The Patriarch

Jews, Christians and Moslems recognize Abraham as a common spiritual ancestor, and all three faiths look to the Genesis account of how the Lord told him: "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee: and I will make of thee a great nation.'' What were Abraham's country and kindred like, and what sort of land did God show him? Modern scholarship, drawing on the latest findings of archaeology and textual research, is able to propose answers to those questions in vivid and imaginative detail. Most of the answers are pulled together in a new, smoothly written book for laymen: Abraham: His Heritage and Ours, by Boston Writer Dorothy B. Hill (Beacon Press; $3.95).

Ziusudra's Ark. For the bare bones of her account, Author Hill uses the 377 verses of the Bible (Genesis 11:27--25:11). To flesh them out she draws upon The Book of Jubilees, a Hebrew document, probably of the 3rd or 4th century B.C., that purports to be a series of messages about the history of mankind given to Moses by an angel. By far the most interesting elements in the book are provided by the latest diggings in Iraq, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

It was here, many scholars believe, that Abraham was born some 4,000 years ago. The land was inhabited by a non-Semitic people called the Sumerians. They, drained the marshes of the delta and built a highly developed civilization of irrigated fields, pastures and theocratic city states. An 8-to-10-ft. deposit of clay from about 4000 B.C. indicates a possible Sumerian basis for the Biblical story of the Flood, and the Sumerian version has its Noah--a good man named Ziusudra who was instructed by two gods how to build an ark and save himself and his family from the inundation that would destroy mankind. Like Noah, Ziusudra determined when the waters had subsided by releasing birds from the ark.

A Dove for Nannar. Author Hill suggests that Abraham was a boy in the Sumerian city of Ur, a descendant of a Semitic people who inhabited the land before the Sumerians came. Thus he would have learned the story of the Flood, as well as that of the Tower of Babel--which sounds like a description of one of the stepped pyramids called ziggurats atop which the Sumerians built temples.

According to The Book of Jubilees, Abraham's father, Terah, made small clay images which Abraham as a boy peddled in the street. Author Hill gives in detail an imaginary account of a trip by the boy Abraham to the great ziggurat of Ur, to present to the priests one of his best doves as a sacrifice to the city's patron deity, Nannar, the moon-god.

Later, grown to manhood, Abraham migrated to Canaan, on the Mediterranean's eastern shore, with his childless wife Sarah, his brother's son Lot, his slaves and herds. The land he found was anything but the primitive pastoral society Bible scholars assumed until recently. The excavation of the ancient cities of Ugarit and Mari in the 1930s shows a culture already old in Abraham's day, which was celebrated for its music and art, bronze work and historical and religious epics. Diplomatic and commercial documents preserved on clay tablets indicate that Abraham, a rich man now, must have lived in a highly sophisticated world.

An Altar for el-Shaddai. Author Hill draws on imagination to describe the vale of Shittim, location of the wicked cities of the plain, Sodom and Gomorrah, though with benefit of modern geological research. "A pall of thin, grey haze hovered ominously over the valley and the smell of sulphur filled the air. There were places . . . where naphtha oozed from the ground, slimy and flammable. There was also asphalt (bitumen) for the gathering . . . Petroleum gases and light fumes of sulphur often hung on the air above the plain . . ." Through Canaan ran an enormous geological fault, and a shift in this, it is thought, touched off an internal explosion of petroleum gas which in turn sent tons of flaming asphalt, marl, salt and limestone high into the air to descend on the helpless cities as brimstone and fire out of heaven, from the Lord.

The Canaanites worshiped an earth-god. Baal, and Abraham presumably joined in some of their community rites and festivals. But Abraham heard the voice of his own God in the high places. On the Amorite mountain of Ebal, between the city of Luz (later called Bethel) and the ruins of an older city called Ai, Abraham set up his first altar. "While other men," writes Author Hill, "turned to the moon's light, the shadow of rocks, the sanctity of caves, the bounty of water holes, or to the protection of river and sun, to find their manifestations of God, more and more often Abraham found himself . . . lifting his eyes to the mountains and his heart to him whom the Canaanites often called el-Shaddai, 'the Mountain One.' "

It was probably on a high place that Abraham made the everlasting covenant of his people with the Lord and received God's instructions to revive the ancient Canaanite rite of circumcision as a token of participation in that covenant. And it was also to a mountain that Abraham went, ready to perform the act that still stands as a supreme symbol of human faithfulness to God's command--the sacrifice of Isaac, his only son.

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