What's in a Name?

I have something of a confession to make. My wife was home sick this week, and while staying home with her to help her through it, I did something I haven't done in months: I took a day off. I'm lousy at sabbath, I know that – my wife rightly exhorts me to get better at it, to take more time off – but this week, well, I actually took a day or two, and I reminded myself what it's like to have a hobby. Truth be told, I haven't had the luxury of hobbies in a good, long while – again, something I should probably fix. But at the start of the week, my wife got a call from her uncle, the one on our prayer list, thanking our church for the card we sent. Anyway, the course of that conversation put me back working on their family tree, and wouldn't you know it, I finally broke through a roadblock I'd had before her great-great-grandparents left Belgium a bit over a century ago. Over the course of a beautiful couple days poring over jumbles of handwritten records in Dutch and French and Latin, I began piecing together the stories of forgotten generations, back to the days of the Holy Roman Empire. Genealogy is my hobby – she's always telling me I could make a living at it – and this week, as she recovered, I got to regale her with the recovery of name after name, life after life.

Of course, I was primed that that week's activities by the fact that, just this past Sunday, we heard the word of God in the shape of a genealogy: the bruised and battered line by which Abram, son of Terah, descended from Shem, son of Noah (Genesis 11:10-26). Terah's line has come down to him and three sons, one of whom, Haran, died young but left a few children behind him (Genesis 11:27-29). Of Terah's son Nahor, we haven't yet heard of any children, though expect to hear of his twelve sons ten chapters from now (Genesis 22:20-23). We've come to realize that this genealogy ends, not with Haran or with Nahor, but with Abram. And “the name of Abram's wife was Sarai... Now Sarai was barren; she had no child” (Genesis 11:29-30). So long as Abram remains resolutely faithful to that marriage, and so long as her condition doesn't change, a corollary is that Abram will be a man without a son, a man with his future in jeopardy.

People in Abram's neck of the woods were deeply concerned and troubled by that sort of thing. They had this story about an ancient king named Etana, who ruled a vast city but had no heir. Etana prayed to his god daily, offering constant sacrifice to the powers of heaven above and hell below, desperate to be blessed. He'd say: “I have honored the gods and revered the spirits; dream interpreters have used up my incense, gods have used up my lambs in slaughter. O lord, give the command! … Relieve me of my disgrace; grant me an heir!”¹ Though the exact resolution is lost to us, this snapshot gives us a sense of how a younger Abram, maybe still under the sway of the gods of Ur, might have reacted, as season came and season went and Sarai wasn't conceiving. In time, Genesis will reveal it as Abram's infected wound.

Combing through family histories, I've come across couples in Abram's situation. Much more often, I've met children who died young, so young that their memories weren't otherwise passed down. But saddest of all have been the records like one that caught my attention this week, because the name of the child looked so peculiar. But when I translated it, it wasn't at all what I thought. It was just the word 'Unnamed.' That brings a tear to my eye all the quicker. Is there anything quite as tragic for a human being as to never have borne a human name?

In the Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian way of thinking, things really only started existing once they had names, once they had distinct social recognition. That's why Babylon's creation stories began “when heaven on high had not been named, and the ground below was not given a name.”² And to people in the Middle East in those days, your name in effect was you, “in some way of the same substance as the human being.”³ No wonder it was so important for your name to keep functioning in the world, at least in the family orbit. It was as a reflex of concerns like that that, in ancient Israel, “if brothers dwell together, and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the dead man” would marry her former brother-in-law, “and the first son whom she bears shall succeed to the name of his dead brother, that his name not be blotted out in Israel” (Deuteronomy 25:5-6). Children were, in Israel as in Sumer, a “vital mechanism in perpetuating ancestral names” in the face of death.⁴

