran into trouble (in Genesis 12 and 20, as similarly did his son Isaac in Genesis 26) after a king thought that the beautiful Sarah was merely Abraham’s sister and not his wife—and thus available for the king’s own attentions. The confusion, it was claimed, derived from another sort of fictitious adoption documented in the Nuzi texts: according to an ancient Hurrian marriage custom, a wife could be “adopted” by her husband as his sister and thereby gain a status superior to that of an ordinary wife. Once again, a puzzling element in the Abraham narrative now appeared to be explained, and in a way that was utterly in keeping with Abraham’s presumed geographic and chronological milieu.9
Was there an actual individual named Abraham? The very fact that his name is “changed” from Abram to Abraham (Gen. 17:5) suggested to some scholars that two sets of ancient traditions about the same person (one set referred to him as Abram, the other by what looks like a dialect variant of this name, Abraham) had been preserved and harmonized via the name-change story. While “Abraham” is quite unprecedented among the personal names preserved in ancient records, “Abram” might well be related to, or a variant of, the common name Abiram—which is indeed the name of a person, or several persons, within and outside the Bible.10 Even if the existence of such an individual could not be proven conclusively, the story of Abraham’s migration to Canaan might well have originated with a whole group of people who claimed him as an ancestor; he, or they, did indeed make the six-hundred-mile trek from Ur to Haran and, after a time, moved on to ancient Canaan, bringing with them their worship of their own God. As G. Ernest Wright, an archaeologist and Albright student, wrote, “We shall probably never be able to prove that Abram really existed, that he did this or that, said thus and so, but what we can prove is that his life and his times, as reflected in the stories about him, fit perfectly with the early second millennium, but imperfectly with any later period.”11
Perhaps Not, After All
In more recent times, however, this whole approach to the historicity of the Abraham narratives has come to be questioned. Many of the stories have been found to contain elements reminiscent of a period long after the supposed time of Abraham. The Philistines, for example, are described as having dealings with Abraham and Isaac in Genesis 20 and 26, but nonbiblical sources suggest that the Philistine presence in the region began only hundreds of years after Abraham’s supposed arrival, during the time of the Judges. Their mention in Genesis may thus be an anachronism (although some scholars have argued that these later Philistines were preceded by a quite distinct people that may have borne the same name).12 As for the alleged overlap between ancient Mesopotamian laws and various elements in the Abraham narratives, scholars nowadays are quite skeptical. Just because a certain ancient law or custom is attested in a clay tablet from Mesopotamia in the second millennium does not mean that, centuries later, the same things were not still in practice, or at least not still known, either in Mesopotamia or in Israel itself.13 What is more, when it comes down to cases, significant differences appear between the Nuzi texts and the biblical passages they supposedly explained. In the phony collateral scheme, for example, the transfer of land in the Nuzi documents is immediate and not contingent on the death of the adopting party; the purchaser really is not an heir at all. Further examination of the wife-sister adoption has thrown the validity of that explanation in doubt as well: in the Nuzi documents, the person who adopts the woman as his sister turns out usually not to be the woman’s present or future husband.14 Moreover, on reflection, the Nuzi law really did not explain these odd biblical tales anyway, which seemed designed to celebrate a certain deviousness or trickery on Abraham’s part.15
Beyond all these points, scholars have noted the absence of any reference to Abraham in the writings of Israel’s eighth- and seventh-century prophets. These prophets know, and refer to, other traditions about Israel’s past—the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Hos. 11:8; Amos 4:11; Isa. 1:9; Zeph. 2:9), the story of Jacob and Esau (Hos. 12:4–5, 13), and the exodus from Egypt and Israel’s desert wanderings (Hos. 2:7; Amos 2:10; 3:1; Isa. 11:16; Mic. 6:4–5). But there is not a word about Abraham until we get to parts of the book of Isaiah that scholars generally date to the sixth century or later (Isa. 29:22; 41:8; 51:1–3; 63:16) and scattered references elsewhere, which scholars date to the same period (Mic. 7:20—all of this chapter is held to reflect the postexilic period—as well as Jer. 33:26 and Ezek. 33:24). This is most surprising for a figure who appears to be so central in Genesis. If he were well known as an ancestor of Israel in the eighth or seventh century, scholars now ask, would not one of these prophets have referred to him?
