One of the oldest ancestors whom the Jews could remember was Abraham. He lived in very old times, many hundred years before there were any books and before anyone could read or write, so that we can know nothing about him except what happened to be remembered through all those years before writing began. Of course such accounts must be very imperfect, for people do not always repeat things just as they heard them. And they often like to make a good story out of a very little incident; but his is all that we have and it may be that when so many things had to be committed to memory, memories were better than they are now. At any rate, each generation had a great amount of anecdotes to tell of those who had lived before them and fathers were fond of repeating these to their children, sometimes in prose, sometimes in poetry. All early history was made up of stories like these. One of the oldest collections of such tales and poems is the Book of Genesis. It begins with a poetic account of the creation of the world and then tells of a great flood, which the Jews thought had covered the whole earth and then how the only family that escaped the flood was scattered over many countries and began to speak many different languages. After this, it tells about Abraham and his descendants.

Abraham came from a mountain region far north of Palestine, near where the great river Euphrates rises. The people of that country wandered about in little bands or tribes, settling down wherever they found good pasturage and water for their sheep and cattle. From the description of them in Genesis, they must have looked quite like the Bedouin Arabs, who later rove through the same regions, living in black tents, carrying their property on camels and donkeys, with long troops of sheep and cattle driven by slaves. And with a picturesque chief or Sheik dressed in a long red cloak, with a bright handkerchief bound around his head and gloating over his shoulders. Abraham seems to have been one of the most powerful of these shepherd-princes, "very rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold," and having many slaves and followers. With these, he once crossed the Euphrates and began a long journey southward, partly in search of fresh pastures and partly, as the story says, because he had outgrown the religious customs of his people and believed that God was calling him away from their idolatries. After going as far south as Egypt and being driven back, he settled down at last just west of the Dead Sea among some tribes called Canaanites, where he stayed the rest of his life.

In those rude and barbarous days, men had several wives instead of only one and the more wealthy and powerful the chief, the more wives he had. One of Abraham’s wives was Sarah, a woman of his own race; another was Hagar, an Egyptian; another was Keturah. His oldest child, Ishmael, the son of Hagar, was very dear to Abraham and would have been Chief after him had not the mother and child been driven out by Sarah’s hatred, into the Arabian wilderness among the serpents and wild beast. The account of this in Genesis is very touching and tells how Hagar and Ishmael were saved and how the descendants of Ishmael became wild Arab tribes wandering through the deserts. Meantime, Isaac, Sarah’s son, remained with his father and became Chief after his death.

One of the most interesting stories in Genesis tells how Abraham, who had always seen children sacrificed to the gods, dreamed once that God commanded him to offer his boy Isaac. So he took Isaac to a mountain, built an altar and put wood upon it. But, just as he was about to kill the child, his love for him made him feel that God could not require such an act and he determined to offer a ram instead. The Jews always remembered this incident and believed that God put the ram there on purpose to convince Abraham that he did not really wish him to do so cruel a thing. It was a long time before they wholly gave up this inhuman practice, but this was probably the first step towards doing so. The last step was not taken, of course, until they learned that God did not wish any life sacrificed to him, whether of children or of animals. But this they could not understand until after many centuries of progress.

Isaac afterwards had two sons called Esau and Jacob and the rest of Genesis tells of them and their descendants. Esau was the older, but Jacob was the mother’s favorite and succeeded, by some very ingenious tricks, in getting away from his brother the rights that belonged to him and making himself a rich and powerful chieftain. Another name for Jacob was Israel and after him the Jews were often called Israelites. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were called Patriarchs.

Genesis i. 1,2; viii. 22; ix. 13; xi. 4; xiii. 2; xxi. 14; xxii. 2; xxv. 27; xxviii. 12

Matthew iii. 9.