Sitting on Cold Tile – A Scribe’s Tale
by Ed Reither
May 23, 2025
I’ve been working on tracing the story of Abraham—his journey from Ur, his time in Canaan, and his trip to Egypt. But as I look for any real evidence outside the Bible, I keep coming up empty.
There are no records in Mesopotamia. Nothing in Egyptian texts. No mention of a man named Abraham making such a journey or being connected to any of the places the Bible talks about. The story seems to stand on its own—layered and edited over time by scribes and theologians, trying to hold it together.
Abraham, it seems, was placed in Ur to give the story some historical weight and distance. Jacob’s journey into Egypt sets up the Exodus. And then you have Ezekiel, much later, saying flat out that “your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite”—suggesting that the people of Israel came straight from Canaan itself, not from somewhere else.
Still, we try to make it all fit. Scholars have written book after book trying to explain the contradictions and fill in the blanks. But what I keep running into is this: there’s no single, clear story. Just a patchwork of attempts to make it work.
San Francisco Theological Seminary (University of Redlands), San Anselmo, CA. Photo – Ed Reither
Yesterday, I spent hours at the San Francisco Theological Seminary Library chasing this down. I held one of those old Dewey Decimal card catalog cards in my hand—the kind with the hole at the bottom. On it were eight call numbers that took me up and down six flights of stairs.
At each stop, I’d find the right section, and if the book was on the bottom shelf, I’d end up sitting cross-legged on the cold tile floor flipping through it. I didn’t just read the book I was looking for—I scanned every title around it, above and below, and all along the aisle. I opened ten or twenty books, all touching on the same topic from different angles.
And every time, I had to quickly decide: is this book worth it? What’s the tone? What’s the author trying to prove? That’s how this scribe works now—reading, sorting, filtering, always aware that behind every explanation is an interpretation, not a final answer.
After a few hours, I left with three more books in my bag. But I knew they wouldn’t clear anything up. They’d just add more pieces to an already complicated puzzle.
It reminds me of The Wizard of Oz. All that effort to follow the yellow brick road, to meet the great and powerful voice—only to find a man behind a curtain pulling levers. That’s what it feels like now: I pulled back the curtain, and instead of divine certainty, I see the editing.
And this isn’t about bitterness. It’s just seeing things more clearly.
The stories people live and die by—whether ancient or modern—are often held together by hope more than by evidence. They help people feel safe, give shape to life, and offer meaning in the face of uncertainty.
I just want to see if the stories we live by are true.