Abraham and the Limits of Historical Meaning
By Ed Reither, Beezone
Dedication
To Stephen Ambrose—my history professor at the University of New Orleans—
who first taught me to respect the story, and then to question the ground beneath it.
Stephen Edward Ambrose (1936–2002) was a historian of uncommon clarity and conviction, best known for his works on World War II and his biographies of Eisenhower and Nixon. A longtime professor at the University of New Orleans, he brought history to life not just through his writing, but through the way he taught others to think critically, and to care about where stories come from.
A Word of Caution to the Reader
Before sharing this essay, a caution is in order—especially for students, researchers, and any honest reader trying to make sense of biblical origins.
What you are about to read is not anchored in solid, verified historical fact – as much as I tried. It is a body of literature built on speculation, argument, and narrative stitching. In my experience, about 90% of what passes as historical analysis in this area of research is myth-making dressed in scholarly language. The remaining 10% efforts by scholars and believers to appear on the surface to be reliable—but rarely does any of it hold up to deeper scrutiny; at least to my estimation.
If you’re looking for faith, there are traditions for that.
If you’re looking for verified truth, you’ll need to search elsewhere.
What you’ll find here is something in between—not quite fiction, not quite history—but a sustained effort to make meaning from fragments.
And yet, mythmaking is not without value. Even when not historically grounded, these stories have served as moral frameworks, offering patterns of meaning, relationship, and responsibility. If approached consciously—as myth, not as fact—they can still shape lives, guide choices, and speak to enduring human dilemmas.
This essay began with my own attempt to read Abraham historically. It didn’t end that way. What follows is not a conclusion, but an account of the confusion that led me into a different kind of reading altogether.
Entering Through Ettien N. Koffi
I began reading Language and Society in Biblical Times by Ettien Koffi with a straightforward question: Who was Abraham, and when did he live? Koffi’s book approached this question with a kind of sober precision that I found reassuring. He wasn’t arguing theology. He was offering something that sounded like historical scholarship—grounded in linguistics, social structure, and biblical geography. It felt like a reliable place to begin.
Earlier that same morning, I had been thumbing through books at the San Francisco Theological Seminary—one after another, dense with jargon, posturing as erudite but weighed down with technicality. Koffi’s voice was different. His writing was scholarly but not aloof, not performative. It didn’t feel like it was written to impress other scholars. His prose was easeful and direct, managing to cover complicated terrain without dressing it up. That made it readable—not just intellectually, but personally. It invited me in.
Koffi treats Abraham not as a symbolic or mythic figure but as a real person who moved through real lands, spoke real languages, and influenced the development of Hebrew through the Proto-Aramaic his community likely brought with them from Haran. His method is clear: if we follow the languages, the migrations, and the textual clues, we can begin to trace the emergence of Hebrew—not out of nowhere, but as the consequence of a long social-linguistic evolution beginning with Abraham.
I accepted the premise. Not because I needed Abraham to be real in a religious sense, but because the argument seemed grounded. There was something stabilizing in the way Koffi laid it all out. Abraham wasn’t floating in myth—he was situated in Canaan, surrounded by linguistic influences, managing herds, building a community, engaging with local tribes. This wasn’t the Abraham of Sunday school. This was a man with a language, a place, and a timeline.
And for a while, I let that framework stand.
Disorientation – The Fractures in the Foundation
But as I read on, something began to shift. Koffi’s clarity, which had initially drawn me in, started to expose the very thing I hadn’t been looking for: contradiction.
The dates. That’s where it began. Abraham’s life was placed, depending on how you followed the trail, anywhere from the 13th century BCE to the 20th century BCE. One moment he was emerging in the time of Amorite migrations near 2000 BCE; another moment, the timeline seemed to float closer to the period that would place him just a few generations before Moses. No definitive anchor held. It wasn’t just that different scholars disagreed—it was that the whole method seemed to depend on stacking tentative assumptions on top of earlier, equally tentative ones.
I started to feel disoriented. If Abraham couldn’t be placed with any certainty—if his appearance on the historical stage could slide forward and backward by centuries—then who exactly was I trying to find? Was I reading about a man, or was I watching later generations project a figure backward into history to give their story a beginning?
