Who was Abraham in the Bible?

A family from Ur

Abraham, first called Abram, enters Genesis in a family list. His father Terah lives in “Ur of the Chaldees,” a real city whose brick ziggurat still rises near Nasiriyah, in southern Iraq. Abram marries Sarai, and the text states the problem of the whole story at once: she is barren. Terah moves the family up the Euphrates to Haran, in today’s Turkey. There the call comes.

Leave your country, and your relatives, and your father’s house, and go to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great. You will be a blessing.

Genesis gives no reason why he is chosen and records no reply. “So Abram went, as Yahweh had told him” (Genesis 12:4). He is seventy-five. He sets out with Sarai, his nephew Lot and their herds, and when he builds an altar at Shechem, near today’s Nablus, the family has walked some 1,600 kilometers around the Fertile Crescent from Ur.

Twenty-five years of waiting

The promise moves faster than the facts. Famine drives Abram to Egypt, where fear makes him pass Sarai off as his sister. Back in Canaan, God tells him to count the stars, for so his offspring will be, and Genesis gives the line Paul would build on in Romans 4:

He believed in Yahweh, who credited it to him for righteousness.

Still there is no child. Sarai gives him her Egyptian slave, Hagar, and at eighty-six Abram has a son, Ishmael. At ninety-nine he receives a new name, Abraham, and Sarai becomes Sarah (why the names changed). Three strangers at his tent by the oaks of Mamre promise a son within a year, and Sarah laughs. Before they leave, Abraham bargains with God for Sodom, from fifty righteous people down to ten. At a hundred he holds Isaac, whose name means “he laughs.”

The test on Moriah

Then comes the hardest chapter in Genesis. God tells him to offer “your only son, Isaac, whom you love” as a burnt offering in the land of Moriah. Abraham goes. On the mountain a voice stops his hand, and a ram caught in a thicket takes Isaac’s place. Jews call it the Akedah, the binding, and read it at Rosh Hashanah. Christians see in Isaac carrying the wood a sign of the cross. Muslims remember the test at Eid al-Adha, and most Muslim tradition names the son Ismail. A later book puts Mount Moriah in Jerusalem, where Solomon built the Temple (2 Chronicles 3:1).

A grave in Hebron, a father of three faiths

When Sarah dies, Abraham, “a stranger and a foreigner” in Canaan, buys the cave of Machpelah at Hebron for four hundred shekels of silver. After all the promises of land, the first piece he owns is a grave. He dies at 175, “full of years,” and his two sons, Isaac and Ishmael, bury him there together (Genesis 25:8–9). Herod later walled the site, and it still stands, holy to Jews and Muslims.

Isaiah calls him “Abraham my friend” (Isaiah 41:8), and Islam honors him as Ibrahim, Khalil Allah, the Friend of God. Some of the best-known stories about him are not in Genesis: young Abraham smashing his father’s idols comes from Jewish midrash and the Quran (21:51–70). Whether a historical Abraham stands behind the story is debated; the text itself gives no dates.