By E. Douglas Clark

He has been called the most pivotal and strategic man in history. Jews, Christians, and Muslims — half the planet’s population — revere him not only as forefather but as an exemplary pattern of righteousness. Jewish tradition tells that his life was a pattern also of things to come, foreshadowing what would befall his posterity through the generations.

But his significance is nothing short of universal, for pursuant to the covenant God made with him, through him and his posterity would heaven’s blessings extend to all nations — by means of the Atonement and the latter-day restoration of the Gospel and establishment of Zion. For more than three decades I have sought to become acquainted with this remarkable man. His name is Abraham.

As a senior in high school I experienced a defining moment when I opened our monthly Church magazine (then called the Era) and began reading an article by Hugh Nibley. The subject was Abraham, and I am still at a loss to adequately explain what happened, except to say that I felt absolutely compelled to learn everything I could about him. The endeavor would be not my vocation but my avocation, one that would lead me to learn biblical Hebrew, participate in the annual meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature, interact with renowned scholars, travel to the Middle East to retrace Abraham’s route, and seek every source available from around the world that illuminated his life story.

Never has there been a story quite like his. Born in an idolatrous era of incredible cruelty and gross immorality, the boy somehow sensed that society had gone gravely amiss, and he began in earnest to seek the Creator. Reflection and prayer opened the heavens, but when he sought to persuade others to abandon their evil ways, he was mocked, persecuted, imprisoned, and ultimately placed on an altar to be sacrificed. Many years later he would endure the unfathomable irony of placing his own beloved son on an altar at God’s command.

“Abraham’s Sacrifice,” by Giovanni Tiepolo

Between those two memorable events came a host of trials and triumphs, prayers and promises, hardships and heavenly visitations. And with him every step of the way was his beloved Sarah. As capable as she was beautiful, she was actually his spiritual superior in important ways. But the decisive factor in their marriage and mission was a deep and undying love that kept them going and seemed to keep them young in spirit, even after they had grown old waiting for the fulfillment of God’s promise of posterity.

That it finally took miraculous means to achieve that promise seems to point ahead to another miraculous birth by another beautiful woman, whose child would come as Son of God and descendant of Abraham. Nor was the Savior the only descendant foreshadowed in Abraham’s long and eventful life. When 14-year-old Joseph Smith knelt to pray, it was a stunning reenactment of what his forefather Abraham had also done as a young boy at the very same age. Joseph’s prayer in fact opened the door for the latter-day fulfillment of Abraham’s covenant.

It is that covenant, along with the sterling example set by Abraham, which is his true legacy. If the great Egyptian pyramids built by the pretenders to Abraham’s priesthood authority were a wonder of the ancient world, it was Abraham himself who was the greater wonder — he who spent his life not amassing fortunes nor constructing massive self-serving monuments, as he easily could have done, but selflessly building the kingdom of God and establishing Zion, and thereby shedding the blessing of God as widely as possible. No wonder the Lord commanded his us to “Do the works of Abraham.” [1] And no wonder modern prophets and apostles have reminded us to do so. In the words of President Spencer W. Kimball, “Now is the time to follow Abraham’s example.”

“Abraham’s Sacrifice,” by Domenichino

So where do we turn to read of Abraham’s example and learn of his works? The most widely known source telling of his life is of course the book of Genesis, where even the casual reader is struck by the sudden shift of emphasis at the end of chapter 11. As noted by German scholar Gerhard von Rad, “All at once and precipitously the universal field of vision narrows; world and humanity... are submerged, and all interest is concentrated upon a single man.” ^[2]

The story of salvation has suddenly become the story of this one man, Abraham, for in him and his posterity are all nations to be blessed. From that point forward the biblical account is the narrative of how that blessing unfolds, beginning with some twelve chapters showing us an unprecedented close-up of a biblical character — his life, conversations, revelations, travels, and even domestic doings. His wife Sarah is the first woman after Eve to be even named in the Bible, and gets far more press than any woman before her.

Even so, the Genesis account of Abraham and Sarah is at times so terse as to be, as Erich Auerbach describes, “fraught with background.” ^[3] Some passages can be downright perplexing, seemingly incongruent or nearly incomprehensible. For example, how is it that the steadfastly faithful Abraham, who had been willing to leave home and kindred at God’s command, suddenly seems to lapse into dismal faithlessness in Egypt by passing his wife off as his sister?  Scholars note that he appears to be “acting completely out of character” ^[4] in this “puzzling” ^[5] and “incon­gru­ous scene” ^[6] that stands out as “a mélange of the credible and the unexplained.” ^[7]

Such incongruence in the Genesis text arises from the troubled transmission of the Hebrew bible over thousands of years, during which it “suffered from the shortcomings of man,” ^[8] including not only all kinds of scribal errors [9] but also, as respected scholar Michael Fishbane has shown, deliberate alterations and omissions. ^[10] In short, despite the wealth of information it preserves about Abraham, the book of Genesis can at times be unreliable and misleading.  

