Abraham Was Born While Noah Was Still Alive

Two Men in the Same Century

Abraham entered the world while Noah still breathed. Not as metaphor and not only as spiritual inheritance, the chronology is literal. The Book of Jubilees, the ancient Jewish text that recounts Genesis and the beginning of Exodus with a more precise accounting of years than the Torah itself provides, places the lifespans of Noah and Abraham in actual overlap. The man who built the ark and survived the flood lived long enough to be a contemporary of the man who would become the father of the Jewish people.

Noah outlived Abraham's grandfather by decades. He was still alive when Abraham was a young man, watching the world that had grown up around the flood's aftermath, noticing how quickly humanity had resumed its old habits. Abraham grew up in a world that still contained the oldest human being who had ever lived, a man who had seen the earth emptied and refilled, who had smelled the waters receding, who remembered what the world looked like after God had washed it clean.

The Exception to What Killed Everyone Else

Abraham lived one hundred and seventy-five years, three jubilees and four weeks of years in the accounting of Jubilees. He died old and full of days. The Book of Jubilees frames this against the backdrop of a world in which human lifespans had been collapsing since the flood. The generations after Noah were dramatically shorter-lived than those before. Abraham was the exception to a trend that had been running in the wrong direction for centuries.

The promise God made to Abraham was embedded in this context. When God told him to look at the stars and count them, and promised that his descendants would be as numerous, Abraham fell on his face and laughed, not from disbelief, the tradition says, but from overwhelming joy, from the shock of hearing something so large said so plainly. He and Sarah were old. The laughter was the only response his body knew how to make to news that size.

The Covenant Cut in Darkness

The covenant that God sealed with Abraham in Genesis 15 was made at night, between the halves of animals, with a smoking fire-pot and a flaming torch passing through the pieces while Abraham slept in a deep and terrifying darkness. God bound himself to Abraham's descendants by the most solemn form of ancient oath, the kind where both parties walk between the animal halves, accepting that they will be like those animals if they break what they have sworn. Only the fire passed through. Only God's presence moved between the pieces. Abraham lay on the ground and God made the promise alone.

The territory named in that covenant stretched from the river of Egypt to the great river Euphrates. It was a span that no nation descended from Abraham would ever fully occupy but that the tradition would never stop regarding as the rightful inheritance. The animals, the darkness, the smoking torch, all of it was in the record, precisely catalogued, available for every subsequent generation to point to.

Keturah and the Sons Who Went East

After Sarah died, Abraham took another wife named Keturah, from the land of Canaan, and she bore him six more sons. The tradition recorded their descendants in careful genealogical detail, sons of Zimran, sons of Jokshan, the branching lines that headed east and south and away from the main story. Abraham gave gifts to all of them and sent them away from his son Isaac while he was still living. Isaac was the heir. The others received generosity and distance. They became the tribes and peoples of Arabia and the eastern lands, related to Israel by blood but outside the covenant.

Abraham died full of years, gathered to his people, and was buried by Isaac and Ishmael together in the cave of Machpelah beside Sarah. The two sons he had kept apart in life came back together over his grave.