Cuneiform tablets may provide clues to the historical Abraham (Biblical Mysteries EP12) According to the Book of Genesis Abraham (Hebrew: אַבְרָהָם‎ About this sound listen (help·info)) was the founding father of the Israelites, with a prominent role in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The story of Abraham is told in chapters 11:26-25:18 of the book of Genesis. It is essentially the history of the establishment of the covenant between Abraham and God: God calls Abraham to leave his land, family and household in Mesopotamia in return for a new land, family and inheritance in Canaan, the promised land; threats to the covenant arise (difficulties in producing an heir, the threat of bondage in Egypt, of lack of fear of God); but all are overcome and the covenant is established. Abraham's story ends with the death and burial of his wife Sarah in the grave that he has purchased in Hebron (a town in southern Judah), followed by the marriage of Isaac to a wife from his own people: these two episodes signify Abraham's desire of the land for his descendants and the exclusion of land's previous inhabitants, the Canaanites, from its ownership. The Bible's internal chronology places Abraham and the patriarchs in the second millennium BCE, but the stories in Genesis cannot be related to the known history of that time, and most biblical histories no longer begin with the patriarchal period. Historicity and composition of the Abraham narrative In the early to mid 20th century leading scholars such as William F. Albright and Albrecht Alt believed the patriarchs and matriarchs to be either real individuals or believable composite people living in the "patriarchal age", the 2nd millennium BCE. In the 1970s, however, significant new conclusions about Israel's past and the biblical texts challenged this portrait. The two works largely responsible were Thomas L. Thompson's The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives (1974), and John Van Seters' Abraham in History and Tradition (1975). Thompson's argument, based on archaeology and ancient texts, was that no compelling evidence pointed to the patriarchs living in the 2nd millennium and that the biblical texts reflected 1st millennium conditions and concerns; Van Seters, basing himself on an examination of the patriarchal stories, agreed with Thompson that their names, social milieu and messages strongly suggested that they were Iron Age creations. By the last quarter of the 20th century, "respectable archaeologists [had] given up hope of recovering any context that would make Abraham, Isaac or Jacob credible historical figures." The patriarchal stories most likely had a substantial oral prehistory: the Oxford History of the Biblical World notes that the purpose of oral tradition is not to record history but to pass on cultural values from one generation to the next: historical facts quickly become garbled, events and characters are invented to serve aims, and variant versions develop beside each other. At some stage in Israel's history these oral traditions became part of the written tradition of the Pentateuch, the series of five books which tells of the origins of the world and the people of Israel: a majority of scholars believes this stage goes back to the Persian period, roughly 520--320 BCE. Name and chronology Abraham first appears as Abram, until he is renamed by God in Genesis 17:5. Both names are West Semitic. Genesis 17:5 explains the name Abraham as meaning "Father of a Multitude", but this is a folk etymology. The standard text of the Hebrew Bible places Abraham's birth 1,948 years after the Creation (1948 AM (Anno Mundi, "Year of the World"). The two other major textual traditions have different dates, the translated Greek Septuagint putting it at 3312 AM and the Samaritan version of the Torah at 2247 AM. All three agree that he died at the age of 175. There have been over two hundred attempts to match the biblical chronology to dates in history, two of the more influential being the traditional Jewish dates (Abraham lived 1812 BCE to 1637 BCE), and those of the 17th century Archbishop James Ussher (Abraham lived 1976 BCE to 1801 BCE); but the most that can be said with some degree of certainty is that the standard Hebrew text of Genesis places Abraham in the earlier part of the second millennium BCE

• published: 12 Dec 2013
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