This post contains a post by Michael Waddell to a BAS forum here about when the stories of Abraham were composed. Credit is fully his, other than the added emphasis that is mine and Byron’s comments as pasted at the bottom.
I [Michael Waddell] really enjoyed watching Dr. Kent Sparks’ NIHB lecture, where he argued that the “Binding of Isaac” (or akedah) was composed during the exile to meet the needs of the exiled Hebrew community. He showed why it would be a plausible fit narratively, and he gave additional reasons why some scholars think that much of the Abraham tradition comes from this period. I have to say, I found it convincing! But then I watched Dr. Joel Baden’s lecture, and I was reminded of the elegant way that the Documentary Hypothesis explains the composition of the Pentateuch in intricate detail. This only works if both J and E — two different written sources — preserved many details of Abraham’s life (including the akedah) before the exile. So I decided to look into what the best scholarship says on when and how the Abraham traditions originated.
And it turns out, much of the best scholarship disagrees fundamentally with much of the other best scholarship!
Let me walk through the major positions on where the stories of Abraham came from. Fair warning: this gets complicated. But it’s a genuinely important question, and I think it reveals a lot about how the Bible was put together.
The case for pre-exilic sources
First, as a refresher, I want to lay out the case that Dr. Baden and others like him use to argue that J and E were independent, pre-exilic documents that recorded details of the Abraham tradition.
In his 2012 book The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis, Baden makes a fresh and detailed case for the classic four-source model (J, E, D, P). His primary criterion is narrative consistency: when you encounter contradictions, doublets, and discontinuities in the text — and the Abraham stories are full of these — you can separate the material into distinct narrative strands, each of which tells a coherent story on its own.[1] You get two wife-sister stories, two Hagar expulsion stories, two versions of the covenant with Abraham, and so on. Each separated strand uses consistent vocabulary, makes consistent historical claims, and follows its own narrative logic.
For Baden, J originates in the southern kingdom of Judah and E in the northern kingdom of Israel, both during the monarchic period — centuries before the exile. He’s not alone here. Richard Elliott Friedman has long defended a similar position, dating J to the 10th or 9th century and E to the 8th. And Frank Polak has argued on linguistic grounds that the Abraham and Jacob narratives exhibit a rhythmic, formulaic prose style characteristic of the classical strata of Biblical Hebrew, which he associates with early Israelite narrative traditions.[2]
The appeal of this position is its explanatory power. The doublets and contradictions aren’t awkward editorial mistakes; they’re the natural result of a compiler weaving together two complete, independent narratives. Pull them apart, and each one works. That’s a powerful argument.
The exilic Yahwist
But in a not-entirely-shocking twist, there are scholars who disagree!
John Van Seters was the great disruptor here. His 1975 book Abraham in History and Tradition was a paradigm shift. In it, he demolished the old Albright-era consensus that the Abraham stories reflected a genuine second-millennium Mesopotamian setting. The nomadic lifestyle, the personal names, the social customs — Van Seters showed that none of these reliably pointed to the second millennium, and that many of them fit better in the first millennium.[3]
But Van Seters went further. He argued that there was no independent E source at all, and that the Yahwist (J) was not a writer of Solomon’s court but a historian working during the Babylonian exile, roughly contemporary with Second Isaiah. His key evidence? The pre-exilic prophets — Amos, Hosea, Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah — know about an exodus tradition and some of them know Jacob, but they show essentially no awareness of Abraham. Van Seters argued that when you compare J’s treatment of creation, Abraham, and the exodus with Second Isaiah, the verbal parallels are striking, suggesting they were contemporaries in Babylon during the late exilic period.[4]
In Van Seters’ model, J wrote as a supplement to the Deuteronomistic History, providing a hopeful theological vision for an audience that desperately needed one. If the Deuteronomist’s message was “we sinned and God punished us,” J’s message was “but God made an unconditional promise to Abraham long before the Law, and that promise still stands.” It’s a smart reconstruction, and it makes the Abraham tradition an exilic creation from top to bottom. On this view, the Documentary Hypothesis has been splitting a single exilic author into two imaginary pre-exilic ones.
Na’aman’s unified exilic composition
But wait, there’s more! Nadav Na’aman takes the exilic dating even further. In a 2015 article, he argued that the pre-Priestly Abraham story was originally a unified and coherent composition, written as part of a larger literary-historical work about Israel’s three ancestors, composed around the mid-sixth century BCE.[5] For Na’aman, none of the three patriarchs — Abraham, Isaac, Jacob — “belong” to either Israel or Judah; they belong to the entity of the “New Israel,” a concept that only makes sense in the exilic context.
