Abraham, Myth, Prophet or Jewish Stratagem.©

    Like me, scholars have wrestled with it for over a century. Allow me to discuss as a behavioral scientist and historian.

Let us look at the Old Testament as a Narrative of Cause and Identity. The Hebrew Bible, especially the patriarchal stories, functions less as a neutral record of “what happened” and more as a charter myth - a story that explains a people’s origins, legitimacy, and purpose. Abraham is not presented as just an ancestor, but as the prototype of faith, leaving his homeland in Ur, Mesopotamia, trusting a promise, and entering into a covenant with allegedly. The narrative retrojects meaning backwards, where Israel exists (in exile, in Judah, in the Persian or Hellenistic period), so the question is: “How did we come to be?” The answer is crafted as: “We were chosen from the beginning by YHWH, through Abraham.”

This is what anthropologists call an “etiological narrative” - a story of origins that gives a community coherence and direction.

The Jewish people, including the Christians and Muslims, have Abraham as a “Point of Beginning”. Yet, as you’ve already noticed, Genesis itself betrays memories of older traditions (Melchizedek, El Elyon, Shaddai, southern YHWH traditions). This suggests the following:

Israel did not begin with Abraham.

Abraham is a literary beginning, chosen as a symbolic father to anchor identity.

The reality is that Israel’s religion grew from a fusion of southern YHWH traditions, Canaanite El traditions, and later covenant theology.

By making Abraham the start, Israel could claim antiquity and divine purpose that rivals (or surpasses) other nations’ myths.

Let us consider Jewish Theology as Purpose-Making. From a psychological and sociological lens:

Purpose: In a world of empires (Egypt, Mesopotamia, later Persia), Israel was small and vulnerable. By narrating themselves as “chosen by the High God before time”, they created a resilient sense of destiny.

Boundaries: Genealogies and covenants marked who is “inside” and who is “outside,” critical for survival during exile and dispersion.

Resilience: When Jerusalem fell (586 BCE), the theology of “promise to Abraham” gave hope, exile was not the end because God’s promise was eternal.

In other words the theology gave cause in crisis and purpose in survival. Without it, Israel might have disappeared like so many other ancient Levantine tribes.

The Melchizedek Problem - If you re-center Melchizedek, a different picture emerges.

He represents a pre-Abrahamic, universal priesthood of the Most High.

Abraham is subordinate to him, at least in Genesis 14.

Yet Israel’s later texts deliberately absorb Melchizedek into their own story (Ps 110; Hebrews 7) so that the older universal figure becomes a legitimizer of their theology, not a rival.

This maneuver shows how traditions were reframed to support identity. What could have been an embarrassing acknowledgment that Abraham was not first, becomes proof that Israel’s kings and messiah stand in the “true priesthood.”

I conclude by attesting this is a Narrative of Survival. So yes—Jewish theology and the Old Testament patriarchal narrative can be seen as a constructed purpose-giving framework. It takes older religious strands (El, Elyon, southern YHWH) and re-centers them on Abraham. It creates a beginning that is not historically first, but theologically first, to secure identity. It serves a psychological function of survival, binding the community with a sense of eternal cause, chosenness, and divine trajectory.

In behavioral terms, it’s the ultimate coping narrative, transforming vulnerability into destiny.

The Gentile!

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