HE IS OLD. He occupies little space. He hardly seems capable of riposte. Yet when he rouses a twinkle in his eye, he can still give life to the lifeless -- and bring youth to the dead. He can also crush icons.

"So, Professor, what do we know about Abraham?" I ask.

"All we know about Abraham is in the Bible," he says. "In the ground, there's nothing."

Avraham Biran is sitting in his office overlooking the Old City, the same office he's occupied for thirty years, since he retired from his job as a diplomat and became the unofficial dean of biblical archaeologists. He wears a green pullover and a tobacco-stained grin. At ninety-three, he's near the age of the man he's spent his life pursuing when that man first appears in history, in Genesis 11.

"So does that mean he doesn't exist?" I first came to see Professor Biran years earlier at the start of my biblical wanderings, and now I'm back at the beginning of another journey. I'm here to try to bring the dim early life of Abraham into some focus and to attempt to answer the question that gnaws at the core of my search: Was Abraham born at all? If so, when? And where?

"Oh, he exists," Professor Biran said. "Just look around you. But remember, archaeology cannot prove or disprove the Bible. I follow Albright, the founder of our field, in that the Bible as a book of divine inspiration needs no proof. At the same time, you can neither do archaeology in biblical lands nor study the Bible without being aware of the discoveries."

"So where do I look?"

"You look at the evidence, you look at the culture he came from, you look at the text."

"And what will I find?"

"Look, to me, these figures are real. I have no reason to doubt it. Whether all the details are correct, I don't know, and I don't really care. If you're looking for history, you'll be disappointed. If you're looking for Abraham, you won't be."

HE HAS NO MOTHER. He has no past. He has no personality. The man who will redefine the world appears suddenly, almost as an afterthought, with no trumpet fanfare, no fluttering doves, in Genesis 11, verse 26: "When Terah had lived seventy years, he became the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran." From this a-heroic start, Abram (the name in Hebrew means "the father is exalted" or "mighty father") goes on to abandon his father at age seventy-five, leave his homeland, move to Canaan, travel to Egypt, father two sons, change his name, cut off part of his penis, do the same for his teenager and newborn, exile his first son, attempt to kill his second, fight a world war, buy some land, bury his wife, father another family, and die at one hundred seventy-five.

Or did he? For most of the last four thousand years, the story of Abraham was almost universally believed -- as the word of tradition, the word of scripture, the word of God, or all three. Beginning about two hundred years ago, many demanded proof. A wave of Jewish and Christian scholars scoured the Bible and concluded that the story had little basis in fact and, instead of being dictated by God, was cobbled together by competing scribes. "We attain no historical knowledge of the patriarchs," wrote Julius Wellhausen, the German scholar of the Bible and the Koran. Abraham, in particular, was "difficult to interpret."

Archaeologists responded to this affront by grabbing picks and heading for the hills. They dug in modern-day Iraq, where Genesis suggests Abraham was born. They excavated in southern Turkey, where he lived before departing to Canaan. They dug in Shechem, Bethel, and Beer-sheba, where he camped in the Promised Land. And while archaeologists didn't find a sign that said ABRAHAM SLEPT HERE, they found enough evidence connecting Abraham to the early second millennium B.C.E. that in 1949 William Albright declared: "There can be little doubt about the substantial historicity of the patriarchal narratives."

Such conviction was short-lived. A new generation of scholars rejected their elders' evidence as insufficient and their claims as romantic. Abraham was a product not of the time the story took place but of the time the Bible was written down, fifteen hundred years later, in the first millennium B.C.E. "The quest for the historical Abraham is basically a fruitless occupation," T. L. Thompson wrote in 1974. The story is little more than a collection of literary traditions, "best compared to other tales, like Hamlet or King Lear." From dust he had come, to dust he had returned.

But Abraham fought back. Tablets found in Nuzi, in northern Iraq, and elsewhere suggested that a variety of customs in the story, like having a child with a handmaid, were legal and well known at the time. Mass migrations from Mesopotamia to Canaan were noted around 1800 B.C.E. Slowly, a new consensus emerged that while precise evidence of Abraham is lacking, the story has countless examples suggesting deep oral roots that ground Abraham in his native soil.

These days, most scholars agree that Abraham -- whether an actual figure or a composite -- emerged from the world of Semitic tribes on the upper arm of the Fertile Crescent. Though the Bible, the most detailed account of his upbringing, does not mention Abraham's birthplace, the text says his brother Haran is born in Ur of the Chaldeans. Jewish and Christian scholars associate this place with Ur, the capital of ancient Sumer; Muslims associate it with Sanliurfa, in southern Turkey. The actual place is unknown.