Na’aman also makes an interesting geographical argument: he believes the author deliberately planted the patriarchs in Hebron and Beer-sheba, cities located in areas that the Edomites had taken possession of after Judah’s fall. If so, the Abraham stories would function as a kind of literary land claim — “our ancestor lived here long before you did” — aimed at a very specific exilic-era problem.
This is a clean and elegant theory, though I think it runs into some trouble with Ezekiel 33:24, which I’ll get to below.
Römer, Finkelstein, and the middle ground
Not everyone thinks the choice is binary between “pre-exilic sources” and “entirely exilic creation.” Thomas Römer and Israel Finkelstein have staked out an influential middle position. In a 2014 article, they used a combination of literary analysis and archaeological evidence to propose a kind of stratigraphy for the Abraham narratives — layers of text that can be tentatively dated to different periods.[6]
Their earliest layer consists of traditions about Abraham as an ancestor figure associated with the southern Judean highlands, particularly with the shrine at Mamre near Hebron. These traditions — especially the Abraham-Lot narratives (Genesis 13, 18–19) and the promise and birth of a son — may go back to the late monarchic period, perhaps preserved at the Mamre sanctuary. Abraham in these stories is a local hero: he’s associated with specific southern sites, he has relationships with neighboring peoples (Lot and the Moabites/Ammonites), and he’s promised offspring and land. Nothing in this core material requires an exilic setting.
But then, they argue, these older traditions were expanded during the exile. The “endangered ancestress” story[7] (Genesis 12:10–20, where Abraham goes to Egypt and passes off Sarah as his sister) and the birth of Ishmael (Genesis 16) were added during this period, emphasizing the inclusive and multi-ethnic character of Abraham. And of course, the Priestly material — including Abraham’s migration from Ur of the Chaldeans, the covenant of circumcision in Genesis 17, and the genealogical framework — comes later still, probably in the Persian period.
This layered approach has a lot going for it, and it takes seriously both the literary evidence for multiple compositional stages and the archaeological evidence for what makes sense in which period.
The Lipschits, Römer, and Gonzalez article
A recent article by Oded Lipschits, Thomas Römer, and Hervé Gonzalez pushes the Römer-Finkelstein approach further. They argue that the earliest pre-Priestly Abraham traditions — particularly the Abraham-Lot narrative connected to the promise and birth of a son — were probably transmitted at the sanctuary of Mamre during the late monarchic period.[8] During the exile, when local sanctuaries outside Jerusalem regained importance, these old narratives were expanded with the “endangered ancestress” tradition (Genesis 12:10–20) and the Ishmael birth narrative (Genesis 16). Both additions emphasize Abraham’s connections beyond the borders of Judah, which they read as reflecting the exilic community’s need to rethink its identity in relation to neighboring peoples.
What I find compelling about this article is their argument that the pre-Priestly Abraham was not an emigrant. He doesn’t come from Mesopotamia in the earliest layer. The whole “Ur of the Chaldeans” framework — Abraham as a model for the Babylonian exiles who left Mesopotamia to return to the promised land — is a Priestly or post-Priestly addition. It only entered the story when someone needed Abraham to be a role model for the returning Golah. If they’re right, this is a significant point: the Abraham who migrates from east to west is a theological creation of the exilic or post-exilic community, while the Abraham who lives in the southern highlands and worships at Mamre is older.
The evidence everyone has to contend with
So which of these theories is right? Honestly, I’m not sure. But let me lay out the key pieces of evidence and how they cut.
The silence of the pre-exilic prophets. Amos, Hosea, Micah, Isaiah, and Jeremiah show little to no awareness of Abraham. Hosea knows Jacob. The historical psalms (78 and 106) begin their surveys of Israelite history with the Exodus, not with Abraham. Only Psalm 105 and Nehemiah 9 — both late texts — begin with Abraham. This is the strongest argument for the late camp. If Abraham were already the great founding ancestor in a widely-known written source, why does no pre-exilic prophet ever mention him? (On the other hand, you know what they say about arguments from silence…)
Ezekiel 33:24. This is arguably the earliest datable reference to Abraham outside Genesis. The people remaining in the ruined land of Judah say: “Abraham was only one, yet he possessed the land. But we are many; surely the land has been given to us.” This text presupposes that Abraham was already a well-known figure whose connection to the land was common knowledge. For the middle-ground scholars like Römer and Finkelstein, this strongly suggests that some Abraham tradition existed before the exile — you don’t invoke an ancestor in a land dispute if no one has heard of him. For Na’aman, Ezekiel 33:24 is compatible with an exilic creation, since the text itself is exilic and could reflect traditions that were developing at that same time. I find the Römer-Finkelstein reading more persuasive here, but I admit it isn’t decisive.
