Abraham, Patriarch of the Ishmaelites, Israelites and Edomites

Abraham's three descent lines — through Ishmael, Jacob, and Esau — and what they left: the Kaaba, Judaism and Christianity, and the Herodian enclosure over the Cave of the Patriarchs.

1. Abraham's descent from Noah

Genesis traces Abraham back to Noah through Noah's son Shem: Shem, Arphaxad, Shelah, Eber, Peleg, Reu, Serug, Nahor, Terah, and then Abram (Genesis 11). Eber, in this line, is the name traditionally connected to the word "Hebrew" (ʿivri); Abraham is called "the Hebrew" in Genesis 14:13.

A line of covenant runs with the descent, in two forms. God's covenant with Noah (Genesis 9), marked by the rainbow, is made with all humanity and every living thing — universal, not a chosen line. The covenant with Abraham (Genesis 12, 15, 17) is the narrower one — the call, the land, and the promise of descendants — carried on through Isaac and Jacob, the chosen line that the rest of this memo follows.

2. Abraham's lines

Genesis gives Abraham sons by three women, and from them three named peoples:

• Ishmael, by Hagar, is the father of the Ishmaelites. Arab and Islamic tradition traces the Arabs to Ishmael, and the line to the Prophet Muhammad.
• Isaac, by Sarah, has two sons. Jacob, renamed Israel, fathers the twelve tribes, the Israelites. The word Jew comes from one of those tribes, Judah: after the ten northern tribes were scattered by Assyria, the southern kingdom of Judah survived the Babylonian exile and carried the line on as the Jewish people, from whom Judaism descends. Christianity arose within the wider Israelite people: Jesus and his first followers were Israelites of the Second Temple period — Galileans, for the most part. The Israelite line is the root of both faiths.
• Esau, Jacob's twin, is the father of the Edomites (Genesis 36).

Abraham had further sons by Keturah (the Midianites among them), so the descent lines run wider than three; these are the three that carry the story to the shrines below.

3. Ishmael in Genesis

Sarah is barren, so she gives her Egyptian servant Hagar to Abraham, and Hagar bears Ishmael when Abraham is eighty-six (Genesis 16). The name means "God hears." An angel meets the pregnant Hagar at a desert spring, names the child, and foretells that a great nation will come from him (Genesis 16).

At the covenant of circumcision (Genesis 17), Abraham asks that Ishmael share in it. God blesses Ishmael: he will be fruitful, will father twelve princes, and will become a great nation. The covenant itself is set with Isaac. After Isaac's birth, Sarah demands that Hagar and Ishmael be sent away (Genesis 21); God states that Ishmael too will become a nation, "because he is your offspring." The boy grows up in the wilderness of Paran, becomes an archer, and takes an Egyptian wife. Genesis lists his twelve sons and gives his lifespan as 137 years (Genesis 25). When Abraham dies, Isaac and Ishmael together bury him at the cave of Machpelah (Genesis 25:9).

4. The Islamic account: Ishmael, the Kaaba, and the sacrifice

In Islam, Ishmael (Ismā'īl) is a prophet and messenger — the Quran calls him true to his promise, one who enjoined prayer and charity, and counts him among the patient and the righteous (Quran 19:54–55). He is the forefather of the Arabs and an ancestor of the Prophet Muhammad. Two episodes carry his story: the building of the Kaaba, and the sacrifice.

The account that places Abraham and Ishmael at Mecca is Quranic and Islamic, and it is the only textual source for it.

Abraham brings Hagar and the infant Ishmael to the valley of Mecca and, on God's command, leaves them. Their water runs out, and Hagar runs seven times between the hills of Safa and Marwah; the well of Zamzam springs up at the child's feet. A tribe settles by the water, and Ishmael grows up among them. Abraham returns, and father and son "raise the foundations" of the Kaaba (Quran 2:127), a sanctuary cleansed of idols. Kaʿba means "cube" in Arabic; the structure is a stone cube about fifteen metres high. The Black Stone, by tradition given by the angel Gabriel, is set into one corner; the Station of Abraham (Maqam Ibrahim) is the stone Abraham is said to have stood on.

These episodes are the basis of the hajj: pilgrims circle the Kaaba (tawaf), run between Safa and Marwah (saʿi), and drink from Zamzam.

Islam also holds that Abraham was commanded to sacrifice his son as an act of submission to God, and that the son went willingly. Genesis names the son as Isaac; the Quran does not name him, and Islamic tradition predominantly identifies him as Ishmael. The willing submission is commemorated at Eid al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice — one of Islam's two major festivals — when an animal is sacrificed, the rite pilgrims also perform at the hajj.

These accounts rest on the Quran, set down well over two millennia after Abraham's traditional era.

5. Isaac's twins: Esau and Jacob

Isaac's wife Rebecca conceives twins, and while they struggle in her womb she inquires of the LORD and is told that two nations are within her, and that the older will serve the younger (Genesis 25:23) — the younger's primacy declared before either is born. Esau comes first — born red, and so also called Edom ("red"), the name his people would carry — with Jacob gripping his heel, the name Jacob tied to the heel and to supplanting (Genesis 25). Esau is a hunter, Jacob a man of the tents and a herdsman; Isaac favours Esau, Rebecca favours Jacob.