Haran dies; Abraham and his surviving brother take wives; then Terah assembles the entire clan and decamps for Canaan. They arrive in the ancient crossroads of Harran, near Syria, where they settle. Far from random, this travel pattern is consistent with the lives of pastoral nomads, who traversed the region with herds, passed time near settled lands, then migrated to other places. Ancient documents describe an interactive society, in which wandering tribes were never far from urban areas, where they bought and sold goods. The Bible alludes to this lifestyle, calling Abraham a Hebrew and an Aramean. These and other variants, Aramu and Arabu, were common terms for "seminomad," until they were replaced with the catchall Arab.

But in telling the story of Abraham, the Bible is interested in much more than history. It takes elements of history, mixes them with elements of myth, and begins to mold them into a theme. Abraham is not a settled man, or a wandering man. He's a combination, who embodies in his upbringing a message he will come to represent: the perpetual stranger in a strange land, the outsider who longs to be the insider, the landless who longs for land, the pious who finds a palliative in God for his endlessly painful life.

The fact that Abraham is such a shadowy figure actually makes this point even more compelling. We must accept his story on faith rather than science. We must see him not as something we can prove but as something we must believe, just as we see God.

\\cHE'S CHILDLESS. He's aging. He's stuck in Harran. Abraham has lived nearly half of his life, and he's yet to do anything that arrests our attention. Why should we care?

If confronting the lack of history was the first step I needed to make to understand Abraham, considering his lack of childhood was the second. Most of the major characters in the historical line of the Bible are introduced as children, infants, or even prenatal predicaments. Large swaths of Genesis discuss Ishmael and Isaac before they're born. Jacob and Esau wrestle in their mother's womb. Joseph struggles as a teenager with the many-colored coat. The infant Moses is hidden in the bulrushes. The boy David fights Goliath. The newborn Jesus is wrapped in swaddling cloths.

Abraham is seventy-five years old before anything happens to him. The only thing we're told is that he comes from a long family line (the text traces his father back to Noah) and can't father children of his own. For Genesis, a narrative consumed with men, lineage, and power, the diminishing effect of this debility on Abraham is staggering. Our chief reaction upon meeting him is not admiration; it's indifference or pity. He's the ultimate blank slate: childless and childhood-less.

Since everything else in the Bible is purposeful, it seems safe to say that this lack of childhood must be purposeful, too. So what is the purpose?

God is looking for someone. He's searching for someone special. At the start of Genesis, in a state of agitated, fertile invention, God creates the world. He creates light and darkness; the earth and the seas; the sun and the moon; creatures of every kind. And after each one he declares his creation to be "good." Then he creates humankind, enjoins them to be fruitful and multiply, gives them dominion over other creatures, and, for the first time, declares his creation to be "very good." Humans are clearly central to God's world. He needs them. He wants them to be his representatives on earth.

But humans disappoint. Adam, in tasting the fruit, indicates that he prefers Eve to God, so God banishes them. Ten generations pass, during which God finds the earth to be corrupt and filled with violence. He is sorry he created humankind and decides to start over. This time he chooses Noah, a righteous man. But Noah, by getting drunk after sailing the ark, indicates that he prefers the bottle to God. Once again, God recedes. Ten more generations pass, during which God becomes outraged by humans' desire to unite and build a tower to the heavens. God does not want to be threatened. He wants to be imitated. He wants to be loved.

After so many failed experiments, God needs a new kind of human. He needs someone faithful, who won't disobey him and who will appreciate the blessings that he has to offer. Above all, God needs someone who needs him and who will rise to his lofty standards.

He needs Abraham.

Abraham inaugurates the twentieth generation of humans. Yet, from the beginning, he is different from the preceding ones: he is not righteous, he is not special. He's not godly in any way. Plus, he's restless. Along with his birth family and his wife, Sarai (like her husband, she will change her name later), he leaves one place for another but stops before he arrives and settles in a new place. He seems unsure. His life is suspended -- and, worse, ruptured. He has no heir, no way to create the next ten generations, or even the next generation. As the text says, in its only biographical detail about these years, "Now Sarai was barren, she had no child."

The need for a son will dominate Abraham's life. Most heroic stories begin with a birth, a hopeful coming. The story of the father of Western civilization begins with the absence of birth, a listless despair. Abraham commands our attention by the sheer lack of command he exerts over his own life. In a story about creation, he cannot create. He is the anti-God.