Such death was a terrifying prospect to the people Abram grew up with. The Sumerians thought not only that the underworld was dark and dreary, but that human needs don't end at death. The spirits in the grave must be fed and watered and satisfied, because everything left to them is sheer misery. To satisfy them, regular offerings had to be made to the dead; if they weren't, then the spirit of even the kindest person in life might return as a bloodthirsty ghost, driven insane by hunger and fury until appeased. Responsibility for such offerings fell to the heir – a son, if there was one, or a daughter if not.⁵ As a result, the traditions of Sumer held that your condition in the afterlife was based in part on how many kids you'd left behind: they said a man who died childless got nothing to eat but bricks he couldn't bite through, whereas a man with seven sons sits among junior gods in bliss.⁶ To Sumerians, it was “paramount for the welfare of an individual in the netherworld to have as many descendants as possible.”⁷ And so “descendants, the name, and the afterlife are interconnected” for them.⁸

Everybody needed to have a name – but people wanted, not just a name, but a great name, that “your name will be made famous in Sumer,” they'd say.⁹ A famous name is harder to forget, and more likely to find charitable support in the hereafter, but even aside from all that, people have always wanted to feel that they matter, and fame is telling you that you matter, that your existence is recognized and ratified by more people than most. So the elite in Abram's world were concerned with how their names could be made famous in Sumer.

Some of their favorite stories were about heroes who, horrified at death, wanted to spend their precious days doing great things so they could make their mark on the world and be remembered. That's the saga of the hero Gilgamesh, probably a real ancient king who inspired mythical tales that were super popular in Ur when Abram grew up there.¹⁰ Abram definitely heard these stories. In one of the oldest such stories, Gilgamesh explains to his best friend Enkidu that he's consumed with anxiety about his own mortality: “In my city, a man dies, the heart is stricken; a man is lost, my heart recoils. … I myself will do the same, I indeed will come to this. However tall the man, he cannot reach the sky; however broad the man, he cannot span the highlands.”¹¹ Gilgamesh understands, at least in this story, the limitations humans face. He can't climb to heaven, can't win hide-and-seek with death. Burning to do something to quiet his crippling fear, he resolves that “since no young man can elude life's ends, I shall enter the highlands, I shall set up my name. Where a name can be set up, I shall set up my name; where no name can be set up, I shall set up the names of the gods.”¹²

The rest of the story features Gilgamesh venturing off to the distant Cedar Forest to harvest its biggest trees: “I want to cut down the cedar and make for myself an everlasting name,” he insists.¹³ The only trouble is that the forest is guarded by a monster called Humbaba. But to Gilgamesh, even that's an opportunity. “If I die, I will only have made a name for myself: 'Gilgamesh battled the brutal Humbaba!'”¹⁴ On the other hand, his friend reminds him, if he succeeds, he'll “make for yourself an everlasting name: how Gilgamesh killed the brutal Humbaba!”¹⁵ As the story goes, they do succeed; but when their further misadventures and foolish pride lead to his best friend being cursed to death by the gods, Gilgamesh hopes that everybody left behind “will cherish your name,” he tells him.¹⁶ For heroes like these, everything was about making a name to outlast death.

Gilgamesh is the kind of guy the Bible had in mind a few chapters ago when it spoke of the gibborim, “the mighty ones who were of old,” the great heroes of legend who went on far-flung adventures – like Gilgamesh to the Cedar Forest – or who were accomplished in battle – like Gilgamesh and Enkidu killing first Humbaba and then the Bull of Heaven. No wonder the Bible explains that these “mighty ones of old” were “men of the name” (Genesis 6:4) – obsessed with their name, their reputation, their renown, by whatever daring feats would cement it beyond the decaying reach of time. That's the Bible's picture of the heroic age before the flood, and in all likelihood, whatever “name they acquire for themselves is illegitimate in God's sight.”¹⁷

After his best friend Enkidu “whom I loved has turned to clay,” Gilgamesh becomes once more acutely “afraid of death... Am I not like him? I too will lie down and never get up, for all of eternity.”¹⁸ The result is an urgent quest for “the secret of life and death,” in hopes of winning himself eternal life;¹⁹ and all along the way, he relies on his reputation to open impossible doors.²⁰ In the end, though, Gilgamesh trudges home empty-handed, with nothing to boast in but the mighty wall of his home city Uruk, the same wall Abram would've seen while passing by on the way to Harran.²¹