Two distinct things then pass to Jacob. The birthright — the firstborn's double share of the inheritance and the headship of the family — Esau gives up himself; scripture returns to it three times: his selling of it (Genesis 25), his protest that Jacob had taken both his birthright and his blessing (Genesis 27:36), and the New Testament looking back on it (Hebrews 12:16). The blessing — the father's prophetic blessing, which carried the covenant promise and dominion — was Isaac's to give and was meant for Esau, so Jacob takes it by deceiving the blind Isaac (Genesis 27). Esau vows to kill him, and Jacob flees to Haran. Neither transfer is the cause of Jacob's primacy, though; both are the means by which the oracle is carried out. The decree — the younger to lead — was told to Rebecca before either was born, and Paul reads it the same way (Romans 9): the choice was made before the twins had done anything.

Twenty years on, Jacob returns. Fearing Esau, who comes to meet him with four hundred men, he sends gifts ahead and wrestles through the night at the ford of the Jabbok, where he is renamed Israel (Genesis 32). The meeting is a reconciliation: Esau runs to him, embraces him, and the brothers weep (Genesis 33). They part in peace — Esau to Seir, the land of Edom, Jacob to Canaan. When Isaac dies, Esau and Jacob together bury him (Genesis 35:29), as Isaac and Ishmael had buried Abraham.

Esau is named as the father of the Edomites, the people of Edom southeast of the Dead Sea (Genesis 36). The Edomites are a documented ancient people of the region. In the second century BCE the Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus conquered Idumea and converted the Edomites to Judaism (around 125 BCE); from then they were counted among the Jews. As a distinct people the Edomites then disappeared, absorbed into the Jewish and wider populations of the region. Their descendants merged into those populations, which over later centuries became variously Jewish, Christian, and Muslim — but the Edomites as such cannot be traced to any one of these. The one prominent figure the sources attach to the line is Herod.

6. The Cave of the Patriarchs and Herod's enclosure

In Genesis 23, Sarah dies at Hebron, and Abraham buys the cave of Machpelah and its field from Ephron the Hittite for 400 shekels of silver as a burial ground. Genesis records that the cave then holds Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah. Rachel is the exception, buried near Bethlehem. The Hebrew name Hevron and the Arabic al-Khalil both refer to Abraham as "the friend of God." In Judaism the site is the holiest after the Temple Mount.

Herod the Great (reigned 37–4 BCE) built a rectangular enclosure of large limestone ashlar blocks over the cave, in the same masonry as the Temple Mount. It is the only fully intact Herodian structure surviving today: Herod's Temple enclosure in Jerusalem survives mainly as the Western Wall, while the Hebron enclosure stands complete. Inside, six cenotaphs mark the three patriarchal couples.

Herod's ancestry is in dispute. The main account, in Josephus, makes him of Idumean — that is, Edomite — descent; a rival account in his own day gave him a fully Israelite lineage, and the question cannot be settled. On the Edomite reading, the monument over Abraham's tomb was raised by a man of Abraham's own line through Esau.

The building was later a Byzantine church, then a mosque under early Islam (al-Haram al-Ibrahimi, the Sanctuary of Abraham), then a Crusader church, and was restored as a mosque by Saladin in 1188. The cave beneath has stayed almost entirely sealed; rare descents in 1968 and 1981 reported Bronze Age and Early Israelite pottery.

7. The site today

The site is in Hebron, in the southern West Bank, about 30 km south of Jerusalem. It is sacred to Jews (the Cave of the Patriarchs), Muslims (the Ibrahimi Mosque), and Christians.

Under Jordanian control (1948–1967) Jews could not visit. After 1967, part of the complex was opened to Jewish worship alongside the mosque, and the site was divided into a synagogue section and a mosque section, with checkpoints and security screening. In 1994 an Israeli settler killed 29 Muslim worshippers during Ramadan; the current segregation, including a set number of days each year when one community has full access, dates from the arrangement that followed. Hebron's Old City was inscribed by UNESCO in 2017.

8. What each source records

• Scripture (Genesis): Abraham's descent from Noah through Shem; Abraham's three lines — Ishmael, Jacob, Esau; the blessing of Ishmael as father of twelve princes; the covenant through Isaac; the oracle to Rebecca that the older would serve the younger; Esau (Edom, "red") as father of the Edomites, the disputed birthright, and his reconciliation with Jacob; the purchase of Machpelah and the burials at Hebron.
• Tradition (Quran and Islam): Ishmael as prophet, forefather of the Arabs and ancestor of Muhammad; Hagar and Ishmael at Mecca; Zamzam; the running between Safa and Marwah; Abraham and Ishmael raising the Kaaba; the sacrifice of the son (Ishmael), commemorated at Eid al-Adha; the hajj rites.
• History and archaeology: the Israelite line as the root of Judaism and Christianity; the Hasmonean conversion of the Edomites (c. 125 BCE) and their absorption; Herod recorded as of Edomite descent; a Herodian enclosure at Hebron, the only one intact, over a cave with Bronze Age material.

References

1. Genesis 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 23, 25, 27, 32, 33, 35, 36.
2. Quran 2:125–129; 14:37.
3. Traditional accounts of the building of the Kaaba (qisas al-anbiya / hadith material).
4. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews and The Jewish War (Herod's Idumean descent, and Nicolaus of Damascus's contrary claim of Babylonian-exile Jewish descent, Antiquities 14.1.3; the Hasmonean conquest of Idumea).
5. Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Kaaba" and "Cave of the Patriarchs."
6. Reports on the Machpelah substructure and the 1968 and 1981 explorations.
7. Site history: Byzantine church, Ibrahimi Mosque, Crusader church, Saladin's 1188 restoration; the 1994 events and the segregation arrangement; UNESCO 2017 inscription.
8. Hebrews 12:16 — Esau's sale of his birthright.
9. Romans 9:10–13 — the election of the younger before birth.