Although Adam became the first Muslim by repenting immediately of his disobedience and submitting himself to the judgment (and punishment) of Allah, it is Abraham whom the Qur’an presents as the truly paradigmatic Muslim not just in his maturity but even in his youth. Like Muhammad after him, Abraham in the Qur’an not only submits to Allah but fearlessly champions Him against the pretenses of any alleged rival. And because Allah repeatedly expresses His warm approval of Abraham, almost His delight, Abraham is uniquely important as a vehicle for Allah’s indirect self-characterization in the Qur’an.
A richly revealing passage, and a good place to begin, is Qur’an 21:51–73. Allah has been consoling Muhammad, His culminating messenger, that though “Messengers before you were mocked,” Muhammad will be vindicated as those earlier messengers were: “But those who mocked them were overwhelmed by that which they used to mock” (21:41). And before long, Allah is reminding Muhammad in more detail of the tribulations and final vindication of Abraham:
Before, We had bestowed right guidance on Abraham, and knew him well.
This was when he said to his father and his people: “What are these idols that you keep ministering to?”
They said: “We found our ancestors had worshipped them.”
He said: “You and your ancestors are in manifest error.”
They said: “Do you come to us with the truth, or are you jesting?”
He said: “Rather, it is your Lord, Lord of the heavens and earth, Who created them.
Of this I am witness.
By God, I shall confute your idols, once you depart and turn your backs.”
So he smashed them into fragments, all but their greatest, hoping they would turn back to God.
They said: “Who did this to our gods? He must truly be wicked.”
They said: “We heard a young man make mention of them, called Abraham.”
They said: “Bring him out in full view of people, and perhaps they will give witness.”
They said: “Is it you who did this to our gods, O Abraham?”
He said: “Rather, it was this greatest among them who did it.
Ask them, if they can speak.”
They reconsidered within themselves, and said: “It is you who are the wicked ones.”
But then—head over heels they were made to turn: “You know these do not speak.”
He said: “Do you indeed worship, apart from God, that which has no power to benefit you in anything, nor harm you?
“Shame on you and on what you worship instead of God! Will you not come to your senses?”
They said: “Burn him, and uphold your gods, if ready to act thus.”
We said: “O fire, be cool and comforting to Abraham.”
And they intended him malice, but We made them the losers,
And We delivered him and Lot to the land We blessed for all mankind.
And We bestowed on him Isaac and Jacob, as an added bounty from Us,
And all We created righteous.
And We made them leaders, guiding to Our commands.
And We inspired them to do righteous deeds,
To perform the prayer, and hand out alms,
And they were Our worshippers. (21:51–73)
Intergenerational conflict between fathers and sons is a universal theme in literature and, often enough, in religion as well. Rudyard Kipling wrote, in bitterness after his son’s death in World War I, “If any question why we died, / Tell them, because our fathers lied.” Wilfred Owen’s “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”—a poem heavy with Abrahamic echoes—is yet another World War I poem that makes the same bitter point.
It would be a mistake, however, to read Abraham’s rebellion through this perennial psychological filter. For though there is boldness in the young man’s words to “his father and his people,” there is no bitterness. Allah makes it plain in innumerable statements throughout the Qur’an that those who do not worship Him as the one and only deity are doomed to suffer forever in hell, and so it is an act of mercy on Abraham’s part to acquaint his people with their fatal error. Warning was an essential part of Muhammad’s message to the people of Mecca, and so it was also for Abraham. Just as important, Abraham is not delivering this warning simply on his own authority. Allah has deputed him for this errand, giving him “right guidance” beforehand.
How did Allah impart judgment to Abraham? At Qur’an 6:75–79, He describes how He tutored Abraham to prepare him to challenge Azar, his father (called Terah in the Bible):
This is how We made Abraham see the kingdom of the heavens and the earth, so that he would have certain faith.
When night enveloped him he saw a star;
He said: “This is my Lord.”
When the star set, he said: “I love not things that set.”
When he saw the rising moon, he said:
“This is my Lord,” but when it set, he said:
“If my Lord does not guide me, I shall be among those who go astray. When he saw the rising sun he said
“This is my Lord, for it is larger,” but when it set he said:
“O people, I am quit of your idolatry. I have set my face towards Him Who created the heavens and the earth, pure in my worship, nor am I one who associates anything with God.”