Perhaps the best one-word summary of the current state of research is: puzzled. The above considerations all argue against Albright’s view of the Abraham stories in Genesis. But if these stories do not go back to authentic reminiscences of life in Mesopotamia in the second millennium, when were they written? Some scholars have gone over to the other extreme, claiming that the Abraham cycle is a late invention, one that was composed only in the postexilic period. Thus, one researcher has argued that if the Bible says that Abraham migrated from Babylon to Canaan, that is because Abraham’s story was created to reflect the Jews’ own “migration” from Babylon after having been exiled there in the sixth century, a millennium after the putative time of Abraham! That is why Abraham is never mentioned by the eighth-century prophets—he hadn’t been invented yet.16 Other scholars have built on this approach in order to claim more broadly that the whole history of ancient Israel as presented in the Hebrew Bible is altogether unreliable, much of it out-and-out invention and fantasy and political propaganda.17
Equally disturbing for contemporary scholars has been a new questioning of the validity of Wellhausen’s understanding of the Pentateuch’s composition and its sources.18 In fact, some scholars are now arguing that the Documentary Hypothesis needs to be completely reconfigured. J and E, the two sources that Wellhausen and subsequent scholars had always considered the oldest, are actually not that old, they say—indeed, the source designated D, in the view of some, is the earliest Pentateuchal source. This view does not appear to have won instant acceptance—there are good arguments against it19—but it has scored enough points to leave many scholars hedging their bets.20
All this has had repercussions for the scholarly view of the stories about Abraham. These stories, most scholars would probably now concede, along with those of the other patriarchs and matriarchs, do seem to contain some very ancient material—probably nothing going back to the time when Abraham and company actually lived (if they did exist), but arguably going back to the tenth or eleventh century BCE, perhaps even earlier. The stories may have been transmitted orally for a time and/or been passed on in the form of story poems similar to the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15) or Deborah’s Song (Judges 5). Then, at a certain point, they were transformed into their present, prose formulations—but when that actually happened remains the subject of debate. In short: how far back do the Abraham stories go, and how authentic are they? The pendulum seems to have swung one way, then another, and perhaps just now it is moving somewhere toward the middle.
One matter on which there is general agreement among modern scholars is that of Abraham the monotheist. Was Abraham truly an exponent of the belief that there is only one true God in the world? This idea, like the Fall of Man, Cain’s satanic birth, and Noah the preacher, appears to have been wholly the creation of the ancient interpreters. When it comes down to cases, not a single verse in the book of Genesis actually says that Abraham believed in the existence of only one God. It is hard to see how he could have. If there even was an Abraham, a modern scholar would say, he lived and traveled about in a polytheistic world. There is nary a hint, even in the Bible’s much later depiction of him, that Abraham’s beliefs differed in kind from those of the people he encountered or even that this was ever a subject of discussion. He is presented as worshiping his own God (and perhaps as worshiping others as well),21 but not as an exponent of monotheism.22
Covenants
One important biblical institution has, however, undeniably been illuminated by research into Abraham and the ancient Near East, and that is the institution of “covenant” (in Hebrew, bĕrit). “Covenant” is just a fancy English term for an agreement, and that is precisely what a bĕrit was: “treaty” or “charter” might likewise be appropriate translations. Normally, a bĕrit was concluded between two or more individuals, or between individuals representing their larger groups, as seems to be the case with the covenant between Abraham and Abimelech (Gen. 21:27). A bĕrit was different from modern-day agreements in one respect, however. Nowadays, when we make a solemn agreement with someone, it is usually followed by a particular act: a piece of paper with some writing on it is put in front of the agreeing parties, and each party then takes a pen (not a pencil!) and puts some squiggles on a blank line at the bottom of the document. People explain this ceremony by saying that it is required because, should some doubt later arise about the agreement’s validity, an expert can be called in to make sure that the two signatures actually are those of the agreeing parties. This may, on rare occasions, happen. In my experience, however, disputes rarely arise about the validity of the signatures; usually, the dispute is about the meaning of the words that were printed on the page before either party signed it. Still, the signatures are deemed crucial—indeed, sometimes the signing has to be witnessed and even attested by a licensed notary. Why all this fuss? A cultural anthropologist would probably say that the real function of the signing ceremony is largely symbolic: it is a ritual, a ceremony designed to make the agreement official and put it into effect. After signing, both parties agree, there is no turning back.
