How God Forms Abraham to Be a Blessing

Book excerpt: This book aims to understand God’s interactions with Abraham in relation to God’s command that Abraham “be a blessing” (Gen 12:2d), which is directly tied to God’s goal that “in you all the families of the earth will be blessed” (Gen 12:3b). The book proposes a formative narrative approach to examine interactions between character and plot, the movement of plot, and the connection between sequential plots. An analysis of thirteen Abrahamic narratives (Gen 12–22) suggests a classification based on four different types of interactions between God and Abraham, which indicate how cooperation and conflict between God and Abraham advance the narrative’s plot. The book then proposes a narrative discourse analysis to examine how Abraham evolved through different stages of the narrative by moving from deviation to cooperation. Detailed analysis of this transformation process reveals three turning points in Abraham’s life. The formative narrative approach and narrative discourse analysis proposed in this book can contribute to the analysis of two important aspects of Old Testament narratives: the formation of plot and the cause-and-effect structure in narrative discourse.