These stories, I realized, weren’t constructed like modern histories. They were inherited traditions shaped by the needs of those who retold them—revised, layered, and sometimes solidified in order to establish legitimacy or continuity. And here I was, entering that maze, thinking I might find a person, when what I was actually uncovering was the residue of remembered meaning, not verifiable fact.
And yet the story of Abraham doesn’t just rest in history books—it lives at the core of three major world religions. Entire traditions call him “father.” People pray to his God. Wars have been waged in the long shadow of his promise. What does it mean that the foundational figure behind so much human belief—so much identity, territory, law, and conflict—might not be historically verifiable?
I didn’t have an answer. What I had was discomfort. A growing awareness that something inside the story didn’t align with the structure being built around it.
The Deeper Question – What Are We Doing With These Stories?
At some point, the historical uncertainty gave way to a larger, more pressing question: If so little about Abraham’s life can be verified, then why does so much continue to be built on his name?
I began to sense that the scholars—Koffi included—weren’t avoiding this question. But neither were they confronting it head-on. Instead, there was a kind of careful sidestepping, as if acknowledging too openly the fragility of the foundation might cause the whole enterprise to collapse. The linguistic arguments, the sociocultural reconstructions, the layered interpretations of Genesis—all of it started to feel like a vast, meticulous architecture built atop sand.
I asked myself: Are we massaging a dead horse?
Is this an attempt to animate something long departed—treating it as alive, because the consequences of declaring it dead are too great to bear?
And yet, what I began to see more clearly is that these weren’t historical documents in the modern sense. They were cultural maps—and maps aren’t the same as territory. These stories weren’t designed to be factual; they were designed to be formative. Myth, when mistaken for history, becomes dangerous. But when read symbolically, it can still carry moral weight.
Still, that distinction is not easy to live with. It required something of me—not just intellectually, but emotionally. To stay with the story, I had to change the way I understood what it meant for a story to be true.
Reframing – Abraham as Developmental Symbol
At a certain point, my confusion stopped being a problem I needed to solve and started becoming a condition I needed to live with. I wasn’t getting clarity. What I was getting was something closer to disillusionment—though not in the cynical sense. I wasn’t bitter. I wasn’t looking to reject the story or tear it down. I just couldn’t hold it the way I once had.
And that’s when something shifted again.
If I couldn’t hold the story as historical, what was left?
Was there still something in it worth keeping—not as fact, but as form?
Could Abraham mean something, even if he wasn’t historically verified?
It was here that developmental psychology came to mind—not in any forced or academic way, but as a framework I’d long known and now began to see mirrored in the story itself. Piaget’s stages of cognition, Kohlberg’s moral development, Maslow’s movement from basic needs to self-transcendence—these were models that described how human beings grow, how understanding deepens, how meaning shifts over time. What if Abraham, rather than being the founder of a bloodline, was a symbolic marker of a particular stage of inner growth?
In that light, his story looked different.
To be called “out of your father’s house,” to leave your familiar land without knowing where you’re going—this wasn’t just a description of a physical migration. It was the shape of the first real spiritual movement: stepping away from inherited identity, cultural certainty, and unquestioned authority. It was the beginning of reflective consciousness. The beginning of trust—not in society, not in tribe, but in something unseen. A future not yet given. A truth not yet proven.
I didn’t need Abraham to be real anymore—not in the archaeological sense. I needed him to be real as an inner figure. A symbol of the self who hears the call to leave the known and walk into ambiguity. In that sense, Abraham was more useful to me as myth than as man. Not because he was false, but because the story had matured beyond the need to be proven.
And perhaps I had, too.
The Timeline Frame – Moses and the Question of Historical Continuity
As I continued wrestling with the Abraham story, I couldn’t help but think about Moses. Koffi doesn’t focus on Moses—he keeps to the linguistic and cultural development surrounding Abraham—but the figure of Moses inevitably enters the conversation once you ask when and how the Hebrew people emerged. Abraham, after all, is said to have gone down into Egypt. Moses is the one who leads the people out. The distance between them—both narratively and historically—ought to matter.
