ove he adored this Most High
God, Maker of heaven and earth. Such was his devotion to this Almighty
Being, that men, wondering, said, "Abraham is the friend of the Most High
God!" He desired to find a home where he could bring up his children in
this pure faith, undisturbed and unperverted by the gross and low worship
around him. In some "deep dream or solemn vision" it was borne in on his
mind that he must go and find such a home.

We are not to suppose, however, that the mind of Abraham rose to a clear
conception of the unity of God, as excluding all other divine beings. The
idea of local, tribal, family gods was too deeply rooted to be at once
relinquished. Abraham, as described in Genesis, is a great Arab chief, a
type of patriarchal life, in which all authority is paternal. The religion
of such a period is filial, and God is viewed as the protector and friend
of the family or tribe. Only the family God of Abraham was the highest of
all gods, the Almighty (Gen. xvii. 1), who was also the God of Isaac (Gen.
xxviii. 3) and of Jacob (Gen. xxxv. 11).

Stanley[349] expresses his satisfaction that the time has past in which
the most fastidious believer can object to hearing Abraham called a
Bedouin sheik. The type has remained unchanged through all the centuries,
and the picture in the Bible of Abraham in his tent, of his hospitality,
his self-respect, his courage, and also of his less noble traits,
occasional cunning and falsehood, and cruelty toward Hagar and
Ishmael,--these qualities, good and bad, are still those of the desert.
Only in Abraham something higher and exceptional was joined with them.

In the Book of Genesis Abraham enters quite abruptly upon the scene. His
genealogy is given in Genesis (chap, xi.), he being the ninth in descent
from Shem, each generation occupying a little more than thirty years. The
birth of Abraham is usually placed somewhere about two thousand years
before Christ. His father's name was Terah, whom the Jewish and Mohammedan
traditions describe as an idolater and maker of idols. He had two
brothers, Nahor and Haran; the latter being the father of Lot, and the
other, Nahor, being the grandfather of Rebecca, wife of Isaac. Abraham's
father, Terah, lived in Ur of the Chaldees (called in Scripture Casdim).
The Chaldees, who subsequently inhabited the region about the Persian
Gulf, seemed at first to have lived among the mountains of Armenia, at the
source of the Tigris; and this was the re