Which may be the point.

In stories of heroic youth, the hero sets out to perform feats of bravery to win the hand of his beloved. The hero of a midlife quest has a different challenge. His is a darker, more inward-looking adventure that borders on madness as it reaches for the sublime. Think of Don Quixote, Oedipus. In midlife, a young man begins to grow old, to realize the inevitability of his death. As Jung observed, midlife is a tension between generativity, the feeling of being part of an ongoing process of creation, and stagnation, the sense of being stuck. Genesis is fundamentally the story of generativity. And Abraham, as he appears in chapter 11, risks disrupting that story. He has no life in him.

This crisis allows for the chief difference between Abraham and his ancestors: Unlike Adam and Noah, Abraham needs God. Specifically, Abraham needs the ability to create, and to get it he must turn to the Creator. Nelly Sachs, the German poet who won the Nobel Prize in 1966, viewed Abraham as a representative human, looking out at a decimated landscape, peering beyond the flames, aching for the divine.

You have called me, Abram.

And I long so much for you.

Abraham is not an individual man, or a historical man. He's the ur man, the man who reminds us that even though God may have cut the umbilical cord with humans, humans still need nourishment from God. This is precisely what makes Abraham so appealing to God. He's not God; he's human. The lesson of Abraham's early life is that being human is not being safe, or comfortable. Being human is being uncertain, being on the way to an unknown place. Being on the way to God. The emptiness of Abraham's invisible youth is the triumph of recognizing this necessity. His early years are a questioning, a yearning, a growing desperation, and finally a humble plea.

Help.

LATE IN MY CONVERSATION with Avraham Biran, he told me a story. The first time he came to Jerusalem, as a young man, he visited many of the holy sites he had read about as a boy. His eyes twinkled brighter than ever. "And I felt nothing," he said. "The places themselves didn't touch me as much. What touched me was the stories."

And there are hundreds of stories.

The desperation at the heart of Abraham's early years -- as appealing as it might make him to God -- proved frustrating to his descendants and contributed to one of the more complex realities of Abraham's life: his unending evolution. Most historical figures leave behind a large body of knowledge -- letters, journals, memories of associates -- which gradually dissipates until people who invoke their names centuries later have only faint traces. Abraham is the opposite: The body of knowledge about his life swells over time, exponentially.

Probably less than 1 percent of the stories told about Abraham appear in the Bible. The vast majority did not even come into circulation until hundreds, even thousands of years after he would have lived. If you graphed all the stories about Abraham according to the date they entered the world, the resulting shape would look like a megaphone, with an invisible mouthpiece planted sometime in the second millennium B.C.E. that has expanded to a wide-open bell today.

For me this abundance presented a challenge. Looking for Abraham meant not just looking at the time he was born; it meant looking at any time anyone retold his story. Still, this was the only way to see Abraham. As a result, before I headed out onto the road and certainly before I sat down with any extremists, I had to venture in and out of various libraries. I had to turn pages covered in lore, legend, and sometimes hate. I had to begin to unravel the Abraham who had been constructed, from the ground up, by each tradition.

All three religions joined in this interpretive process, though Jews necessarily came first, probably beginning around the third century B.C.E. Every aspect of Abraham's life was open to retelling. First among these: his childhood. Denied a childhood in Genesis, he gets one in death; in fact, he gets more than one. In an elaborate, historical psychoanalysis, the children of Abraham slowly re-create the story of their forefather's early life in an effort to better understand their own. Abraham is like Jesus in this regard -- the stories told about him after his death are as important as, if not more important than, the stories told about him during his life. This process initiates a rich paradox: God may have made humans in his image; we humans made Abraham in ours.

While the stories told about Abraham venture so far afield that they often appear made up, most interpreters were careful to anchor their tales in the text. With no clues about Abraham's boyhood, for example, interpreters turned to the Book of Joshua, in which God tells the Israelites, "Long ago your ancestors -- Terah and his sons Abraham and Nahor -- lived beyond the Euphrates and served other gods. Then I took your father Abraham from beyond the River and led him through all the land of Canaan."

"Aha!" the interpreters said. Abraham must have been different from his relatives because he alone was taken from beyond the Euphrates. He somehow knew that worshiping idols was wrong. From this simple hook, volumes were spun. In the Book of Jubilees, a noncanonical Jewish text from the second century B.C.E., the boy Abraham is presented as asking his father, a priest, what advantage idols serve, considering that they are mute. "I also know that, my son," Terah replies, "but what shall I do to the people who have ordered me to serve before them?"

