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
This presentation seeks to compare the collective narrative of the patriarch Abraham to the sequential framework of the Israelite temple, providing additional glimpses into the Israelite worldview informing them both. I say “collective narrative” because the commonalities with the temple are not readily apparent in the Bible alone but become more apparent when one considers the extra-biblical sources that include the early life of Abraham. There is no shortage of scholarly endeavors to structurally dissect the narratives of Abraham and the other patriarchs as found in the Bible and to propose ideas concerning the meaning their respective configurations might convey. This study seeks to do the same, but includes the material on Abraham’s early life as part of the analysis. While including extra material goes beyond the typical controls of analyzing the purpose of any single text like Genesis, including the material from Abraham’s early life causes the story of Abraham to fit better into a narrative pattern (or “type-scene” as Robert Alter called them) that can also be seen in the narratives of Isaac and Jacob which follow. It is in their commonalities that the Israelite worldview is more likely reflected.
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John S. Thompson
John S. Thompson obtained his BA and MA in Ancient Near Eastern Studies (Hebrew Bible) from BYU and UC Berkeley respectively and completed a PhD in Egyptology at the University of Pennsylvania, with a dissertation emphasis on ancient priesthood. He was an employee of the Seminaries & Institutes of Religion for 28 years, most recently as a Coordinator and the Institute Director in the Cambridge, Massachusetts, area. John is now very happy to research and write full time for Scripture Central, a nonprofit organization that focuses on ancient and modern historical-cultural contexts of the Bible, Book of Mormon, and other Latter-day Saint scripture. He is married to Stacey Keller from Orem, Utah, and they have nine children and six grandchildren.