The term hanīf, untranslated in The Study Quran, is translated just above as “pure in my worship” and, in the Norton Critical Edition of the Qur’an, as “one by nature upright,” where the phrase “by nature” perhaps reflects the Muslim view that pure monotheism is mankind’s natural religion. Muslims would later use the term hanīf respectfully to designate non-Christian, non-Jewish, but pre-Muhammadan monotheists (there were such Arab monotheists in the Hijaz at the time of Muhammad’s birth). Among all such proto-monotheists, the hanīf par excellence is Abraham.
But not to digress further about the Arabic term, what Allah means to call to Muhammad’s mind, in recounting how He led Abraham from relative uncertainty into absolute certainty, is that “This was Our argument which We conveyed to Abraham against his people. We elevate in degrees whomsoever We wish. Your Lord is All-Wise, Omniscient” (6:83, emphasis added). Allah could have raised someone else up, but it was Abraham whom he actually did raise up and whom he armed with this cosmological argument so as the more effectively to bring the saving message to Azar and his people that “it is your Lord, Lord of the heavens and earth, Who created them. Of this I am witness” (21:56).
The challenge to Azar’s people then is double: first, they must accept Allah and reject all rival gods as false; second, they must accept Azar’s son Abraham as a witness bringing testimony about Allah. But their reaction to this challenge, in effect, is the scoffing and dismissive “Surely you jest. Surely you can’t be serious.” Ah, but Abraham, Allah’s messenger, could not be more serious! He demonstrates that he will not be trifled with by breaking their idols into pieces when their backs are turned, “all but their greatest, hoping they would turn back to God.” The meaning of this stratagem becomes clear as the story continues.
For when the people ask who has shattered the idols and young Abraham is implicated, he says that “it was this greatest among them who did it.” If they doubt him, they should ask the other, wounded idols themselves: “Ask them, if they can speak.” At first, the idolaters do so, proceeding as if indeed the idols could answer a direct question and even accusing them: “It is you who are the wicked ones.” But then, “head over heels,” they return to their prior suspicion of Abraham, coming to their senses and saying, “You know these do not speak.”
With these words, of course, they have fallen into Abraham’s trap, and in righteous and triumphant wrath he cries, “Shame on you and on what you worship instead of God!” In reply to this, they become a lynch mob, determined to burn this outrageous young heretic at the stake. “Burn him, and uphold your gods!” they cry. But Allah foils their plan, whether or not they quite realize that it is He who has done so. The sentence, “O fire, be cool and comforting to Abraham” is not addressed to them but to the fire, after all, and at no point does Allah say that Abraham was bound or placed on any kind of pyre. “We made them the losers,” Allah says, but just how this was accomplished He leaves unclear.
What is quite clear, however, is that Allah is pleased with Abraham’s zeal on His behalf. Allah rewards Abraham and his brother Lot with “the land We blessed for all mankind” and further rewards Abraham with his son Isaac and his grandson Jacob. These two Allah then makes leaders and teachers of Islam, like Abraham himself—guiding them forward as Allah guided Abraham before them.
But what of Azar? Did he accept the message that his son was bringing and accept him in the end as Allah’s designated messenger? It would seem not. At Qur’an 26:83–95, we read a rather touching prayer to Allah in which Abraham seems to beg forgiveness for Azar, followed by a vivid picture of the judgment that must await the older man as an intransigent unbeliever. In A. J. Arberry’s poetic translation:
My Lord, give me Judgment, and join me
with the righteous,
and appoint me a tongue of truthfulness
among the others.
Make me one of the inheritors of the
Garden of Bliss,
and forgive my father, for he is one
of those astray.
Degrade me not upon the day when they
are raised up,
the day when neither wealth nor sons
shall profit
except for him who comes to God with
a pure heart.
And Paradise shall be brought forward
for the godfearing,
and Hell advanced for the perverse.
It shall be said to them, “Where is that
you were serving
apart from God? Do they help you
or help themselves?”
Then they shall be pitched into it,
they and the perverse
and the hosts of Iblis, all together.
