Becoming Abraham

Map of Abram's journey

We know Abraham as the father of many nations. Arabs and Jews both claim him as their ancestor. His life story forms the very foundation of the basic Christian concept of justification by faith. He did not start out that way. We first meet him as a name at the tail end of one of the tiresome genealogies that make parts of the Bible so dry: “After Terah had lived 70 years he became the father of Abram, Nahor and Haran” (Genesis 11:26). How did this Abram grow to become the Abraham so many people revere?

God called Abram and he answered. As Genesis 12 describes the call,

The LORD had said to Abram, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you. “I will make you into a great nation 
 and I will bless you; 
I will make your name great, 
 and you will be a blessing. 
I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; 
and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

So Abram left, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Haran. He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all the possessions they had accumulated and the people they had acquired in Haran, and they set out for the land of Canaan, and they arrived there. Abram traveled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. At that time the Canaanites were in the land.

The LORD appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built an altar there to the LORD, who had appeared to him. From there he went on toward the hills east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. There he built an altar to the LORD and called on the name of the LORD. Then Abram set out and continued toward the Negev.

Ziggurat of Ur

God said, “Go.” Abram left. It wasn’t quite that simple. The previous paragraph says that he was born in Ur of the Chaldeans, one of three sons of Terah. They all married. Haran died, leaving a son.

Terah took his orphaned grandson Lot and his childless son Abram and set out for Canaan. They stopped at Haran. The Bible does not say why they left Ur for Canaan or why they did not continue on. According to Acts 7:4, though, God called Abram before he left Ur.

Some commentators criticize Abram for leaving Ur with part of his family and stopping at Haran. It seems like imperfect obedience. On the other hand, the Bible records many, many times when God gives a promise and then makes people wait. We have no idea how long they remained in Haran before Terah died, but one way or another, the stop tested Abram’s faith.

As I explain in a longer article, Nobodies of the Bible: Abram, both Ur and Haran were part of a large Mesopotamian civilization that gave the world the science of astronomy and its sinful partner, worship of the moon. The Bible tells us nothing about what either Terah or Abram thought of moon worship, but as soon as Abram answered God’s call, it became impossible for him to practice any form of paganism.

We don’t know how old Abram was when God called him in Ur, but he was 75 when he left Haran. He had no children, and God’s promise had no meaning until he had a son to inherit it. He may not have been very worried then. After all, he was only five years older than his father had been at the birth of his firstborn.

Abraham's Departure / József Molnár (1850)

Abram obeyed. He packed all his stuff, gathered his wife and servants (and maybe some friends who shared his enthusiasm for learning to know the God who speaks to people, and, unfortunately, a nephew he should have been left behind. They all set off for Canaan. Abram didn’t know if that is where God wanted him to wind up, but he had to go somewhere. Returning to Ur would have been the only wrong destination.

Once he arrived at a place later called Shechem, God promised to give that land to his descendants. In other words, Abram himself wouldn’t possess a bit of it. It looks like there was already a Canaanite shrine there, but Abram built an altar to God, defying this new paganism he had encountered. Then he moved a little farther, pitched his tent, built another altar, and called on the name of the Lord.

He would live as a nomad until the day he died. He would pitch his tent many times in many places. Its location was always temporary. Meanwhile, he built altars. He worshiped at them, and they remained when he departed.

Scripture does not record another word that God spoke to Abram for another 10 years. That’s the way God works. He invades our thoughts without warning, speaks so vividly that it feels like something wonderful will happen in the next fifteen minutes–or at least by the end of the week. Then the waiting begins.

It’s hard to receive a promise and wait. A year or two is bad. Abram had lived with his promise since before he left Ur. Still childless when God told him he had arrived in the land promised to his descendants, he must have thought that, finally, he and his wife would start a family. Ten more years passed. Abram continued to worship faithfully. Meanwhile he did some noble things and some foolish, cowardly things. Day by day, the promise faded. He developed a plan B and designated one of his servants as his heir.

Then God showed up again. Abram spilled out his frustrations and worries. He pointed out his lack. He complained. Haven’t all believers done the same thing, sometimes with more than one promise? God spoke his promise again. The servant would not be Abram’s heir. He would have a son from his own body. He told Abram to look up at the sky and try to count the stars. God promised him that his descendants would be that numerous. “Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness” (Genesis 15:6).

This verse marks the first occurrence of any form of “believe” in the Bible. Nowhere does Genesis record that Abel, Enoch, Noah, or even Abram himself when he first heard the promise, believed God. He had no more evidence, no more logical reason than before. He believed anyway.

He and his wife hatched a scheme to help God along, so the son born a year later, Ishmael, was not the son of promise. God did change Abram’s name to Abraham, his wife Sarai’s to Sarah, and promise that Sarah herself would bear a child, but not until 13 years later. Abram/Abraham continued to do some noble things and some foolish and cowardly things for the rest of his life. Being declared righteous does not guarantee against committing sins from time to time.

Abram started out as nobody but a name in a genealogy. God spoke to him and made a wild promise. No amount of waiting, no amount of his own sin, could deter him from hanging on to that promise. As he waited, his faith grew. And that is how a person of no discernible importance to any society he lived in became Abraham, father of many nations, including the spiritual nation of those of like faith.

Photo credit: Ziggurat of Ur Some rights reserved by Russell Petcoff. — Ancient Ur is now in modern Iraq. I have found many very recent pictures of this ziggurat with U.S. soldiers, but it was originally built for astronomical research and moon worship.

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