אברהם בסקירות ההיסטוריות בספרות הבית השני

This paper examines the representation of Abraham in brief historical accounts written between the third century BCE and first century CE that did not find their way into the Hebrew canon. Although these texts vary in their date and provenance, their treatments of the Abraham cycle reflect similar tendencies. First, they are influenced by literary types that flourished or were adopted by Jewish communities during the Second Temple period—apocalypses and lists of examples, for instance. Second, while they follow earlier biblical historical models belonging to the “historical review” type, extrabiblical summaries blend these models with pericopae and literary types drawn from the long, authoritative story of Israel’s past in Genesis – 2 Kings. While this phenomenon is already attested in late biblical summaries, the influence of Genesis is much more manifest in Second Temple extrabiblical reviews. A substantial number of extrabiblical summaries thus recapitulate Abraham’s narratives; place them at the beginning of the account or immediately following pericopae from Genesis 1–11; structure the unit about the patriarchs as a genealogy; or insert chronological data into their retellings of the patriarchal narratives—in larger numbers than their biblical precedents. While the biblical summaries never adduce chronological data or review the first generations of humanity, the selection of pericopae from the Abraham cycle in extrabiblical reviews is largely dependent upon biblical historical summaries. Themes such as Abraham’s beginnings and the covenant between the pieces—referred to in Joshua 24, Psalm 105, and Nehemiah 9—thus form some of the most common Abrahamic narratives in the extrabiblical accounts. While no significant differences, with regard to most of the aspects examined in this paper, exist between the summaries penned by communities in various geographical locations, chronological data are a particularly characteristic feature of the summaries in the Qumran library, reflecting the sectarian community’s intense interest in the temporal axis of history.