There is a poignancy in this passage as Allah recalls to Muhammad how Abraham first begged forgiveness for Azar but then immediately went on to concede that Hell is inescapable for those, like Azar, who in their lifetimes did not worship Allah. In this prayer, we see how far indeed Abraham’s rejection of his father stands from Kipling’s bitterness. And though Allah, unless He exercises His mercy option on the Day of Judgment, fully intends to punish Azar with Hellfire for all eternity, He does not fault Abraham for his devotion to the old idolater whose faith Abraham himself has abandoned. At Qur’an 31:14–15, Allah says:
And We enjoined upon man to care for his parents—his mother carried him in hardship upon hardship, and his weaning lasts two years—and to say: “Give thanks to Me and to your parents, and to Me is your homecoming.” And yet, should they press you to associate with Me that of which you have no knowledge, do not obey them, but befriend them in this life, in kindness. And follow the path of one who has turned in repentance to Me.
That Allah recalls to Muhammad both Abraham’s prayer and Allah’s own stern counsel is the more affecting when we recall that the orphaned Muhammad’s uncle and foster father, Abu Talib, never managed to break with his ancestral faith. Although he defended Muhammad against the Prophet’s enemies in Mecca, Abu Talib, like Azar, was headed for Hell as an unbeliever, absent, again, some exceptional intervention on Allah’s part. Faith can hold families together. It can also tear them apart.
In the Gospel of Matthew (10:34−6), Jesus, quoting (in italic below) the Israelite prophet Micah, famously says:
“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth: it is not peace I have come to bring, but a sword. For I have come to set son against father, daughter against mother, daughter-in-law against mother-in-law, a person’s enemies will be the members of his own household.”
The sword to which Jesus refers in this passage is not a sword of military conquest but of domestic turmoil and familial division. Speaking with divine authority, the Messiah intended to—and indeed he did—bring dissension to the greater Jewish household of his time. Muhammad would do no less in his time. Allah comforts Muhammad by telling him that as it was thus for the great Abraham, so it must ever be, whatever the cost: devotion to God must always trump devotion to family.
Granting that Abraham dealt kindly with his idolatrous father, did he for all that remain resident in Azar’s household? In the Apocalypse of Abraham, a visionary Jewish text, originally written in Hebrew and roughly contemporary with the writing of the New Testament, Abraham’s father is not just an idolater but an idol-sculptor and an idol-merchant. Young Abraham’s exposure to the all-too-human manufacture and sale of supposedly divine images gives rise in him to a crisis of idolatrous faith. He then prays to (the real) God to reveal himself; and when God speaks, He instructs Abraham to leave his father’s house. (Abraham’s father is Azar in the Qur’an but Terah in the Bible and later Jewish texts.)
The text of the Apocalypse of Abraham reads, in English translation:
And it came to pass as I was thinking things like these with regard to my father Terah in the court of my house, the voice of the Mighty One came down from the heavens in a stream of fire, saying and calling, “Abraham, Abraham!” And I said, “Here I am.” And he said, “You are searching for the God of gods, the Creator, in the understanding of your heart. I am he. Go out from Terah, your father, and go out of the house, that you too may not be slain in the sins of your father’s house.” And I went out. And it came to pass as I went out—I was not yet outside the entrance of the court—that the sound of a great thunder came and burned him and his house and everything in his house, down to the ground, forty cubits.1
At Qur’an 19:42–48, Allah recalls for Muhammad a story somewhat similar to that told in the Apocalypse of Abraham:
And mention in the Book Abraham; he was a man of deepest faith, a prophet.
Remember when he said to his father: “My father, why do you worship what does not hear, what does not see, what is of no use to you whatsoever?
“My father, there has come to me of Knowledge what did not come to you, so follow me and I shall guide you to a level path.
“My father, do not worship Satan: Satan has always been disobedient to the All-Merciful.
“My father, I fear a torment will touch you from the All-Merciful, and you become a follower of Satan.”
He said: “Are you renouncing my gods, O Abraham? If you do not desist, I shall curse you. Leave me alone for a while.”
He said: “Peace be upon you! I shall ask my Lord forgiveness for you, for He has always been kind to me. I shall keep aloof from you and from what you worship instead of God, and I shall call upon my Lord; perhaps by calling Him I will not be amiss.”
