When did Abraham live?

Ages, not dates

Genesis never names a ruler that historians can date. The king of Egypt who takes Sarai into his palace is simply “Pharaoh” (12:15). The four kings who raid the Jordan valley in Genesis 14, Amraphel of Shinar, Arioch, Chedorlaomer of Elam and Tidal, match no known king. Scholars once took Amraphel for Hammurabi of Babylon, an idea now abandoned. What Genesis gives is ages: none for the start in Ur (11:31), only one for the move from Haran.

So Abram went, as Yahweh had told him. Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran.

Counting back from Solomon

To turn ages into years, readers chain the numbers back from a fixed point. The usual anchor is Solomon’s Temple, begun “in the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel had come out of the land of Egypt” (1 Kings 6:1). Solomon’s fourth year is usually put around 966 BC, so the Exodus falls about 1446 BC. Israel lived in Egypt 430 years (Exodus 12:40), so Jacob arrived about 1876 BC, aged 130 (Genesis 47:9). Isaac was sixty when Jacob was born, and Abraham a hundred when Isaac was (25:26; 21:5). The result: Abraham born about 2166 BC, leaving Haran about 2091 BC.

Every link is a choice. The Greek Septuagint counts the 430 years for Canaan and Egypt together, which moves Abraham about two centuries later.

Counting forward from creation

The other method adds up the ages in the family lists of Genesis 5 and 11, from Adam to Terah. Jewish tradition, following the ancient chronicle Seder Olam, puts Abraham’s birth in the year 1948 from creation, about 1812 BC. Archbishop James Ussher, who in 1650 dated creation to 4004 BC, arrived at 1996 BC.

Part of the gap is a puzzle inside the text. Genesis says Terah was seventy when his sons were born (11:26) and died in Haran at 205 (11:32). Yet Stephen, in Acts 7:4, says Abram left Haran after his father died, and Abram was seventy-five then. Ussher fitted both by making Terah 130 at Abram’s birth.

What archaeology can say

No inscription outside the Bible names Abraham. In the mid-twentieth century, scholars led by William F. Albright placed the patriarchs in the Middle Bronze Age, roughly 2000 to 1550 BC. They saw a world that seemed to fit: herdsmen moving between towns, and customs like Sarai’s, a childless wife giving her slave to her husband, known from Mesopotamian marriage contracts and from the laws of Hammurabi, in the eighteenth century BC.

In the 1970s Thomas L. Thompson and John Van Seters challenged it, showing that many of those parallels fit later centuries too. And some details in Genesis do sound later:

• Camels. Pharaoh gives Abram camels (12:16), but tamed camels appear in the region several centuries after any proposed date, a point still debated.
• Philistines. Abraham lives “in the land of the Philistines” (21:34), a people who settled on Canaan’s coast in the twelfth century BC.
• Chaldeans. “Ur of the Chaldees” uses a name from about a thousand years after his traditional date, as the page on Ur today explains.

So when?

Many traditional Jews and Christians take the numbers as history and place Abraham around 2000 BC, give or take two centuries. Some historians see the Middle Bronze Age as the stories’ setting, whenever they were written down. Others think Abraham belongs to the memory of later Israel, set down in the first millennium BC. One date is firm: Ur’s gold Ram in a Thicket, named by Leonard Woolley after Genesis 22, was made around 2500 BC, before any date proposed for Abraham.