In the Apocalypse of Abraham, from the first century C.E., the boy comes upon a stone god fallen over in his father's idol shop. When they lift the idol, it falls again, severing its head. No problem: the father promptly chisels a new body and attaches the old head to it. "What are these useless things that my father is doing?" Abraham muses. "Is he not rather a god to his gods? It would be more fitting for them to bow down to him."

While these stories show a brilliance of invention, their true gift lies in the way they appear to grow ineffably out of the text. Genesis suggests that Abraham's family lived in Ur of the Chaldeans. Archaeologists took this suggestion literally and went looking for Ur, but early interpreters took it etymologically and noted that ur, in Hebrew, means "fire" or "flame." Suddenly the line "I am the Lord who brought you out from [the fire] of the Chaldeans" took on new meaning.

Interpreters went to work. After Abraham confronts his father about the idols, Terah informs King Nimrod of Babylon, who orders the boy burnt in a furnace. A million people come to watch. Stripped to his underclothes and bound with linen, Abraham is cast into the furnace. For three days and nights he walks amid the fire, before finally emerging. "Why weren't you burnt?" Nimrod asks. "The God of heaven and earth delivered me," Abraham replies.

Ur was not the only word to inspire biographers. Chaldea, in lower Mesopotamia, was known in antiquity as the home of astronomy and astrology. For interpreters, this fact could mean only one thing: Abraham must have been an astronomer! As Jubilees reports, "Abram sat up during the night of the seventh month, so that he might observe the stars from evening until daybreak so that he might see what the nature of the year would be with respect to rain."

Other traditions have Abraham moving to Phoenicia to teach astronomy. Many have him teaching arithmetic and other sciences to Egyptians, who pass them on to the Greeks. Abraham, age seventy-five, a pastoral nomad, suddenly becomes the Albert Einstein of his day, going on the international lecture circuit, spreading knowledge, and earning the equivalents of Nobel Prizes in astronomy, mathematics, meteorology, as well as -- just for his stamina -- peace.

What's important about this process is that as early as a few hundred years after the Bible was written, Abraham begins to develop dimensions he doesn't have in the text. What's complicated about this process is that each writer tries to make Abraham speak to his generation, or to his particular target audience. One writer is a philosopher, so he wants to emphasize Abraham's reason. Another is a rabbi, so he wants to stress Abraham's piety. While these traditions may have made Abraham more appealing to their readers, they also risk making him less appealing to others. Astrology, for instance, is widely mocked today; saying Abraham was an astrologer actually undermines his credibility for our generation.

This situation leaves us in a challenging position -- trying to glean more about Abraham while accepting that we're doing so through a prism that may tell us more about the author than the subject. I found this dilemma fascinating on one level but also daunting. Wait, you're telling me that if I want to understand Abraham I have to understand a different Abraham every generation for four thousand years? Even at a generous calculation of two generations every one hundred years, that's eighty different Abrahams I have to consider. How exhausting. How maddening.

HOW WISHFUL. The real story is worse.

The eighty different Abrahams -- stretched from antiquity to today -- are only the ones created by Jews. Christians and Muslims have their own Abrahams. Eighty quickly becomes two hundred and forty. And Abraham quickly becomes unviewable. To put it in terms that a Chaldean could understand: Abraham is a Milky Way, not a North Star.

Again, I had no choice but to confront the thicket. It was off to another set of libraries and another assortment of scholars. In many ways, the geek in me -- and eventually even the adventurer in me -- found this process thrilling. It was like participating in a giant, three-dimensional scavenger hunt, where every clue in Judaism led to some desert hideaway in Christianity, led to some palm tree in Islam, under which was some spring -- yes! -- that suddenly cleared up some tangle described on the front page of that morning's newspaper.

The reason this pursuit proved so exciting is that to examine those hundreds of Abrahams -- to understand how he evolved over time -- is to understand what each religion values. And while many of those Abrahams would turn out to be incompatible with one another, every one agreed on one thing: Abraham believed in one God. And most agreed that he came to that view while still a boy. This biographical detail became so widely believed that it actually made it into scripture.