In the ancient Near East they of course had documents—at first, as we have seen, clay tablets; these were inscribed with hatch marks from a wedge-shaped marker while the clay was still wet. (This is the writing system known as cuneiform, from the Latin cuneus, “wedge.”) These clay tablets could be stored for future use and even authenticated in some fashion. But agreements were not generally solemnized and put into effect by being written down and authenticated (though they were often committed to writing at some point). Instead, there was a different sort of ceremony—or rather, a range of different sorts of ceremonies; one of the most common involved the killing and cutting up of an animal or animals, often leading to a festive meal. After the animals were slaughtered in the presence of the agreeing parties, the agreement was deemed to have gone into effect. Such covenants were known throughout the ancient Near East; they were called by different names, but the element of slaughtering an animal was basically the same. In Akkadian, “Let’s go slaughter a donkey” was an idiom meaning, “Let us make an agreement.”23
What the killing of the animal was meant to imply is difficult to say. Some texts unambiguously assert that the killing and dismemberment was intended to be a not-too-veiled threat. “Just as this calf is cut up, so may Matiel be cut up,” says an Aramaic treaty of the eighth century BCE, implying that such is the penalty for breach of contract. Another document testifies: “Abba-AN swore to Yarim-lim the oath of the gods and cut the neck of a lamb, (saying): If I take back what I gave you. . . .”24 Similarly: “If Mati’ilu violates the covenant and oath to the gods, then . . . as the head of this ram shall be struck off, so shall his head be struck off.”25 But such explanations may merely represent (as was the case with ordinary sacrifices) a later attempt to find a rationale for a long-established ritual whose original rationale lay shrouded in hoary antiquity. Whatever the true reason, the act of cutting up animals was apparently a big part of the original idea: in biblical Hebrew, covenants are usually “cut,” and this seems to bespeak the centrality of this ritual act.26
“O Lord, Can I Get That in Writing?”
After Abraham has journeyed from Ur to Haran and from Haran on to Canaan, the Bible reports, God appeared to him in a vision, saying to him, “Do not be afraid, Abram, I am granting you a very great reward” (Gen. 15:1).27 Abraham is skeptical—what good will it do to him to be rewarded if he has no heirs? God reassures him on this score: he will indeed have descendants, in fact, as numerous as the stars.
Then He said to him: “I am the LORD who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.” But he said, “O LORD my Master, how can I know that I will possess it?” He said to him: “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” He brought Him all of these and then cut them in two, laying each half over against the other. . . .
Until the twentieth century, this passage, like so many in the Bible, must have seemed somewhat mysterious. What was the point of cutting up these animals? Now, in the light of everything that is known about ancient Near Eastern covenants and treaties, scholars believe that Abraham’s pious-sounding question, “O LORD my Master, how can I know that I will possess it?” might better be reworded: “O LORD, do you think I could have that in writing?” What Abraham is really asking is that God’s promise to give him “this land to possess” be made official—and God obliges:
When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces [of animals]. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I give this land.”
The fire and torch, modern scholars say, are apparently intended to represent God’s physical presence here, and by walking between the cut-up animal carcasses God was doing exactly what the text says He was doing (and what an ordinary human being would be doing by the same action), making a covenant with Abraham.28 Henceforth, the land would belong to his descendants.
The idea of this covenant may thus, according to scholars, be altogether political in origin—a way for later Israelites to say, “This land was promised to us.” Perhaps, some even assert, there never was an Abraham, and the existence of any such divine grant of the land to Israel was in any case the pipe dream of a later age. At the same time, however, the very idea of God as a maker of binding, legal agreements is not limited to this episode. It recurs elsewhere in the Bible—in fact, it seems to represent something basic about how Israel understood God and His way of interacting with them as a people.