Why is Abraham called the father of three religions?

A promise bigger than one family

Genesis plants the idea in God’s first words to Abram.

I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who treats you with contempt. All the families of the earth will be blessed through you.

Later God tells him, “You will be the father of a multitude of nations” (17:4), and the promise reaches both of his sons. Isaac carries the covenant, but of Ishmael God says, “I will make him a great nation” (17:20). Three faiths now claim that father in three ways: by descent, by faith and by submission. Together they count more than half of humanity.

Judaism: Abraham our father

Jews call him Avraham avinu, Abraham our father, the first of the three patriarchs. The central Jewish prayer, the Amidah, opens by blessing the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, and the sign of his covenant, circumcision on the eighth day, is still kept as brit milah. The prophets speak to Israel as his children: “Look to Abraham your father, and to Sarah who bore you” (Isaiah 51:2).

Descent is not the whole story. A convert to Judaism takes a Hebrew name as a son or daughter of Abraham our father. When a convert named Obadiah asked Maimonides whether he could pray to the God of our fathers, the great 12th-century rabbi answered yes, since Abraham is the father of everyone who comes to the faith.

Christianity: the father of all who believe

The New Testament opens with “the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1). John the Baptist warns his hearers not to lean on the name: God can raise up children to Abraham from stones (Matthew 3:9). Paul builds the Christian claim on the order of Genesis. Abraham believed in chapter 15, years before he was circumcised in chapter 17.

He received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had while he was in uncircumcision, that he might be the father of all those who believe

For Paul, that makes Abraham the father of believing gentiles too: “If you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring” (Galatians 3:29). The Catholic Mass still calls him our father in faith.

Islam: Ibrahim, the friend of God

The Quran names Ibrahim often, and its fourteenth surah bears his name. It tells how young Ibrahim looked at a star, then the moon, then the sun, and turned from each as it set, to the Creator of the heavens and the earth (6:74–79). It calls him neither Jew nor Christian but hanif, upright, one who submitted to God (3:67), says God took him as a friend, khalil (4:125), and presents Islam as a return to his religion (16:123). With his son Ismail he raised the foundations of the Kaaba (2:127), and in Islamic tradition the Arabs descend from Ismail. In every daily prayer Muslims ask God to bless Muhammad as he blessed Ibrahim and his family, and at Eid al-Adha they remember his test.

One father, different stories

Sharing a father does not mean telling the same story. Genesis names Isaac as the son on Moriah, while most Muslim tradition says Ismail (which son was it?). Jews stress covenant and descent, Christians faith, Muslims submission. The label “Abrahamic religions” is modern, and some scholars think it blurs real differences.

Still, the shared father has an address. In Hebron, the cave where Isaac and Ishmael buried him together (Genesis 25:9) is holy to Jews and Muslims. In 1965 the Second Vatican Council’s declaration Nostra Aetate noted that Muslims link their faith to Abraham, and in 2021 Pope Francis went to Ur, the city of Abraham, to pray with leaders of several faiths.