Father Abraham Had Many Sons

Okay, quick quiz. How many actual sons did Abraham have? I’m not talking about his many descendants which were to be, and are, as many as the stars in the sky or the sand on the seashore. I’m talking sons, not grandchildren or great-grandchildren or whatever. Two, you say? Isaac and Ishmael? Um, not exactly.

As a matter of fact the correct answer is eight. So who were the other six, and where did they come from? Their names were Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak and Shuah. Their mother was Abraham’s other wife, Keturah.

After the Bible tells us of the death of Sarah, and after it tells us of Isaac’s marriage, it tells us that Abraham took another wife and had six more sons. He gave them gifts and sent them all away to live in the east while he was still alive so Isaac would get all the inheritance. The way this is worded, Ishmael is included in the gift giving and sending away. One commentator (Ya like that word? That’s a fifty-cent word if I ever heard one!) suggested that he hoped Abraham was a little more generous with Keturah’s sons than he was with Ishmael, given that Ishmael nearly died of thirst in the desert. But then, I’ve often thought that the reason for that was because he was sharing with his mother. After all, he was an older teenager at that time, not a little child as a lot of people assume.

The Bible then goes on to tell us some of the descendants of Keturah and Abraham’s six sons. And that’s pretty much all there is to the story. The reason I include it is because it is so surprising, and because it begs the question: just when did this occur? I had my own idea about it, but the commentaries I consulted were divided. Some of the commentators agreed with what I thought, that this second marriage happened after Sarah’s death, but others had a different idea. They thought that perhaps Keturah was a servant that Abraham married early on when Sarah proved barren, perhaps even before they left Haran. They cite Hebrews 11:11, that says, “By faith Abraham, even though he was past age--and Sarah herself was barren--was enabled to become a father because he considered him faithful who had made the promise.” In other words, it was not only Sarah who received the special miracle that enabled her to conceive at the age of ninety, but Abraham also needed a miracle to be able to become a father at his age. And of course, in that culture it was acceptable to marry a secondary wife if the first did not have children. I’m sure the women didn’t accept it very readily, but the culture at that time did not ask what women accepted. Now, before you start patting our collective culture on the back, that culture didn’t have an entertainment culture that entertained it’s people with images of violence and perverted sex. We might not have their badness, but we have badness of our own.

I’m not too sure that the verse in Hebrews actually means that Abraham couldn’t have become a father at his age. After all, it is sometimes possible for a man to father a child in old age; at least, so I’ve heard. Or even if it did mean that Abraham was made able to do so only by a miracle of God, one commentator who agreed with me said that the miracle was so powerful that the effects of it were still on him when he was 140 and beyond.

Another reason I favor the explanation of Abraham’s remarrying and having six more sons after the death of Sarah is because of Eliezer, who I talked about in the last story. Eliezer was not Abraham’s son, yet had Ishmael not been born, Eliezer would have inherited everything Abraham had. Why would this have been necessary if Abraham had other children? If Keturah was one of Abraham’s servants, that would not have made her children ineligible for inheritance, since it didn’t disqualify Ishmael. Sarah’s stated reason for wanting Ishmael sent away was so that he would not inherit along with Isaac.

The next event we’re told about is Abraham’s death. He was, by now, 175 years old. It had been a century since he had left Haran. He was buried in the cave in which he had buried Sarah by Isaac and Ishmael. I don’t know where Keturah’s sons were, but Ishmael must have put aside his differences with Isaac to come and assist in his father’s burial.

If you do the math, you discover that Abraham’s twin grandsons Jacob and Esau were fifteen years old at the time. My son was fifteen when my father passed away last December 31, so this is something I can relate to.

I’m also not sure why Ishmael was so much more important than Keturah’s sons. Only one of Keturah’s sons, Midian, seems to have any importance in Scripture. But some seem to say that the country of Midian was founded by someone else of that name. If, however, it was named for Keturah’s son, then Keturah had at least two descendants you may have heard of: Reuel, priest of Midian, better known as Jethro, and his daughter Zipporah, Moses’ wife. I could not find a definitive answer to whether or not Jethro and Zipporah descended from Keturah.

I don’t have a lot of sermonizing to do with this story. There are some hints, however, in a lot of these Abraham stories that Abraham was perhaps less than exemplary in some of his dealings with his family. In Romans we read that he was called righteous, not because he was good, but because he believed God, and God simply counted his belief as righteousness. This did not excuse anything unrighteous that Abraham did. It means that Abraham was declared righteous by the grace of God, just as all of us are. None of us have any righteousness on our own, and we all need God’s forgiveness, His crediting us with righteousness. Otherwise, we would all be guilty before God. Only the blood of Jesus can take away our guilt. Of course, Jesus’ death and resurrection had not yet occurred in Abraham’s lifetime, but Jesus said about him: “Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad (John 8:56).”