Abraham

A young man stands outside under the night sky and chooses a god. The first candidate is a star, and he says of it, this is my Lord. Then the star sets. He tries the rising moon, and the moon sets too. At dawn he tries the sun, the biggest and brightest of them all, and when that also sinks below the rim of the world he turns to his people and tells them he is finished with everything they worship. He has turned his face, he says, to the One who made the heavens and the earth.

That scene comes from the sixth sura of the Qur’an, and the young man is Ibrahim, the Abraham of Genesis. Three religions claim him as a founder, and the Bible that introduced him tells almost nothing of how he came to his God. In Genesis he is Abram, son of Terah, a man from Ur of the Chaldeans who has moved north to Haran when a voice tells him to leave his country, his kindred and his father’s house for a land that will be shown to him. He goes. He is seventy-five years old.

Genesis never says why God chose him.

Later storytellers could not leave that silence alone. The rabbinic midrash Genesis Rabbah gives Terah a trade: he makes and sells idols. One day he leaves Abram minding the shop. A customer comes in and Abram asks his age. Fifty, the man says, or sixty. Woe to a man of sixty, Abram replies, who bows down to something made yesterday, and the customer leaves in shame. Then a woman arrives with a dish of fine flour as an offering. Abram takes a club, smashes every idol, and puts the club in the hand of the largest one. When Terah returns, his son tells him the idols quarrelled over who would eat the flour first and the big one settled it. Terah snaps that idols cannot do anything of the kind. Abram asks whether his ears can hear what his mouth is saying.

The same passage carries the story further. Terah hands his son over to Nimrod, the king, and the two argue theology in a chain. Nimrod says to bow to fire. Abram says water puts out fire. Then bow to water. Clouds carry the water. Then the clouds. Wind scatters the clouds. Then the wind. A human being withstands the wind. Nimrod tires of the game and throws Abram into a furnace to see if his God will save him. Abram walks out. His brother Haran, who has been waiting to see which side wins before picking one, declares for Abram, is thrown in after him, and dies with his insides scorched.

None of this is in Genesis, and its roots can be traced. Ancient readers took the name Ur, which sounds like the Hebrew word for fire or flame, and read God’s words in Genesis 15, “I brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans”, as a rescue from the fire of the Chaldeans. The Book of Jubilees, from about the second century BCE, has Abram at sixty burning down a house of idols by night and Haran dying in the blaze while trying to save the gods. Pseudo-Philo’s Biblical Antiquities, from the first or second century CE, has a leader named Yoktan throw him into a furnace where bricks were being fired, and it is the crowd standing around the furnace that burns while Abram comes out unhurt. The scholar Yishai Kiel, writing in 2015, notes that casting Nimrod as a fire-worshipper and as Abraham’s single great rival first appears in Genesis Rabbah, and argues that it reflects polemic against the Zoroastrian tradition, whose own prophet Zoroaster was also said to have come out of a fire unscathed.

The Qur’an tells its own version in the twenty-first sura. Abraham asks his father and his people what these statues are that they devote themselves to, and they say their fathers worshipped them. When the people are gone he breaks the idols into pieces, all except the largest. Brought before the crowd and asked who did it, he answers that the biggest one did, so they should ask the idols, if the idols can speak. They cannot, and the people know it. Their answer is to build a fire. Then comes the command that has become one of the best-known lines in the Qur’an: “O fire, be coolness and safety upon Abraham.” The Qur’an names his father Azar and does not name the king at all.

The Genesis Abraham is less a smasher of idols than a man walking a long road on promises. God tells him to look up at the stars and count them if he can, because his descendants will be as many, and Abraham believes, and it is counted to him as righteousness. God orders a heifer, a goat and a ram cut in half, and after sunset, in thick darkness, a smoking firepot and a flaming torch pass between the pieces to seal the covenant. At ninety-nine he is renamed Abraham and circumcised, and his wife Sarai becomes Sarah.

Then three strangers appear at the door of his tent by the oaks of Mamre, in the heat of the day. The old man runs to meet them, bows to the ground, and has Sarah knead cakes from fine flour while he chooses a tender calf and serves it with curds and milk, standing by them under the tree as they eat. One of them promises that Sarah will have a son within the year. Behind the tent flap, Sarah laughs. The same visitors are on their way to Sodom, and Abraham haggles with God over that city like a merchant, down from fifty righteous people to forty-five, to forty, to thirty, to twenty, to ten.