Aping Gilgamesh, one real-life Sumerian king went an expedition and “set up my great name and my monumental inscription in the land Lebanon on the shore of the Great Sea.”²² But even when they couldn't venture out on big adventures, kings in the days of Abram loved to build and brag. Construction was a major way for kings to perpetuate their names, often stamping their names into all the baked bricks. One king reversed erosion to the riverbank and thus “set up my name for the distant future,” he said.²³ Another king built a city wall “in order to establish my name forever.”²⁴ A third “wrote my praise there on a foundation inscription which proclaims my royal name, in order that the numerous peoples sing my praises forever”²⁵ – we found those words at Ur. Understandably, such kings were always worried someone would rewrite their inscriptions to claim credit, and so they usually ended with a curse: “As for the man who... has my handiwork destroyed or erases its inscription and writes his name on it..., may that man not get a name or beget any descendants!”²⁶ The kings prayed that the gods would, in such a case, “destroy his name, his seed, his clan, and his kin from the land.”²⁷

Theirs is the mentality the Bible lampooned in the last chapter. Remember those people with so many bricks and an open plain to build on? What did they want to do? “Let us build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens.” And what purpose would that serve? One thing above all else: “Let us make a name for ourselves” (Genesis 11:4). Just like Gilgamesh wanted to put up signs memorializing his own name first and the names of the gods only if he couldn't exalt his own,²⁸ so the builders of Babel built a religious tower, not to acclaim the name of any god (much less the true God!), but to establish their own name, their own legacy.²⁹ In so doing, the Bible suggests, such builders “pathetically strove for permanence... in their own strength.”³⁰ “To seek to make a name for oneself is to assert one's self-made autonomous independence, to claim once more to be 'the master of my fate..., the captain of my soul.'”³¹ And that's what all their construction was about.

That's what Gilgamesh and the gibborim, the Babel-builders and the kings, and even average Sumerians raising their kids all had in common. They wanted to make their name, exalt their name, preserve their name against the terrors of death, all through their own efforts. Whether Gilgamesh and his adventures and battles, or the builders trying to leave a lasting mark on the landscape, or Abram's neighbor begetting wildly for the sake of a better afterlife, all of them were living out a works-based script, one in which a name is an attainment, provided for by human labor more-or-less independently from the actions of God.

And it's a script still at play in the world today. Not too many of us worry about being world-famous, whatever fantasies we entertained in youth. But in our local communities, we'd like to be known. In our families, we'd like to be remembered. We don't want to be forgotten for centuries until some genealogist dusts off our name – or passes it by. We want to know we've mattered, that we've made our impact on the world around us, so we'll be missed and not forgotten, and that, as the years roll on, our name won't be shaded in oblivion. But because we want these very reasonable things to wish, we go about living one or another version of a purpose-driven life. But it's generally our purpose that drives us: our conception, upon which we've decided, for why we're here in the here-and-now, for how we want to spend our days, trying to be remembered on our terms.

The way we think, the way our society thinks, “we must all make a name for ourselves, and failure to reach the pinnacle of society is morally culpable. In a world that catechizes us into the dream that 'you can be anything you want to be,' citizens are faced with the twin responsibility of first choosing what to be and then becoming what they have chosen, on pain of namelessness.”³² We may not journey to the Cedar Forest, but we go to the beach and snap some candids for the photo album. We may not fight Humbaba or the Bull of Heaven, but we wrestle the causes we oppose for the sake of the ones we support. We may not build towers, but we build careers we hope will impress. We may not expect our children to feed our ravenous ghosts, but we direct them to pass down our name for a little while – and beyond that while, we prefer not to think. And so, staving off the anxieties of death by human effort, we sacrifice ourselves a little each day to society's “ever-provisional, ever-changeable verdict... on the name we have made for ourselves.”³³

