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 region where Abraham was born, a region now occupied by the people called Curds, who are perhaps descendants of the old Chaldees, the inhabitants of Ur.  The Curds are Mohammedans and robbers, and quite independent, never paying taxes to the Porte.  The Chaldees are frequently mentioned in Scripture and in ancient writers.  Xenophon speaks of the Carduchi as inhabitants of the mountains of Armenia, and as making incursions thence to plunder the country, just as the Curds do now.  He says they were found there by the younger Cyrus, and by the ten thousand Greeks.  The Greeks, in their retreat, were obliged to fight their way through them, and found them very skilful archers.  So did the Romans under Crassus and Mark Antony.  And so are they described by the Prophet Habakkuk (chap, i. 6-9):—­