But again, I was confronted with the same uncertainty. The Exodus is traditionally dated to anywhere from the 15th to the 13th century BCE, depending on which internal or external clues one chooses to privilege. Meanwhile, Abraham’s timeline shifts just as easily between the 20th and 18th centuries BCE. Do the numbers line up? Sometimes they seem to. Other times, they clearly don’t.
The gap between Abraham’s entrance into Egypt and Moses’ exit wasn’t just a chronological space—it was a symbolic void. A blank that had to be filled by tradition, speculation, or faith.
I started to see that the timeline itself wasn’t holding the story together. It wasn’t a spine—it was a scaffolding. The more it tried to support, the more it seemed to buckle.
Rather than collapse under the ambiguity, I began to see the narrative distance between Abraham and Moses as an invitation. The figures no longer had to stand in historical sequence like ancient dominoes. They could represent movements of the inner life: the call to leave, the descent into unknown structures, the eventual breaking free.
The story wasn’t reporting. It was reflecting.
Interlude – The Ordeal as Historical Justification
One particularly striking moment in Koffi’s chapter on the emergence of Hebrew from Canaanite and Proto-Aramaic comes when he discusses the transition to Egypt—specifically the migration of Jacob and his household after Joseph’s rise in Egypt. According to Genesis, seventy members of Jacob’s family relocated to Egypt to escape famine. This narrative marks a major turning point, not just in biblical storytelling, but in the theological and ethnic identity of the Hebrew people.
But—and this is critical—there are no external records confirming any of it. Egyptian archives, known for their detail and ceremonial precision, are completely silent about the presence of the Hebrews in Egypt. No archaeological evidence confirms their enslavement, migration, or exodus. These aren’t minor gaps. They are gaping absences in what is otherwise one of the most narratively formative arcs in biblical tradition.
And yet, as Koffi notes, many scholars accept the story as plausible—not because of corroborating evidence, but because, in their view, “no one would invent a story like this.” Historian John Bright epitomizes this position when he writes that the story’s humiliating themes—slavery, dependence, deliverance by divine intervention—are themselves signs of authenticity. In his words, “it is not the sort of tradition any people would invent.”
This is where the line between myth and memory becomes most revealing. Bright’s argument is not historical; it is psychological. He is claiming that because the story portrays suffering, it must be true. But this overlooks how often heroic identity is born from exactly these kinds of ordeals. It is precisely the magnitude of the suffering that confers legitimacy to the narrative. The ordeal becomes its own evidence.
There is, embedded in this logic, a theological seduction: the deeper the shame, the greater the glory. The more unbearable the exile or oppression, the more sacred the survival. This mythological pattern recurs throughout history, and it becomes especially powerful when used to claim identity, territory, or divine favor. And in that light, Bright’s rationale isn’t weak merely because it lacks external support—it’s dangerous because it elevates emotional plausibility above empirical reality.
We believe not because the facts are secure, but because the feelings are strong.
Closing – What Now?
I didn’t arrive at an answer. I arrived at a different kind of relationship—with the story, with history, and with my own need for certainty.
What began as a straightforward inquiry into the historical Abraham led me into something much more difficult to hold. I began with the assumption that if I could locate him—fix him in time, language, and place—I could better understand the emergence of a people, maybe even a faith tradition.
And for a moment, I thought I could.
But clarity gave way to contradiction. And the more I read, the more I began to realize that what was being constructed wasn’t a portrait of a person, but a framework of meaning. The man I was trying to find may never have existed. Or if he did, we know almost nothing about him beyond what tradition wants him to mean.
What saved the story for me wasn’t the scholarship, though I still respect it. It was the realization that Abraham—as a figure, as a moment in consciousness—might still be true even if he never walked the earth. He is not proven. But he is felt. He is invoked not because we know he lived, but because we recognize what his story asks of us.
To leave the known. To listen inwardly. To walk into something not yet seen.
I can live with that now. Not because the historical questions have been answered—they haven’t—but because I’m no longer asking them to bear more than they can carry. I’m no longer asking the story to be what it’s not. I’m letting it speak from where it actually lives.
In here.
Ed Reither