But with the restoration of the Gospel came the hope that Latter-Day Saints would receive further information about their illustrious forefather. The Book of Mormon, published in 1830, foretold that the latter-day work among a branch of Abraham’s posterity would bring them “to the knowledge of their fathers” and the covenants God had made to them. [11]

The most dramatic fulfillment of that promise came in the stunning restoration of an autobiographical Abraham account that fills in key gaps left by Genesis, including the fact that God commanded Abraham to ask Sarah to say she was Abraham’s sister. In March 1842 when Wilford Woodruff helped set the type for the publication of the first installment of the Book of Abraham, his journal entry that night marveled at the book’s “great and glorious” truths, “which are among the rich treasures that are revealed unto us in the last days.” ^[12]

The Book of Abraham remains one of our most important, if sadly underused, scriptural treasures, revealing precious truths about Abraham’s story and his deeds that remain a beacon for his descendants.

With the appearance of the Book of Abraham and the sure knowledge that authentic Abrahamic traditions had survived outside of the Bible, Church leaders were eager to learn more of Abraham from other emerging sources like the Book of Jasher. The Prophet Joseph briefly referred to in an article he wrote for Times and Seasons, [14] and other leaders like Brigham Young, John Taylor, and Wilford Woodruff, speaking in public, quoted the Jasher story of Abraham smashing the idols. ^[15]

When Franklin D. Richards, the compiler of the Pearl of Great Price, spoke in General Conference in 1892, he summarized several legends from Jasher and further mentioned the Qur’an as a source of Abrahamic material. ^[16] By then the Church in Salt Lake City had even reprinted the book of Jasher, making it widely available to the saints. And in the 1898 maiden volume of the Improvement Era, the Church published the first English translation of an extra-biblical account called the Apocalypse of Abraham, a text that purports to be an autobiographical writing of the patriarch and contains striking parallels to portions of the Book of Abraham.

Since then, additional ancient texts continued to emerge, slowly at first. A few were published by R. H. Charles at the beginning of the twentieth century. ^[17] But the pace began to accelerate with the 1947 discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, including the Genesis Apocryphon — yet another autobiographical account of Abraham. In the following decades the emergence of yet other ancient biblical-related texts grew rapidly. Many of these claimed to have been composed originally by early biblical figures like Abraham and Enoch and even Adam, and although once used as authentic texts in early Jewish and Christianity communities, they had long since been set aside, lost, or otherwise forgotten.

Their sudden recovery from oblivion after many centuries is hailed as something of a miracle even by secular scholars. “By the strangest quirk of fate respecting literature that I know of,” wrote Samuel Sandmel in 1983, “large numbers of writings by Jews were completely lost from the transmitted Jewish heritage... Now... a door is being opened anew to treasures that are very old.” ^[18]

Hugh Nibley’s assessment is similar, referring to that “astonishing outpouring of ancient writings that is the peculiar blessing of our generation.” ^[19] Part of the blessing is the remarkable corroboration that these newly emerged writings offer to the prior latter-day revelations and texts, a phenomenon noted by no less a figure than Harold Bloom.  In one of his widely read books, the prominent Bloom, not a Latter-day Saint, called attention to Joseph Smith’s “uncanny recovery of elements in ancient Jewish theurgy that had ceased to be available either to normative Judaism or to Christianity, and that had survived only in esoteric traditions unlikely to have touched Smith directly.” ^[20] Such vindication of the Prophet Joseph’s work was prophesied by himself: “The world will prove Joseph Smith a true prophet by circumstantial evidence,” ^[21] he foretold.

But these long-lost and recently recovered ancient texts do more than corroborate.  They also offer additional detail, consistent with the restored knowledge already provided through latter-day scripture, about our illustrious forefather Abraham. Of all the saints since Abraham’s day, we are uniquely blessed to have at our disposal an expanded wealth of knowledge about him and his life.

All of which seems to me more than coincidental, for the more we learn of Abraham’s day, the more it seems a distant mirror of our own age of increasing spiritual darkness. The remedy for today’s ills is the preaching of the restored Gospel of Jesus Christ and the establishment of Zion, which we can accomplish only by doing the works of Abraham and thereby fulfilling his covenant to bless ourselves and all nations.