The son arrives, and he is named Isaac, which means he laughs. An older son, Ishmael, born to Sarah’s Egyptian servant Hagar, is sent into the wilderness with his mother at Sarah’s demand. Then the hardest chapter. God tells Abraham to take his son, his only son, whom he loves, to the land of Moriah and offer him up. They walk for three days. Isaac carries the wood on his back, and his father carries the fire and the knife. The boy asks where the lamb is. Abraham says God will provide it. At the top he binds his son on the altar and raises the knife, and an angel calls out to stop him. A ram is caught by its horns in a thicket nearby, and it goes on the altar instead.

The Qur’an’s version, in the thirty-seventh sura, is quieter and stranger. Abraham sees in a dream that he must sacrifice his son and simply asks the boy what he thinks. The son answers, “O my father, do as you are commanded”, and lies down on his forehead, and God ransoms him with a great sacrifice. The Qur’an does not name the son. Muslim commentators long disagreed over whether it was Ishmael or Isaac, and most later settled on Ishmael. In the second sura, Abraham and Ishmael raise the foundations of the House at Mecca together, praying that God will accept it from them, and the standing place of Abraham is appointed as a place of prayer. The Qur’an calls him the friend of God. The Christian tradition kept a different emphasis: the apostle Paul read his trust under the stars as the pattern for all who believe, and the Gospel of Luke sends a poor man called Lazarus to rest at Abraham’s side after death.

Genesis lets him die in peace at one hundred and seventy-five, old and full of years. Isaac and Ishmael, the two sons who had been pulled apart, bury him together in the cave of Machpelah beside Sarah. The Testament of Abraham, a Jewish work probably written in Egypt around the turn of the era, would not allow him such a quiet exit. God sends the archangel Michael to collect his soul, and Abraham refuses to go. He bargains for a tour of the whole inhabited world first and is carried over it in a chariot, but whenever he sees sinners, thieves breaking into a house among them, he calls down fire from heaven on them, and they burn. God stops the ride: Abraham has never sinned, and so he has no mercy on sinners. In the end God sends Death itself, shining and beautiful, and the only way it can take the old man is by a trick. Abraham kisses its hand, and his soul leaves him.

What Abraham can do, he does through God, never through his own strength. Fire cools at a word, a covenant is sealed by a torch moving in the dark, the knife is stopped in mid-air, and God lets a mortal argue him down over the fate of a city. What he cannot do is just as plain in the texts. He twice passes Sarah off as his sister to save his own skin. His bargaining over Sodom stops at ten, and the city is not spared. He can put off death with arguments, but only for a while. And the promise of descendants as countless as the stars comes to a man who has to wait until he is a hundred for the first son of that promise, and then is asked to give him back.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Abraham in the Bible?

Abraham is the patriarch of Genesis 11 to 25, born Abram in Ur of the Chaldeans. God calls him to leave his homeland for Canaan and promises him descendants as numerous as the stars. He is the father of Ishmael by Hagar and of Isaac by Sarah, and Jews, Christians and Muslims all regard him as a founding figure of their faith.

Did Abraham really smash his father’s idols?

The idol-smashing story is not in Genesis. It appears in the rabbinic midrash Genesis Rabbah, where Abraham breaks the idols in his father Terah’s shop and puts the club in the hand of the largest one, and in the Qur’an’s twenty-first sura, where he breaks all the idols except the biggest and tells the people to ask it who did it. An earlier version in the Book of Jubilees has Abraham burn down a house of idols at night.

Why was Abraham thrown into the fire?

In Genesis Rabbah, King Nimrod throws Abraham into a furnace after he refuses to worship fire and wins their argument, and Abraham comes out alive. In the Qur’an, his people decide to burn him for breaking their idols, and God commands the fire to be coolness and safety upon Abraham. The story likely grew from ancient readers taking the city name Ur as the Hebrew word for fire.

Which son did Abraham almost sacrifice?

In Genesis 22 the son is Isaac, whom Abraham binds on an altar in the land of Moriah until an angel stops him and a ram is sacrificed instead. The Qur’an tells the same test without naming the son, and most later Muslim commentators identified him as Ishmael, though earlier ones were divided.

How did Abraham die?

Genesis says Abraham died peacefully at one hundred and seventy-five and was buried by Isaac and Ishmael in the cave of Machpelah. The Testament of Abraham tells a different story in which he refuses to go with the archangel Michael, tours the world in a heavenly chariot, and is finally taken by Death through a trick when he kisses Death’s hand.

Related Entries

Yahweh, Michael, Adam, Eve, Noah, Moses, Joseph (Old Testament), Azrael, Gabriel, Metatron, Sheol, Jesus, Zoroaster, Sin