Christian interpreters, including ones gathered in the New Testament, like Paul and John, were interested less in Abraham's childhood than in subsequent events in his life. Islam, by contrast, was fascinated with Abraham's boyhood. The Koran was dictated to Muhammad ibn Abdullah, an Arab trader from the prestigious Qurysh tribe, over a period of twenty-two years, beginning in 610 C.E. The revelations came directly from Allah and were deeply painful for the prophet, who was caught unawares by his mission. "Never once did I receive a revelation," he said, "without thinking that my soul had been torn away from me." Muhammad believed not that he was founding a new religion but that he was restoring the primordial faith in one God. He also explained that he was bringing this true faith to Arabs, who, unlike their neighbors in the fertile regions of the Middle East, had yet to receive a prophet.

"I see Islam as a reformation in the context of monotheism," said Bill Graham, the chairman of the Department of Near Eastern Languages at Harvard and a leading historian of Islam. A trim, boyish man who arrived and departed from our meeting helmeted and on bicycle, Graham has an infectious North Carolina accent that makes every comment sound as avuncular and commanding as that of a grand southern judge. "The clear message is that Muhammad has come back with the Koran to revive and straighten the world, starting with the Arabs."

Because the Koran was simply reviving truths people already knew, its stories tend to evoke events rather than retell them in any sequential way. Stories about Abraham, for example, whom the Koran calls Ibrahim, are sprinkled throughout the text rather than grouped in the order Abraham may have lived them.

"The Koran is written in a referential style," Graham said. "It doesn't retell events, it refers to them. It uses the common rhetorical device 'Remember when ... ,' as in 'Remember when Abraham did this... .' And you have to supply the when." Because of the lack of a straight narrative, the experience of encountering the stories in the Koran is different from that of encountering them in Genesis. But the effect is the same: Abraham is less of a historical figure and more of a living person who makes points about human history.

"The Koran is more didactics than storytelling," Graham explained. "Everything is in service to the notion that we're all servants of God. Therefore, everything told about Abraham shows that in the midst of a pagan world he was an exemplar in his faith."

Even as a boy.

Abraham's childhood, ignored by the Bible, untouched by the New Testament, now makes its first appearance as scripture. And that childhood is remarkably similar to the legends that had been coalescing over the preceding millennium. In the sixth chapter, or sura, Abraham asks his father why he takes idols as gods. Outside, Abraham looks at the stars and concludes they are gods, until they disappear. The same follows for the moon and sun. Finally he realizes that one God must be behind them all. "I disown your idols. I will turn my face to him who has created the heavens and the earth, and will live a righteous life. I am no idolater."

The boy Abraham's next appearance is even more familiar. In one of the more famous Jewish legends, Abraham smashes the idols with a stick and attempts to blame the destruction on one of the idols. "Why are you mocking me?" his father asks. "Do these idols know anything?" The story in sura 21 is almost identical, with Abraham smashing the idols and blaming the destruction on the supreme idol. "Ask them, if they are able to speak," Abraham says. "You know they cannot speak," comes the reply.

The stunning similarity of these accounts presents two options. One, the story is true. Judaism, for one, holds that the oral tradition about Abraham and other figures was actually given by God on Mount Sinai along with the written text in the middle of the second millennium B.C.E. Islam also maintains that the Koran was dictated by God. The story of Abraham smashing the idols is therefore the word of God, and is sacrosanct. The other option is that the legends of Abraham were composed not by God but by God-intoxicated people. These legends then developed such currency in the Middle East that Muhammad picked them up from Jewish and Christian traders in Arabia. This situation would corroborate the scholarly view that Islam drew from existing elements in the region and made them accessible to a new and wider audience.

In either case, the significance of the shared heritage is clear: All three religions view Abraham's childhood in a powerfully similar way. At the root of Abraham's biography, there is harmony among all his descendants. The advantage of this universality cannot be underestimated. Abraham, across all religions and time, is devout, dedicated, capable of deductive reasoning, willing to struggle for his faith, and deft at using wit and logic to spread the divine message he alone understands. He is prophetic, heroic, charismatic. He is worthy of God.

The potential problem with this universality should also not be overlooked. One unintended lesson of Abraham's childhood is that individuals should feel free to liberate themselves from false religions, even in the face of resistance from their families, their nations, or their political leaders. This moral validates a tension that has existed until this day, with young people rejecting their parents' God in favor of their own. Abraham becomes a model not just for shared origins but also for fundamentalism, for the notion that ye who hear God most clearly, hear most correctly. Abraham, while still a boy, is denounced for his beliefs, even burned for his faith. Abraham, in other words, is not just the first monotheist. He's also the first martyr.