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Deborah, which constitutes Chapter 5 of the Book of Judges, with its multitude of feminine images and its triumphant vindication of female strength and courage, must be the lyrical work of a woman. Yet it is clear from internal evidence that this was one of the earliest sections of the Bible to be written downand it seems to have attained more or less its present form not later than 1200 BC . 32 These early Bible records testify to the creative role played by women in the shaping of Hebrew society, to their intellectual and emotional strength, and to their high seriousness.
    Yet the early Bible is above all a statement of theology: an account of the direct, often intimate, relationship between the leaders of the people and God. Here the role played by Abraham is determinant. The Bible presents him as the immediate ancestor of the Hebrew people and founder of the nation. He is also the supreme example of the good and just man. He is peace-loving (Genesis 13:8-9), though also willing to fight for his principles and magnanimous in victory (14:22), devoted to his family and hospitable to strangers (18:1), concerned for the welfare of his fellow men (18:23), and above all God-fearing and obedient to divine command (22:12; 26:5). But he is not a paragon. He is a deeply human and realistic personality, sometimes afraid, doubtful, even sceptical, though ultimately always faithful and carrying out God’s instructions.
    If Abraham was the founder of the Hebrew nation, was he also the founder of the Hebrew religion? In Genesis he appears to inaugurate the special Hebrew relationship with a God who is sole and omnipotent. It is not clear whether he can accurately be called the first monotheist. We can dismiss Wellhausen’s Hegelian notions of the Jews, symbolized by Abraham, moving out of their primitive desert background. Abraham was a man familiar with cities, complex legal concepts, and religious ideas which, for their day, were sophisticated. The great Jewish historian Salo Baron sees him as a proto-monotheist, coming from a centre whose flourishing moon-cult was becoming a crude form of monotheism. The names of many of his family, Sarah, Micah, Terah, Laban, for instance, were associated with the moon-cult. 33 There is in the Book of Joshua a cryptic reference to Abraham’s idolatrous ancestry: ‘even Terah, the father of Abraham…served other gods’. 34 The Book of Isaiah, reproducing an ancient tradition otherwise unrecorded in the Bible, says that God ‘redeemed Abraham’. 35 The movements of the Semitic peoples westwards, along the arc of the fertile crescent, is usually presented as a drift under the pressure of economic forces. But it is important to grasp that Abraham’s compulsion was religious: he responded to an urge he believed came from a great and all-powerful, ubiquitous God. It is possible to argue that, though the monotheistic concept was not fully developed in his mind, he was a man striving towards it, who left Mesopotamian society precisely because it had reached a spiritual impasse. 36
    Abraham may perhaps be most accurately described as a henotheist: a believer in a sole God, attached to a particular people, who none the less recognized the attachment of other races to their own gods. With this qualification, he is the founder of the Hebrew religious culture, since he inaugurates its two salient characteristics: the covenant with God and the donation of The Land. The notion of the covenant is an extraordinary idea, with no parallel in the ancient Near East. It is true that Abraham’s covenant with God, being personal, has not reached the sophistication of Moses’ covenant on behalf of an entire people. But the essentials are already there: a contract of obedience in return for special favour, implying for the first time in history the existence of an ethical God who acts as a kind of benign constitutional monarch bound by his own righteous agreements. 37
    The Genesis account, with its intermittent