So let's turn the corner. Abram, accompanying his father Terah, has left Sumer; but Terah settled the family in Harran (Genesis 11:31), repeating the settling on the plain that led to the city and tower (Genesis 11:2). Though Terah's left Sumer, Sumer clearly hasn't left him. But in the midst of this, we hear the voice of God to man for the first time since the days of Noah.³⁴ Abram hears it clear as day: “Go! Get away from your land and from your family and from the house of your father, to a land that I will show you!” (Genesis 12:1). These words of divine urgency demand that Abram “abandon all that is familiar,”³⁵ that he “give up the security of his social sanctuary and familial support.”³⁶ The result, if he obeys, “will turn him into an isolated individual with no familial ties.”³⁷ He's asked to slip away from everybody who has a natural reason to remember him when he's gone, to go dwell among strangers who won't gather his bones to Terah's in the family tomb and won't feed lost Abram in his unmarked grave. Abram is called to hurl himself off the map, to risk living and dying in obscurity, to erase his own name. For all Abram can tell, he's being asked to move to hell.

God asks of Abram something even more intense than the worst fear of the builders of Babel. Their worst-case scenario, remember, was to “be scattered over the face of all the earth” (Genesis 11:4). In fact, up to this point in Genesis, the only times people have left their settled place was by judgment: Adam and Eve kicked out of the garden (Genesis 3:23-24), Cain cursed to be “a fugitive and wanderer in the earth” (Genesis 4:12), and now “the LORD scattered [the Babel-builders] over the face of all the earth” (Genesis 11:9). What all these felt as a punishment, this Voice asks Abram to embrace voluntarily. And at the point of asking, Abram barely yet knows the God who asks it.³⁸ A half-familiar God offers him an unfamiliar country, and unlike Gilgamesh trudging back to Uruk, Abram's journey offers no prospect of a restful homecoming.³⁹ Abram's found himself on an episode of Let's Make a Deal, and he has to trust that this God isn't hiding a big zonk behind that curtain. No wonder God goes on to detail how his Big Deal for Abram addresses “Abram's likely longings and ambitions.”⁴⁰

The first promise God gives to Abram is, “I will make of you a great nation” (Genesis 12:2). The only other time so far we've heard about nations was as “the clans of the sons of Noah, according to their genealogies, in their nations” (Genesis 10:32). Abram wasn't on that list, and for much of his life, he's been all but nationless. Now, God doesn't pledge to include him in some existing nation, the Sumerians or Amorites or Arameans or whoever, but to raise up a nation just for Abram. If Abram has to give up his family and land, then on the other side of the exchange he can bank on “the promise of a new community” of which Abram will be the heart.⁴¹ God takes away his past only to give him a more astonishing future.⁴² In spirit if not in letter, Abram's going to become a king.⁴³ What God offers Abram “mirrors the aspirations and ideals of ancient Mesopotamian political leaders like Gilgamesh,” allowing Abram to move forward in life “acting with regal confidence and power.”⁴⁴ Spoken by anybody else, it's the voice of implausibility, irrationality, idiocy, delusion. But this is thus saith the LORD.

The second promise that God gives Abram is, “I will bless you” (Genesis 12:2). Now, that could mean material prosperity – bigger flocks, broader tents, better toys, plenty of grain and cheese and figs, precious metals and fine crafts – but Abram already found a lot of that in Harran (Genesis 12:5). God could just be assuring him that going on the road doesn't mean missing out on future opportunities. But maybe it's not a stretch for Abram to wonder if this means the blessing all the money in the world couldn't buy. After the flood, “God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth'” (Genesis 9:1). But Abram isn't fruitful. Abram hasn't multiplied. Abram fills a very, very small corner of earth. And the only conclusion one could draw is that the blessing of God has passed him, and just him, by. Now, God declares, “I will bless you” (Genesis 12:2). Could it be that, without needing to sacrifice like Etana, Abram's heart has been heard?

