Abraham[a] (originally Abram)[b] is the common patriarch of the Abrahamic religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.[5] In Judaism he is the founding father of the special relationship between the Jews and God; in Christianity, he is the spiritual progenitor of all believers, Jewish or gentile (non-Jewish);[c][6] and in Islam he is a link in the chain of prophets that begins with Adam and culminates in Muhammad.[4]
His life, told in the narrative in the Book of Genesis, revolves around the themes of posterity and land. Abraham is called by God to leave the house of his father Terah and settle in the land of Canaan, which God now promises to Abraham and his progeny. Various candidates are put forward who might inherit the land after Abraham; and, while promises are made to Ishmael about founding a great nation, Isaac, Abraham's son by his half-sister Sarah, inherits God's promises to Abraham. Abraham purchases a tomb (the Cave of the Patriarchs) at Hebron to be Sarah's grave, thus establishing his right to the land; and, in the second generation, his heir Isaac is married to a woman from his own kin, thus ruling the Canaanites out of any inheritance. Abraham later marries Keturah and has six more sons; but, on his death, when he is buried beside Sarah, it is Isaac who receives "all Abraham's goods", while the other sons receive only "gifts".[7]
The Abraham story cannot be definitively related to any specific time, and the patriarchal age, along with the Exodus and the period of the judges, is widely seen as a late literary construct that does not relate to any period in actual history.[8] It was probably composed in the early Persian period (late 6th century BCE) as a result of tensions between Jewish landowners who had stayed in Judah during the Babylonian captivity and traced their right to the land through their "father Abraham", and the returning exiles who based their counterclaim on Moses and the Exodus tradition,[9] and after a century of exhaustive archaeological investigation no evidence has been found for a historical Abraham.[10]
The Abraham cycle is not structured by a unified plot centred on a conflict and its resolution or a problem and its solution.[11] The episodes are often only loosely linked, and the sequence is not always logical, but it is unified by the presence of Abraham himself, as either actor or witness, and by the themes of posterity and land.[12] These themes form "narrative programs" set out in Genesis 11:27-31 concerning the sterility of Sarah and 12:1-3 in which Abraham is ordered to leave the land of his birth for the land Yahweh will show him.[12]
Terah, the ninth in descent from Noah, is the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran. Haran is the father of Lot, who is Abram's nephew; the entire family live in Ur of the Chaldees. Haran dies in his native city, Ur of the Chaldees. Abram marries Sarah (Sarai), who is barren, and on the death of Terah, Abram, Sarai, and Lot depart for Canaan, but settle in a place named Haran, where Terah died at the age of 205.[13] God had told Abram to leave his country and kindred and go to a land that he would show him, and promised to make of him a great nation, bless him, make his name great, bless them that bless him, and curse them who may curse him.[14] Abram was 75 years old when he left Haran with his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, and the substance and souls that they had acquired, and traveled to Shechem in Canaan.[15]Then he pitched his tent in the east of Bethel.