Background
He was born in Ur of the Chaldees in southern Mesopotamia and taken by his father, Terah, to Haran in northwestern Mesopotamia, where his father died.
He was born in Ur of the Chaldees in southern Mesopotamia and taken by his father, Terah, to Haran in northwestern Mesopotamia, where his father died.
In Haran God instructed him to leave his native land for a still undisclosed destination with the divine promise, that he would become a great and blessed nation (Gen. 12:1-3). At age seventy-five, he took his wife Sarai (later renamed Sarah), his nephew Lot, and their entire household, and moved to the land of Canaan, which God informed him would be the land of his offspring.
He lived a nomadic life, mainly in the southern part of the country (the Negeb), making covenants with the local kings, and expounding his monotheistic creed.
At one period, when the land was struck by famine, Abraham and his family went to Egypt, where Abraham, fearing that he might be killed by the Egyptians because of Sarah’s beauty, passed her off as his sister. Pharaoh took her to his palace and rewarded Abraham, but when he was afflicted by plagues, he discovered the true relationship and returned Sarah to Abraham.
Back in Canaan, a dispute between the followers of Abraham and Lot led to the two parting company, with Abraham remaining in the Negeb and Lot moving to the Dead Sea region. Subsequently, when four invading kings captured the area where Lot lived and took him captive, Abraham armed his servants, defeated the invaders, and rescued Lot. On his return from this expedition, he encountered Melchizedek, king of Salem (taken to be Jerusalem), whose offer of gifts Abraham magnanimously declined.
In a series of revelations, God promised to grant Abraham a multitude of progeny, who would become a great nation. Abraham undertook to serve only the one true God. This was affirmed in a solemn covenant ceremony, and its sign was circumcision, which Abraham performed on himself and on all the male members of his household.
As Sarah remained childless, she gave Abraham her maidservant Hagar as wife and when Abraham was eighty-six, Hagar bore a son, Ishmael. Some thirteen years later, Abraham was visited by three weary travelers, whom he did not recognize at first as angels. His warm reception of these strangers made him a symbol of hospitality in Jewish tradition. They announced that he and Sarah (both of them now aged about a hundred) would have a son. They also informed Abraham of God’s decision to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah for their wickedness. Abraham pleaded for them to spare the cities and was answered, that God would relent if ten righteous men be found in the cities. Abraham was unsuccessful in this quest and the cities were destroyed by fire and brimstone.
In due course, Sarah bore a son, Isaac. As she felt that Ishmael constituted a threat to her son’s rightful inheritance, she insisted that Abraham expel Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness. There an angel of God appeared and they were miraculously saved (Gen. 21).
After the death of Sarah, Abraham purchased the cave of Machpelah in Hebron as a family burial plot. In his latter years he saw' Isaac marry his kinswoman Rcbekah. brought by Abraham’s servant from the city of Nahor so that Isaac would not take a Canaanite wife. He himself remarried, and had six children with his new wife Keturah.
When Abraham died, according to the Bible at age 175, his two sons, Isaac and Ishmael, buried him in the cave of Machpelah.
Abraham’s greatest trial came, when he was commanded by God to sacrifice Isaac. Unhesitatingly, he obeyed, taking the young lad to a mountain in the land of Moriah. Only at the last moment, when the boy was already bound and Abraham’s hand raised with the knife, did an angel intervene to stop him and explain that this was a divine test of his faith. This story was to be influential in Jewish theology as a prototype of complete faith and willingness for martyrdom. Some scholars have seen it as condemnation of the practice of child sacrifice prevalent in those days.