Word: abrahamics
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...Abraham's life becomes very eventful. He travels to Egypt and back and alights inCanaanite towns that may correspond topresent-day Nablus, Hebron and Jerusalem. He grows rich, distinguishing himself sometimes as a warrior king and sometimes as an arch-diplomat. At one point, three strangers appear at his tent. A model of Middle Eastern hospitality, he lays out a feast. They turn out to be divine messengers bearing word that God intends to destroy Sodom, where his nephew Lot lives. Abraham initiates an extraordinary haggling session, persuading the Lord to spare Sodom if 10 righteous people can be found...
Meanwhile, the Torah portrays Abraham's domestic life as a soap opera. Convinced she will have no children, Sarah offers him her young Egyptian slave Hagar to produce an heir. It works. The 86-year-old fathers a boy, Ishmael. Yet God insists that Sarah will conceive, and in a wonder confirming Abraham's faith, she bears his second son, Isaac. Jealous of Hagar's and Ishmael's competing claims on her husband and his legacy, Sarah persuades Abraham to send them out into the desert. God saves the duo and promises Hagar that Ishmael will sire a great nation...
Then, in one last spectacular test of his faith, God directs Abraham to offer up "your son, your only one, whom you love, your Isaac" as a human sacrifice. With an obedience that has troubled modern thinkers from Kierkegaard ("Though Abraham arouses my admiration, he at the same time appalls me") to Bob Dylan ("Abe says, 'Where do you want this killin' done?' God says, 'Out on Highway 61'")--but which seems transcendentally right to traditionalists--the father commences to comply on a mountain called Moriah. Only at the last instant does God stay the father's hand and renew...
...Abraham dies and is laid out next to Sarah, who preceded him, in a plot he has bought in a town later called Hebron. Both sons attend his funeral...
That is the story. What is its importance? Despite every effort and argument, there is no way to know what century Abraham lived in, or even whether he actually existed as a person. (If he did live, it would have been between 2100 B.C. and 1500 B.C., hundreds of years before the date most historians assign to the actual birth of the religion called Judaism.) But Abraham represents a revolution in thought. While he is not a pure monotheist (he never suggests that other gods do not exist), he is the Ur-monotheist, the first man in the Bible...