Here, Abraham deals with Azar with the kindness that Allah prescribes and even promises to beg Allah’s forgiveness for him, but the rift between them is deep, all the same, and will prove fatal in the end for Azar, just as in the Apocalypse of Abraham it proved fatal in a different way for Terah. In subordinating familial to creedal values, Abraham in these passages is again like Jesus who, when interrupted among his disciples by a report that his mother and his brothers were waiting for him outside, said,
“Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?” And stretching out his hand towards his disciples he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. Anyone who does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” (Matthew 12:48–50)
Allah, in just this way, is pleased that Abraham has placed devotion to Him so clearly above devotion to Azar, a point he makes even more forthrightly at Qur’an 9:113–114, with unmistakable further reference to Muhammad himself:
It is not right for the Prophet {i.e., for you, Muhammad} and the believers to ask forgiveness for polytheists, even if they are relatives, once it has become clear to them that they are denizens of hell. When Abraham asked forgiveness for his father, this was only to fulfil a promise he had promised him. But once it became clear to him that he was an enemy of God, he washed his hands of him—Abraham was one who sighed much, and was self-restrained.
Abraham’s sigh is understandable. Allah does not blame him for grieving that Azar must be damned and even praises him for his gentle, restrained manner, but Abraham must and does submit to Allah’s determination that all unbelievers, Azar included, are to be “denizens of hell” forever. This was why Allah “had taken Abraham for an intimate” (Qur’an 4:125) and rewarded him, as already noted: “When he abandoned them and what they worshipped instead of God, We bestowed on him Isaac and Jacob, and each We made a prophet. And We granted them of Our mercy, and conferred upon them the highest praise on tongues of truth” (Qur’an 19:49–50).
The character of Abraham is sharply and consistently drawn in the Qur’an, but the focus of our inquiry is not Abraham per se, or any one personage who appears both in the Qur’an and in the Bible but rather God and how His character is indirectly revealed in the respective scriptures through His interaction with a series of these personages. In such a comparison, attention to formal or stylistic differences between the two scriptures can sometimes be surprisingly helpful.
In the Qur’an, Allah is omnipresent because He is the speaker at every moment. When a story is being recalled, He is, accordingly, the narrator. In Genesis, by contrast, when a story is being told the narrator is anonymous. As I said earlier, Jewish tradition, to be sure, honors Moses as the divinely inspired author of Torah, which comprises the five “Books of Moses,” of which Genesis is the first. Page by page, however, the text of Genesis never presents Moses in that role. No, the anonymous narrating voice is taken for granted; always reliable, it is simply, automatically “there,” as if the Bible were telling its own story.
In the Qur’an, both because Allah is never offstage and because He often refers to the very Qur’an that He is speaking into existence as a book, the character of the Qur’an as a spoken-and-then-written artifact seems to be at the front of Allah’s mind. Allah is far more intensely and audibly involved in the Qur’an as scripture than Yahweh is ever involved in, say, the Book of Genesis as scripture. Put most simply, Allah cares more about writing than Yahweh does.
And yet within the stories that Allah tells about Abraham in the Qur’an, Allah rarely assigns Himself a speaking role. He is there as the narrator, to be sure, from start to finish; and yet within His narration He rarely or never says, “And then We said to Abraham,” much less “And then I said to Abraham.” Abraham’s words to Allah are quoted directly on occasion; an example would be the prayer quoted above. Allah’s conversations with Abraham are not quoted directly.
In Genesis, by contrast, the anonymous narrator often quotes Yahweh’s words directly. On one occasion, repartee between Yahweh and Abraham becomes exceptionally lively and, on Abraham’s part, only barely reverent. The occasion is Abraham’s attempt to talk Yahweh out of destroying the sinful city of Sodom:
Abraham stepped forward and said, “Will you really destroy the upright with the guilty? Suppose there are fifty upright people in the city. Will you really destroy it? Will you not spare the place for the sake of the fifty upright in it? Do not think of doing such a thing: to put the upright to death with the guilty, so that upright and guilty fare alike! Is the judge of the whole world not to act justly?” Yahweh replied, “If I find fifty upright people in the city of Sodom, I shall spare the whole place because of them.”
Abraham spoke up and said, “It is presumptuous of me to speak to the Lord, I who am dust and ashes: Suppose the fifty upright were five short? Would you destroy the whole city because of five?” “No,” he replied, “I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there.” Abraham persisted and said, “Suppose there are forty to be found there?” “I will not do it,” he replied, “for the sake of the forty.” (Genesis 18:23–29)
The bargaining continues down to the number ten. True, in the end Yahweh destroys Sodom after all, yet a deity who can be argued with and bargained with in this way can only seem less toweringly august and overpowering than one with whom such back talk is simply and utterly out of the question. For all his power and dynamism, Yahweh in the Bible is less absolute and overwhelming than is Allah in the Qur’an.
