The Search for Abraham

Who was Abraham?

It remains one of the biggest mysteries of Judaism: that founder of the religion, Abraham, enters the book of Genesis without any introduction.

The first mention of then-Abram (before he changes his name to Abraham later in Genesis) is when we are told of his father, Terah, his wife, Sarai and his nephew Lot, and their apparent decision to “set out from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan.” Terah dies before they reach Canaan.

The next chapter begins, and G-d tells Abram to go forth “from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.”

There is nothing of Abram’s childhood, of his life in Ur, of the circumstances that bring him this singular most important divine encounter.

He is inarguably the most important figure in Judaism; the sine qua non; the man without whom the religion does not exist — nor, for that matter, Christianity or Islam.

And yet we are thrust into the story knowing absolutely nothing about him.

Moses has a long, narrative biography told in Exodus. We all remember the coming of age and diplomatic career of Joseph; even Samuel is introduced before his own birth —  with the recounting of  his mother Hannah’s struggle to bear a child.

Abraham, this towering figure whose divine encounter shaped all of us, enters the Bible cloaked in enigma.

Of course, we have the apocrypha: the Midrashic tale of the young Abraham smashing images in an idol shop in Ur and of G-d’s deliverance of young Abraham from Nimrod’s fiery furnace (a story interestingly mirrored in the Qur’an).

The earliest known clues to Abraham’s biography come from the 3^rd century BCE writer Berosus, a Babylonian priest.

While Berosus’ works are almost completely lost to history, they were known to Josephus, who in the first century CE relayed a quote from him in his Antiquities of the Jews: “In the 10^th generation after the Flood, there was among the Chaldeans a man righteous and great, and skillful in the celestial science.”

Josephus tells us of a Greek writer named Hecatseus,  who “does more than barely mention him; for he composed, and left behind him, a book concerning [Abraham].” Of course, none of Hecatseus’ work has come our way, either. According to this book, Josephus says, Abraham “reigned at Damascus, being a foreigner, who came with an army out of the land of above Babylon, called the Land of the Chaldeans.” At that time, Josephus says, there was a village named after Abraham near Damascus.

The oldest, most specific biography of Abraham comes from the first century Alexandrian Jew Philo, who wrote “On Abraham.”

Philo, too, specifically mentions Abraham’s knowledge of celestial science. He recounts of Abraham, a man “who is called an astronomer, and one addicted to the contemplation of the sublime bodies in the sky.”

So you have three chief ancient accounts of Abraham; one that places him as a kind of general; two others as a scientist/astronomer.

The latter characterization is the most fascinating: a man who spends his life studying the heavens, the “sublime bodies” and astronomy, who is somehow compelled to leave his elevated station and one of the most advanced cities in the ancient world to uproot his life and his family to head to a wilderness, driven by some revelation, by something he has seen or felt.

He does this, mind you, on his own — in the biblical account Abraham takes his family from Ur to head to Canaan before he talks to G-d.

THE JEWISH world is in tension, not just from the obvious external forces, but from internal ones. While we all feel our Jewish identity more strongly than ever, we are still very much divided; the ultra-orthodox, the ultra-liberal, the conservative, the reform. The cultural Jew, the political Jew. None of us can agree on the right form of Judaism.

Some are educated in tradition, some not. But much of it, beyond the pure text of the Hebrew Bible, is just that — tradition. Some of us wish to observe thousands of tractates and fence laws, others merely choose to refrain from eating shellfish or food and water on Yom Kippur.

All of us live in a figurative Ur: an ear of artificial intelligence and quantum physics and space telescopes, where our knowledge of ourselves and the world around us is deeper and more intricate than in the history of humanity.

And yet we continue to search for something else, something we don’t understand. Something we feel. Like Abraham, we are called to the figurative Canaan, called to today’s Israel, because there is something inside us we know beyond the mechanics of our everyday lives.

“What other man would not have been grieved, not only at departing from his own country but also at being driven away from every city into an inaccessible and impassable district?” Philo writes. “And what other man would have not turned back and returned to his former home, paying but little attention to his former hopes, but desiring to escape from his present perplexity, thinking it folly for the sake of uncertain advantages to undergo admitted evils?”

The search for Abraham is the search for the divine in ourselves, that heavenly spark that calls us to pray three times a day or just eat challah on Friday nights or somehow feel a kinship with a country thousands of miles from our own — that compelled a scientist to begin a perilous pilgrimage to the Judean desert.

There is no Judaism without Abraham. And there was no Abraham without that initial kindling, that original decision to give up what he knew and look for something he had never seen. That first step toward Canaan.

We don’t know the character of religion Abraham practiced, before the codification of Sinai. We know little of how Abraham observed his religious practice; what we do know is the divine search that brought him out of Ur of the Chaldeans, despite everything he knew, despite his apparent station.

We don’t know Abraham’s biography — and maybe we don’t need to. Because the moment he made the decision to leave Ur, he had created something.

Everything we do, whether it’s an extensive, 24-7 adherence or a casual, periodic interest, is rooted in Abraham’s first step. And the very best we can do is try walking in the same direction.