Before Abram can puzzle over it, there drops a third promise: “I will greaten your name” (Genesis 12:2). After Genesis 6 and 11, “this is now the third time we have seen the motif of making a name.”⁴⁵ Abram, don't forget, is a descendant of Shem, a man whose name literally meant 'Name.' Before brick ever touched brick at Babel, God had already provided a Name for the world.⁴⁶ God calls Abram to step forward as the true heir of Mr. Name, thus “assuring him of renown.”⁴⁷ But how? Will Abram go on great adventures? Star in a compelling story? Win big battles? Reshape the landscape? Raise a large family? Well, yes, but that's not where his great name will come from. Abram “doesn't need to do anything except go and let God fulfill his promises.”⁴⁸

And in this, Abram is absolutely “a counterexample... to the model of Gilgamesh,” absolutely a counterexample to the kings who've lorded over him all his life, and absolutely a counterexample to the builders of Babel.⁴⁹ Where the builders insisted on making a name for themselves, Abram understands that his only hope of such a name is to wait on the God who is “the sole arbiter of what is impermanent and what endures,” of what counts and what doesn't, of what's remembered and what's forgotten.⁵⁰

“God promised to give Abram essentially what the Babel-builders desired, only more so.”⁵¹ “The builders' aggressiveness is matched by Abram's passiveness,” so that Abram's name and blessing and nation “will be a gift, not an achievement.”⁵² Babel shows us how “everyone who exalts himself will be humbled,” but Abram hears that “he who humbles himself will be exalted” (Luke 14:11). Where the builders at Babel built themselves a tower, a 'great thing,' God pledges to make Abram's name tower higher still. What all humanity together tried to make themselves and thus royally botched, God wants to promise Abram in the form of a gift, one Abram could never afford with anything he could muster to barter, even the whole of his life.⁵³ Whatever comes to fruition for or through Abram, at root “it will not be his own doing.”⁵⁴ “God is the source of Abram's name being made great,”⁵⁵ making him at last a true 'son of name,' a gift as unearned now as was Abram's first breath on the day he was born. In some marvelous way, Abram here is born again, with the LORD taking over the place of Terah.⁵⁶ As one theologian put it, from one perspective, this passage here is “the beginning of the gospel.”⁵⁷ For the name God alone gives is “the only name grounded in grace.”⁵⁸

We know God did bless Abram, whose name he literally greatened a whole syllable to 'Abraham.'⁵⁹ God multiplied him from just “one” to many (Isaiah 51:2), to “a nation great, mighty, and populous” (Deuteronomy 26:5), for whose salvation God “divided the waters before them to make for himself an everlasting name” (Isaiah 63:12). The Lord called them “to dispossess nations greater and mightier..., cities great and fortified up to heaven” (Deuteronomy 9:1), and to “make their name perish from under heaven” (Deuteronomy 7:24). But Israel felt deeply anxious over whether God would keep his promise. They feared the prospect that those greater nations “will surround us and cut off our name from the earth” (Joshua 7:9), just as they threatened: “Come, let us wipe them out as a nation; let the name of Israel be remembered no more!” (Psalm 83:4).

To quell such anxieties, God eventually raised up a young man named David to Israel's throne. And while God denied David the privilege of harvesting the Cedar Forest to build God “a house of cedar” (2 Samuel 7:7), God looked on David as he'd looked on Abram. “I have been with you wherever you went and have cut off all your enemies from before you; and I will make for you a great name, like the name of the great ones of the earth” (2 Samuel 7:9). David reacted, as is only meet and right, with wonder and awe, extolling how God made himself a great name through the power of invincible love (2 Samuel 7:23-26). Decades later, as David lay on his deathbed, his court officials reminded him of the promises and prayed that God might even “make the name of Solomon better than your name” (1 Kings 1:47). Ever after, all Israel would pray for each new son of David: “May his name endure forever, his fame continue as long as the sun!” (Psalm 72:17). But none of these kings received a name greater than David's or Solomon's. None made Abram's heirs into a truly great nation in every sense of the word. None showed what the fullness of God's blessings should look like. None of them became a perfectly Abrahamic king. Until, suddenly, after a long and dark Advent wait, one did.

The Eternal Word of God, you see, personally “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:7). He came as “Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1), “and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David..., and of his kingdom there will be no end” (Luke 1:32-33). He lived his whole life to “manifest [God's] name to the people whom [God] gave me out of the world” (John 17:6). He said he'd one day “sit on his glorious throne” (Matthew 25:31), and invited his followers to “eat and drink at my table in my kingdom” (Luke 22:30). But until then, his was a hidden kingdom, a kingdom “not of this world” (John 18:36). And so it had to be. “None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory” (1 Corinthians 2:8).