That said, nowhere in the qur’anic interaction between Allah and Abraham as reviewed above does Allah deliver for Abraham’s private benefit a demonstration of his power as intimately terrifying as the one Yahweh stages at Genesis 15. There, the anonymous narrator begins with another candid dialogue between Abraham and Yahweh, as Abraham—at this point still named Abram—complains that Yahweh has not kept his fertility promise:
[Yahweh] then said to him, “I am Yahweh who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldaeans [in far-off Mesopotamia] to give you this country [Canaan] as your possession.” “Lord Yahweh,” Abram replied, “how can I know that I shall possess it?” He said to him, “Bring me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old goat, a three-year-old ram, a turtledove and a young pigeon.” He brought him all these, split the animals down the middle and placed each half opposite the other; but the birds he did not divide. And whenever birds of prey swooped down on the carcasses, Abram drove them off….
When the sun had set and it was dark, there appeared a smoking firepot and a flaming torch passing between the animals’ pieces. That day Yahweh made a covenant with Abram in these terms:
“To your descendants I give this country,
from the River of Egypt to the Great River,
the River Euphrates, the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.” (15:7–11, 17–21)
What kind of covenant is this? It is a covenant that reveals the characteristic concern of Yahweh as distinct from the characteristic concern of Allah. Yahweh is a fertility god; Allah is a theolatry god. The rare and archaic English word theolatry—meaning god-worship as idolatry is idol-worship—effectively names Allah’s characteristic concern both that He Himself be worshipped and that no other god be worshipped and thus “associated” with Him. Yahweh, by strong contrast, never demands worship from Abraham or expresses any indignation that another being might be receiving the worship due only to Him. The matter of worship seems not to be on His mind at all. Yahweh’s concern is elsewhere—namely, on human fertility, at first, and later on Abraham’s fertility.
In Genesis 1, Elohim commanded the first human couple to be fruitful and multiply and rule the earth. By Genesis 15, the promise implied in that command has been both narrowed and intensified: narrowed to Abraham but intensified inasmuch as Abraham’s is to be a truly miraculous fertility, in return for which Abraham will enter an unbreakable covenant with Yahweh, binding himself to absolute obedience under pain of death.
Both these elements—both the fertility and the covenant of obedience—are present in the ritual performed at Genesis 15. The several animals that Abraham obediently bisects are not simply sacrificed. Because this is a covenant ritual, their bisection and the divine flame that passes between their body parts function together to mime the horror that will befall Abraham should he ever dare to break covenant with Yahweh. This horror, note well, is to occur not in an afterlife but during Abraham’s own lifetime. Unlike Allah, who speaks so often of the afterlife and the excruciating hellfire that awaits those who have not worshipped Him while alive on earth, Yahweh never alludes to any punishment coming after death, or any reward either.
Abraham’s reward for fidelity to his covenant with Yahweh is to be not eternal bliss in a heavenly garden but rather a splendidly lengthy human lifetime enriched by the grand possession of all the land from the Nile in Egypt to the upper Euphrates. Yahweh has thus promised Abraham that he will rule over the entire eastern end of the Mediterranean coastlands, populating this vast territory with the fruit of his now miraculous loins and dominating any and all peoples already inhabiting the land: Hittites, Canaanites, Girgashites, and so forth.
Yahweh’s goal, however, is not some quasi-imperialist lust for territory for its own sake. After all, Yahweh is already “the judge of the whole world,” as Abraham rightly calls Him in the passage quoted above. Land (with subjugated peoples to work the land) has a merely instrumental value for Him: it serves to foster the fertility of the one man, Abraham, whom “I have singled…out to command his sons and his family after him to keep the way of Yahweh by doing what is upright and just, so that Yahweh can carry out for Abraham what he has promised him” (18:19).
