Abraham

Genesis 22:1 says plainly that God tested him, and Genesis 22:12 gives the result: "now I know that you fear God." The command was stopped before it was carried out, and a ram died in Isaac's place.

Hebrews 11:19 says Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead, so he was not obeying against the promise but through it. The chapter also does something larger than test one man. It is the first place in Scripture where a father, a beloved only son, a mountain and a substitute stand together, and the New Testament goes back to it again and again.

The text never says. The Hebrew word used of him at 22:5 and 22:12 is naar, the same word Genesis uses of Joseph at seventeen in 37:2 and of Benjamin in chapter 44, where he is a grown man with sons of his own. The word covers a wide range of ages and settles nothing on its own.

What the text does give is a ceiling and a load. Sarah dies at 127 in the next chapter and she bore Isaac at ninety, so if the binding sits immediately before Genesis 23 then Isaac was at most thirty-seven. He carried the wood for a burnt offering up a mountain while his father, a hundred and thirty or more, carried the fire and the knife, and he worked out for himself what was missing from the procession.

Three positions are held. A boy, which the word allows and which almost all the art on this page shows. A youth in his teens, which leans on the word at its Joseph range and on the wood. A grown man in his twenties or thirties, with Josephus giving twenty-five directly (Antiquities of the Jews 1.13.2: "Now Isaac was twenty-five years old") and Jewish tradition commonly giving thirty-seven, which is the arithmetic from Genesis 23:1. Adam Clarke reports a late Aramaic targum that puts the words "Behold, I am now thirty-six years old" in Isaac's mouth, and that is a targumic tradition rather than the text of Genesis. This page names the positions and settles none of them.

Adam Clarke asks the question directly and does not soften it. How could Abraham say this consistently with truth when he knew what he was going up the mountain to do. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown answer that the words were spoken in ignorance of the outcome and in confidence that the son, though sacrificed, would somehow be restored.

Hebrews 11:19 gives the reasoning behind the confidence: Abraham considered that God was able to raise the dead. Both readings sit in the commentary tradition, and Hebrews weighs heavily for the second.

Yes, and Genesis does not hide it. He did it in Egypt at 12:13 and again at Gerar at 20:2, and at 20:13 he admitted it had been a standing arrangement made with Sarah when they first left home.

Both times a pagan king rebuked him and God protected Sarah. That is the point the text is making. The promise was preserved over his failure rather than because of his management. The second time happens after the covenant of Genesis 15, after the name change of Genesis 17, and within a year of Isaac's birth.

Genesis 16:2 marks the decision with a sentence about him rather than about Sarai: "And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai." Taking a maidservant for an heir was a normal arrangement in that world. John Wesley drew the line in 1765 and it is the line this page keeps. He may be excused; he cannot be justified.

What follows shows the cost. Hagar despises Sarai, Sarai mistreats Hagar, Hagar runs, and the angel of the LORD finds her at a spring in the desert. She gives God a name that nobody else in Scripture gives Him: "You are the God who sees me." Ishmael is not the mistake. Genesis 17:20 and 21:13 both have God promising to make him a great nation, and 25:9 puts him at his father's graveside beside Isaac.

The majority identification is the southern Mesopotamian city at Tell el-Muqayyar. Alan Millard argued it in Biblical Archaeology Review in 2001 and stated the limit himself: the case is strong, and the available information precludes certainty.

A northern Ur has real defenders. Cyrus Gordon argued in 1958 for the region of Urha, later Edessa, and Hershel Shanks put the northern case to a wide readership in 2000. The argument runs on the family's repeated returns to Haran and to Aram-naharaim in the north.

What nobody disputes is that the family came out of Mesopotamia, moved through Haran, and left for Canaan from there. The site's Ur page carries the whole question, including what Leonard Woolley did and did not claim about the houses he excavated.

