LOOK BACK TO ABRAHAM YOUR FATHER: ABRAHAM IN JEWISH LITERATURE OF ANTIQUITY

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes changing understandings of Abraham’s significance in Jewish literature of antiquity. It argues that the patriarch’s importance is expressed by the different sets of theological ideas and interpretive frameworks which are used to interpret or claimed to be expressed by his story. Specifically, I examine how different authors represented the significance of Abraham by asking how they conceptualized his ongoing importance for the Jews of their own time. I begin my analysis with the Pentateuch where I make two interrelated arguments. First, in the Torah Abraham is the recipient of extravagant divine promises of land and progeny. These promises constitute the foundation of the divine commitment to his offspring. Second, Abraham is not portrayed as a model of virtue or piety to be imitated. I note that this conception of Abraham’s significance is found in all the main Pentateuchal sources identified by modern scholarship: Non-P, P, and D. I claim that it is only in the Second Temple period that we begin to see an exemplary understanding of Abraham. I show that Philo, Jubilees, and Paul in the Letter to the Galatians understand the patriarch as a model of virtue and piety that the audience is meant to imitate. These texts all share a vision of the past as qualitatively similar to the present, and break with the Pentateuch’s understanding that Abraham lived in a period of origins different from that of the work’s audience. The final two chapters of the dissertation examine rabbinic midrash, focusing on the fifth-century collection Genesis Rabbah. I first illustrate how the biblical concepts of promise and covenant are reinterpreted in light of the rabbinic concept of merit. Abraham as portrayed as a source of merit for the Jewish people, or God’s promises to him are reimagined as being dependent on the future merit of his descendants. I then turn to Genesis Rabbah’s sustained focused on the thoughts and feelings of Abraham. I argue that the patriarch is not presented as a model of ideal emotional life. Instead, he is an example of thoughts and feelings that the audience can recognize as like their own. Abraham thus constitutes a site for reflection on subjectivity, rather than an exemplar.