Even doing what is upright and just functions instrumentally to promote the beyond-all-human-reckoning fertility that Yahweh has promised Abraham:
“I shall make your descendants like the dust on the ground; when people succeed in counting the specks of dust on the ground, then they will be able to count your descendants too!” (13:16)
“Look up at the sky and count the stars if you can. Just so will your descendants be,” he told him. Abram put his faith in Yahweh and this was reckoned to him as uprightness. (15:5–6)
“For my part, this is my covenant with you: you will become the father of many nations. And you are no longer to be called Abram; your name is to be Abraham, for I am making you father of many nations. I shall make you exceedingly fertile. I shall make you into nations, and your issue will be kings.” (17:4–6)
Why does Yahweh so desire Abraham’s fertility? Why, for that matter, does He desire fertility in the first place? Why did Elohim so direct the creation of the world itself that its very climax should be the fertility and world dominion of Adam and Eve? These questions really have no answers. Rather than the conclusion of an argument, they are the premise. Many consequences flow from God’s determination, first, that humankind should reproduce without hindrance and, later, that Abraham and his people should reproduce so miraculously as to dominate all the other peoples in the land that Yahweh has promised them. As for the origin of this determination, this the Bible leaves hidden in the unknowable mind of God. Did Yahweh Elohim create the world out of love for His human creatures, or special love for Abraham and his offspring? Perhaps the latter, but if so, the Bible never says so: it leaves us in wonderment.
So it is as well with Allah’s desire for exclusive human worship. Why might it not be beneath Allah to be troubled by whether mere human beings—His own lowly creatures, “created…from dust, then from a sperm, then from a blood clot, then from a morsel,” as we read at Qur’an 22:5—should worship Him or not? But the matter clearly does trouble Him, and the consequences of the trouble reverberate on virtually every page of the Qur’an. Does Allah desire human worship for humans’ sake? Perhaps so, but if so, the Qur’an never clearly says so. It leaves us in wonderment, facing an all-shaping desire that simply must be taken on its own terms.
Allah and Yahweh are one in the expectation that their human creatures should submit their wills to the divine will, but Allah does not anticipate that this submission should lead to any other-than-normal fertility in His servant Abraham. Nor is it on His agenda that Abraham should rule over other peoples in the Levant. What matters is only that Abraham should formally and publicly acknowledge Allah as God, should accordingly repudiate any rival claims to divinity, and should fearlessly bring this message to his people. Abraham’s reward for doing all this will come not in this life but in the glory of his afterlife.
Strikingly, Abraham’s world in the Qur’an is a populous world that is generally both polytheistic and idolatrous. In the Bible, by contrast, the nomadic Abraham wanders across what seems a much emptier landscape, never once encountering an idolater or a declared polytheist. Moreover, at Genesis 14, Abram takes part in a bread-and-wine ritual conducted by the priest-king of Salem, a ritual in which it is unclear whether the ’el ‘elyon or “God Most High” being honored is identical or not with Yahweh. The ritual, involving bread and wine, seems appropriate to an agricultural people, while Abram is a herdsman, reckoning his wealth by the size of his herds and conducting rituals (as at Genesis 15) that involve the sacrifice of animals rather than of crops. It is at least conceivable, then, that Abram—by no means yet in control of any of the land that Yahweh has promised him—is practicing here a kind of politically pragmatic religious diplomacy and that Yahweh is prepared to tolerate this. One cannot imagine the literally and violently iconoclastic Abraham of Qur’an 21 engaging in any such dubious tolerance of polytheism, nor can one imagine Allah ever countenancing it.
With regard to fertility, it is not that Allah does not recognize it as a human good, but in His interactions with Abraham, Allah makes fertility a good that follows rather than precedes the good of proper theolatry. It is only after commissioning and training Abraham as His messenger and then observing with gratification how bravely and well Abraham has challenged Azar and his people that Allah says, in a passage already quoted: “And We bestowed on him Isaac and Jacob, as an added bounty from Us (21:72, emphasis added). Fertility is a reward, an added gift, for correct and zealous theolatry. Moreover, it is not by their sheer, miraculous numbers that Abraham’s offspring are to bear witness that Allah is great but rather by their exemplary work as practitioners of Islam in upright living, prayer, and almsgiving, crowned by the worship of Allah alone:
…to do righteous deeds,
To perform the prayer, and hand out alms,
And they were Our worshippers. (21:73)
For Yahweh, it is the other way around, fertility then theolatry. Yahweh first promises Abram land and offspring in “a country which I shall show you; and I shall make you a great nation” (Genesis 12:1–2). Only after Abraham has arrived in the land where Yahweh has led him does it come about that he “built an altar to Yahweh and invoked the name of Yahweh” (12:8). Divinely promised (if not yet delivered) fertility comes first as the premise; human worship follows as the consequence. Abraham’s trust that Yahweh will keep his promise corresponds, in Genesis, to Abraham’s zeal for Allah’s claim to unique and universal worship in the Qur’an. As quoted already, “Abram put his faith in Yahweh, and this was reckoned to him as uprightness” (Genesis 15:6).