“Ur of the Chaldeans.” The term “Chaldeans” as a designation for southern Mesopotamia wasn’t common until the Neo-Babylonian period (7th–6th centuries). This makes Abraham’s origin in “Ur of the Chaldeans” look like an exilic or post-exilic addition. All camps essentially agree on this point — the Ur connection is late. The question is whether it was added to an existing Abraham tradition or is part of a wholesale exilic creation.
The doublets. There are two wife-sister stories (Genesis 12:10–20 and 20:1–18), two Hagar stories, two covenant accounts. For Baden and the neo-documentarians, these are the clear-as-day fingerprints of two independent source documents. For Van Seters and the supplementary camp, they’re the result of a single author drawing on (and sometimes duplicating) earlier oral traditions and folk motifs. For Römer and Finkelstein, they may represent different chronological layers. I personally find the doublets most naturally explained by multiple sources, but I acknowledge that supplementation can produce similar results.[9]
The theological fit with exile. Abraham leaving his homeland at God’s command, journeying to a promised land, trusting in a covenant despite having no visible proof — this maps almost perfectly onto the experience of exiles hoping to return to Judah. The akedah, too, can be read as a story about being willing to sacrifice everything and trusting that God will provide. All of this could be coincidence, or it could mean the Abraham stories were composed or substantially reshaped during the exile. The trouble is that theological fit doesn’t prove dating; later communities regularly find their own situations reflected in older stories, precisely because that’s how stories survive.
Genesis 14 and Melchizedek. This chapter, in which Abraham defeats a coalition of kings and meets the mysterious priest-king Melchizedek, is widely considered one of the latest additions to the Abraham narrative. Melchizedek appears elsewhere in the Bible only in Psalm 110, which many scholars associate with the Hasmonean period, and his title “priest of El Elyon” has strong parallels with Hasmonean-era priestly claims. This matters because it shows that the Abraham tradition didn’t stop growing after the exile — it kept accumulating new material for centuries.
…
I’d love to hear what you all think. Does the silence of the pre-exilic prophets settle the question for you? Or does Ezekiel 33:24 prove that Abraham was already an established figure before the exile? Baden’s source divisions are extremely appealing to me — but do they hold up when the relative dating evidence points a different way?
[1] Joel S. Baden, The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis (Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).
[2] Frank H. Polak, “Linguistic and Stylistic Aspects of Epic Formulae in Ancient Semitic Poetry and Biblical Narrative,” in Biblical Hebrew in Its Northwest Semitic Setting, eds. Steven E. Fassberg and Avi Hurvitz (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 285–304.
[3] John Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975). His later Prologue to History: The Yahwist as Historian in Genesis (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1992) extends the argument to all of Genesis.
[4] John Van Seters, “Dating the Yahwist’s History: Principles and Perspectives,” Biblica 96 (2015): 1–25.
[5] Nadav Na’aman, “The Pre-Priestly Abraham Story as a Unified Exilic Work,” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 29/2 (2015): 157–181.
[6] Israel Finkelstein and Thomas Römer, “Comments on the Historical Background of the Abraham Narrative: Between ‘Realia’ and ‘Exegetica,'” Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel 3/1 (2014): 3–23.
[7] That sounds better than the “feigned incest story”, doesn’t it?
[8] Oded Lipschits, Thomas Römer, and Hervé Gonzalez, “The Pre-Priestly Abraham Narratives from Monarchic to Persian Times,” in The Politics of the Ancestors (FAT 124; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 261–296. [A PDF of this very good paper is in the Luke sub-directory in Dropbox.]
[9] I’d note that the Isaac version of the wife-sister story (Genesis 26:1–11) is sometimes argued to be the oldest of the three, since it’s the most “profane” — it has no real plot and reads like a bare-bones folk tradition. If that’s right, then the Abraham versions in Genesis 12 and 20 could be later literary expansions of an older Isaac tradition, which would complicate both the documentary and supplementary models.
The above is from a post by Michael Waddell to a BAS forum here about when the stories of Abraham were composed. Credit is fully his, other than the added emphasis that is mine and Byron’s comments as pasted at the bottom.
Comment by Byron Springer
Really interesting post. In the NIHB roundtable on Genesis scholarship, I asked (tongue in cheek) for a poll on Documentary Hypothesis v. Supplementary Development. Dr. Carr voted “both.” I tend to think he is right. There may have been separate J and E sources that developed over time as conditions and awareness evolved. For example, a pre-exilic reference to Ur may have been supplemented later to be “Ur of the Chaldeans” because later generations really didn’t have a good memory of Ur or where it was. Each subsequent version of each document may have evolved and changed as the stories were told across the region and influenced each other. I also like Dr. Carr’s suggestion that Genesis may actually have been composed as a compilation without really a strong intent to harmonize all of these sources. Instead, the book is meant to memorialize and preserve various traditions that different groups felt were important or even authoritative.