Genesis itself says almost nothing. Genesis 11:28 records one bare fact: "Haran died in the presence of his father Terah in Ur of the Chaldeans," and gives no cause. Two later Jewish writings fill the silence with different stories, and neither is Scripture.

The book of Jubilees, from the second century BC, says Abram burned his father's house of idols by night, that Haran ran in to save them, and that the fire killed him there in Ur (Jubilees 12:12-14). Genesis Rabbah, a rabbinic commentary compiled centuries later, tells a different and better known story: Nimrod cast Abraham into a fiery furnace for refusing to worship idols or fire, Abraham came out alive, and Haran, who wavered on which side to take, was thrown in after him and died (Genesis Rabbah 38:13). The Mishnah counts this as the first of ten trials Abraham withstood, beginning with Ur and ending on Moriah (Mishnah, Avot 5:3).

Both accounts agree that Abraham broke with his father's idols before God ever called him, and Joshua 24:2 says as much in one line: Terah served other gods beyond the Euphrates. The specific stories are legend built on that verse and on the silence of Genesis 11:28, not the text of Genesis itself.

2 Chronicles 3:1 is the only other place in Scripture that uses the name, and it puts Solomon's temple on Mount Moriah. Josephus states the identification with the temple mount outright, Jerome glosses the name the same way, and the rabbinic tradition is unanimous on it, so that reading leads.

The Samaritan Pentateuch does not read the same word at Genesis 22:2, and the Samaritan tradition puts the binding at Mount Gerizim. Other readers weigh the three days of travel and the wording of 22:2, which speaks of a land and one of its mountains, toward an unidentified site further off. The one place that could settle the question has never been excavated.

Three works from the Second Temple period name him. They are labeled study resources on this site rather than Scripture, and the text quoted here is the King James Version with Apocrypha.

Sirach, whose Hebrew original is commonly dated to the early second century BC, gives the earliest surviving Jewish summary of the whole life, and it already carries the four pieces the New Testament will use. Sirach 44:19: "Abraham was a great father of many people: in glory was there none like unto him;" Sirach 44:20: "Who kept the law of the most High, and was in covenant with him: he established the covenant in his flesh; and when he was proved, he was found faithful." Sirach 44:21: "Therefore he assured him by an oath, that he would bless the nations in his seed, and that he would multiply him as the dust of the earth, and exalt his seed as the stars, and cause them to inherit from sea to sea, and from the river unto the utmost part of the land."

1 Maccabees, second century BC, has Mattathias on his deathbed read Genesis 15:6 through Genesis 22 in a single line. 1 Maccabees 2:52: "Was not Abraham found faithful in temptation, and it was imputed unto him for righteousness?" That is the same fusion James makes at James 2:21-23, which shows the reading was standard Jewish teaching two centuries before James wrote.

Judith 8:26 remembers the testing with Isaac as its subject rather than as its object: "Remember what things he did to Abraham, and how he tried Isaac, and what happened to Jacob in Mesopotamia of Syria, when he kept the sheep of Laban his mother’s brother." 2 Esdras names him twice. At 3:13 he is the man God chose out of a wicked generation: "Now when they lived so wickedly before thee, thou didst choose thee a man from among them, whose name was Abraham." At 7:36 he is remembered as the first intercessor: "Then said I, Abraham prayed first for the Sodomites, and Moses for the fathers that sinned in the wilderness:"

No. Romans 11:1 asks the question in the form Paul himself puts it and answers it, "Certainly not!" Romans 11:18 tells the grafted Gentile not to boast over the branches, because he does not support the root; the root supports him. Romans 11:29 says God's gifts and His call are irrevocable.

Genesis 17:7-8 gives the covenant and the land to Abraham's descendants as an everlasting covenant and an eternal possession, and 2 Chronicles 20:7 says God gave that land to the descendants of Abraham His friend forever. Being a child of Abraham by faith means being brought into a promise that was already made, and not taking it from anyone. This site's tradition holds that God's promises to Israel stand.