The covenant or alliance between Allah, on one side, and Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, on the other side, is thus essentially about theolatry: Allah demands worship, for reasons of His own; His human worshippers provide it. The covenant between Yahweh and Abraham is essentially about fertility: Yahweh, for reasons of His own, promises fertility; Abraham builds a worshipful altar in testimony to his trust that fertility will follow.
As this chapter opened with a confrontation between Abraham and his father, Azar, in Qur’an 21, we must not conclude before inquiring into the state of Abraham’s relationship with his father, Terah, in the Bible.
Abraham does leave Terah’s house in the Bible. As Abram, he dutifully answers Yahweh’s call that he leave his country, his kindred, and his father’s house (12:1) and be guided by Yahweh to the land of Canaan. Nowhere, however, is it suggested that in this departure he was also breaking with his father’s god(s). In Genesis 11:31, we read that Terah took Abram and his wife along with Abram’s nephew, Lot, who is Terah’s grandson, “and made them leave Ur of the Chaldaeans to go to the land of Canaan.” True, the family stops just short of Canaan in Haran; but when Abram departs Haran for Canaan, it is as if he is completing the family’s originally intended journey as its representative. Later, as we shall see, Abraham will send back to Haran to find a spouse for his son, Isaac. All this is context for Yahweh’s statement at Genesis 15:7 “I am Yahweh who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldaeans,” indicating indirectly that Yahweh had been with Terah, too, on that earlier journey from Ur to Haran. In any case, between Abram’s departure from Haran and Terah’s death there, years pass, but no further interaction between father and son is recorded in the Bible.
Many centuries later, a Rabbinic commentary-by-expansion on the Book of Genesis would tell a quite different, conflict-filled story about Abraham and Terah, one that has many elements in common with the Qur’an’s story of Abraham and Azar as recalled above. Chapter 38 of Genesis Rabbah, a large work concluded not long before the birth of Muhammad, is nominally an expansion of Genesis 11:27–28:
Terah fathered Abram, Nahor and Haran. Haran fathered Lot. Haran died in the presence of his father Terah in his native land, Ur of the Chaldaeans.2
Why, the ever-curious Rabbis asked, did Haran die? And the answer they provided, matching much of the Qur’an’s account of Abraham’s rebellion against Azar, includes the story of Abraham smashing his father’s idols and then claiming, as in the Qur’an, that the largest idol must have smashed the smaller ones. Genesis Rabbah then introduces the figure of Nimrod, a legendary Mesopotamian king, who has Abraham thrown into a bonfire, defying his god to save him. The Lord does save Abraham, but when Haran—Terah’s brother and Abraham’s uncle—decides that he, too, will now declare his faith in Abraham’s God and when he, in turn, is thrown into the fire, God does not save him, and so the Rabbis have an answer to their question: why did Haran die? This answer does, of course, raise further questions, but such ever is Rabbinic commentary.
Nimrod appears in many later Arabic legends as well, but our comparison is not of the full sweep of Jewish tradition with the full sweep of Muslim tradition but only of the Bible with the Qur’an. That already limited comparison is more limited still in the current chapter, which addresses only Abraham and only his relationship with his father in the two scriptures. Within that limited comparison, we may conclude that the relationship between Abraham and his father is central in the Qur’an because Allah’s central preoccupation there is theolatry, and Azar is an idolater, while the same relationship is marginal in the Book of Genesis because Yahweh’s central preoccupation there is fertility, and because Terah, whether or not he worships Yahweh, shares through his son in Yahweh’s promise of miraculous fertility. Later in the Bible, notably in His relationship with Moses, Yahweh will develop a preoccupation with theolatry that matches or exceeds Allah’s in this chapter, but it remains true that neither idolatry nor polytheism figure in Yahweh’s relationship with Abraham, so long as we confine our attention to the Bible itself.
In the Bible and in the Qur’an alike, however, whatever the importance of Abraham’s relationship to his father, what will matter still more—and say more about the character of God—is Abraham’s relationship to his two sons, Ishmael and Isaac. To this subject we now turn.