The Departure
An excerpt from Father, Founder, Patriarch - Discovering the vision of what all men must be
Abraham.
When we first meet Abraham, he is living with his father and family in the land of the Chaldeans, near the city of Ur.
The bible goes on to explain that Terah took his family west, to the city of Haran. This directional detail will become a motif of significance in the Jewish understanding of the narrative. From the creation account in Genesis, Adam and Eve are moved east from the Garden and the journey of Terah is seen as a continuation of that drive. Abraham, traveling all the way to what will one day be Israel completes “the journey to the family’s true homeland.”1 We continue to see this directional narrative play out in the New Testament with Jesus entering Jerusalem from the eastern Mount of Olives, and with the apostles continuing to go west from Jerusalem to Rome, the heart of the world.
The reason, however, for the familie’s departure is never given in the bible. For additional insight we can follow and ancient Jewish commentary of the Hebrew scriptures called the Midrash Bereshit. Although it is non-canonical, it can still give us a unique window into the lives of characters from the bible as they were conceived by Jewish authorities.
Regarding the exodus from Ur, the Midrash portrays this as the result of Abraham’s growing belief that the religious structure currently dominating his culture was founded on shaky ground. At a time when people worshiped fire or water or the sun or the moon he recognized that all natural phenomena are passing and therefore cannot be the ultimate end. Instead, he decided, there must be some even deeper origin of things.
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