The Book of the Bee 25

1Of Abraham.

2Terah the father of Abraham took two wives; the one called Yona, by whom he begat Abraham; the other called Shelmath, by whom he begat Sarah. Mar Theodore says that Sarah was the daughter of Abraham’s uncle, and puts the uncle in the place of the father. When Abraham was seventy-five years old, God commanded him to cross the river Euphrates and to dwell in Harran. And he took Sarah his wife and Lot his nephew, and crossed the river Euphrates and dwelt in Harran. In his eighty-sixth year his son Ishmael was born to him of Hagar the Egyptian woman, the handmaid of Sarah, whom Pharaoh the king gave to her when he restored her to Abraham; and God was revealed to him under the oak of Mamre. Abraham was a hundred years old when Isaac, the son of promise, was born to him; and on the eighth day he circumcised himself, his son, and every one born in his house. When God commanded Abraham to offer up Isaac upon the altar, He sent him for sacrifice to the special place where, according to the tradition of those worthy of belief, our Lord was crucified. After the death of Sarah, Abraham took to wife Kentorah (Keturah), the daughter of Yaktan, the king of the Turks. When Isaac was forty years old, Eliezer the Damascene, the servant of Abraham, went down to the town of Arach (Erech), and betrothed Raphka (Rebecca), the daughter of Bethuel the Aramean, to Isaac his lord’s son. And Abraham died at the age of one hundred and seventy-five years, and was laid by the side of Sarah his wife in the ‘double cave,’ which he bought from Ephron the Hittite. When Isaac was sixty years old, there were born unto him twin sons, Jacob and Esau. At that time Arbel was built; some say that the king who built it was called Arbol. In Isaac’s sixty-sixth year Jericho was built. Esau begat Reuel; Reuel begat Zerah; Zerah begat Jobab, that is Job.