Presented at
2025 Abraham and His Family Conference
Saturday, May 3 and Saturday, May 10, 2025
Sponsored by The Interpreter Foundation, Brigham Young University Religious Education,
Scripture Central, and FAIR Latter-day Saints
In part based on the passage in Genesis 22:1 “God did tempt [test] Abraham,” a Jewish tradition developed that read and interpreted the Abraham stories in Genesis 12-23 as the Ten Tests of Abraham. This approach gives a powerful way of seeing a coherence in the various stories of Abraham and Sarah. As the spiritual father and mother of the covenant people Abraham and Sarah pass the tests of mortality in these stories and thus establish the virtues of their descendants—the covenant children. The Lord, in Isaiah 51:1-2 exhorts Israel “look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged. Look unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bare you.”
This study proposes to:
- explore the history of these traditions: there are various lists of the ten tests, and several extra-biblical stories;
- identify the specific covenant virtues presented in the various stories;
- point out in these stories the often neglected tests and sacrifices of Sarah;
- examine how this approach may also be applied to the Abraham and Sarah stories told in Philo, the Genesis Apocryphon and Josephus;
- demonstrate this approach as a way of reading the LDS Book of Abraham, seeing Abraham and Sarah as models of the doctrine taught in Abr. 3:25 ‘And we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them.”
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David Seely
David Rolph Seely is professor of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University. He is a member of the international team of scholars that translated the Dead Sea Scrolls and published together with Moshe Weinfeld, the Barkhi Nafshi hymns from Qumran. He has co-authored the books My Father’s House: Temple Worship and Symbolism in the New Testament, Jehovah and the World of the Old Testament and Solomon’s Temple in Myth and History and co-edited Glimpses of Lehi’s Jerusalem. He has also published on Old and New Testament, Book of Mormon and Temple topics.
Jo Ann Seely
Jo Ann H. Seely is Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University. She has taught in the Program on Studies in Religion at the University of Michigan, and at the BYU Jerusalem Center. She co-edited with John W. Welch and David R. Seely the volume Glimpses of Lehi’s Jerusalem. Jo Ann has published on various scripture topics in Old Testament, New Testament, and the Book of Mormon.
