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Jubilees and Philo share a tradition, not found in the Hebrew Bible, in which Abraham abandons his polytheistic background and learns monotheism by God speaking to him directly, either as a voice or mystical experience.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Jubilees 12:17
Pseudepigrapha, Hebrew Bible Expansions
16 And in the sixth week, in the fifth year of it, [1951] Abram sat up throughout the night on the new moon of the seventh month to observe the stars from the evening to the morning, in order to see what would be the character of the year with regard to the rains, and he was alone as he sat and observed. 17 And a word came into his heart and he said: All the signs of the stars, and the signs of the moon and of the sun are all in the hand of the Lord. Why do I search (them) out? 18 If He desires, He causes it to rain, morning and evening; And if He desires, He withholds it, And all things are in his hand.'
Philo, On Abraham 70
Classical
70 The man who had been brought up in this doctrine, and who for a long time had studied the philosophy of the Chaldaeans, as if suddenly awakening from a deep slumber and opening the eye of the soul, and beginning to perceive a pure ray of light instead of profound darkness, followed the light, and saw what he had never seen before, a certain governor and director of the world standing above it, and guiding his own work for its good, and exerting his care and power on behalf of all those parts of it which are worthy of divine oversight.
Date: 20–50 CE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... interpreters found an alternate explanation for how Abraham came to know that there is only one God: they connected his refusal to worship "other gods" (implied by Joshua 24:2-3) with his knowledge of the stars. Somehow, Abraham came to understand that it is not the stars but God who controls human destiny ... And so, the motif 'Abraham the Astronomer'—based on the simple fact that the Bible names Chaldea as Abraham's birthplace—led to a new motif, one that explained how Abraham came to be a monotheist: it was Abraham's knowledge of astronomy and observations of the heavens that led him to discover that there is only one God ..."
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I love that history also had him studying with Shem and Eber in Jerusalem in the School of the Prophets after he left Babylon. He wasn't left to learn on his own, YHWH trained him.
I love that history also had him studying with Shem and Eber in Jerusalem in the School of the Prophets after he left Babylon. He wasn't left to learn on his own, YHWH trained him.