On the cross, Jesus could well have cited the psalm: “I call upon you, O LORD, I spread out my hands to you” – spread out as wide as from nail to nail (Psalm 88:6). But then Jesus, King of Israel, Lord of Glory, died as real a death as any before or since. Where moments before, the nature of God had been united to a living body animated by a human spirit, now the Second Person of the Holy Trinity was united to a human nature stretched between lifeless corpse and separated soul. As his stiff flesh and bones were enclosed in the earthly darkness of a tomb, Jesus – God and human soul – descended to the house of clay, to “the depths of the pit, in regions dark and deep,” where heroes and builders and poets had so feared to be lost and forgotten (Psalm 88:6).

The psalmist had asked God, “Do the departed rise up to praise you? Is your steadfast love declared in the grave?... Are your wonders known in the darkness?” (Psalm 88:10-12). That weekend, finally, the answer was yes. Yes, God's steadfast love was declared in the grave, when Jesus came and declared his triumphant love to the lost souls whose names were long forgotten on earth. Yes, God's wonders were known in the darkness when Jesus confronted the warden of hell's gates and despoiled him for every spirit to see. And yes, the departed Jesus rose up by resurrection to praise his Father forever – a hallelujah homecoming! “Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:9-11). Our Lord Jesus Christ is King of the Universe!

“Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day,” Jesus said, “he saw it and was glad” (John 8:56). In Jesus, and in him alone, would be fulfilled the prophet's further promise: that to those who, like Abram, would trust the LORD and “choose the things that please” him, God would “give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off” (Isaiah 56:4-5). Much as Abram could say while gazing from the gates of Harran, God “saved us and called us with a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began and which has now been manifested through the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:9-10). This gospel is the news that a Perfect Son of Abraham has become “a royal priesthood, a holy nation” (1 Peter 2:9) “called by a new name that the mouth of the LORD” has given: the Church (Isaiah 62:2).

Through the hands of that holy nation, you and I have been “baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). Christ our King promised that to all “who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12), a genealogy better and richer than mine or yours or Abram's by Terah. “By believing, you may have life in his name” (John 20:31), life richer and brighter than all Gilgamesh quested after, a legacy longer than Etana's wildest dreams. “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men” – not to Etana or Gilgamesh, not to Abram or David – “by which we must be saved,” than the name of King Jesus Christ (Acts 4:12). And now we're all on Abram's journey to somewhere we haven't yet been shown, but which our faith knows to be “a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (Hebrews 11:16). No longer, then, do we face the prospect of the grave as doom and gloom, clay and dirty water. No longer do we fear and fret over being fed, not when the King saves a seat at his table. No more do we worry about being forgotten, about our legacies being a dying breeze, about our names as broken symbols lost to time, “for as the new heavens and the new earth that I make shall remain before me, declares the LORD, so shall your offspring and your name remain” (Isaiah 66:12) – a tower time can't topple.

Christ our King says of each disciple who perseveres on the Abrahamic journey to its end that “I will never blot his name out of the book of life; I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels” (Revelation 3:5). Christ our King offers each such disciple “a white stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it” (Revelation 2:17), engraved more indelibly than all the monuments of all the kings of old. But Christ our King promises us still more: that “I will write on him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God..., and my own new name” (Revelation 3:12). If we but follow him to his promises, that name above every name, that name greater than any, will be stamped on me and on you, securing us with its significance eternally. What good grounds for thanksgiving! Hail to Christ the King!

1  Standard Babylonian Etana II.133-142, translation by Benjamin R. Foster, 2024, at <https://www.ebl.lmu.de/corpus/L/1/9/SB/II#133>.

2  Enuma Elish I.1-2, in Johannes Haubold and Sophus Helle, Enuma Elish: The Babylonian Epic of Creation (Bloomsbury, 2025), 27.

3  Steffan Mathias, Paternity, Progeny, and Perpetuation: Creating Lives after Death in the Hebrew Bible (T&T Clark, 2020), 94-95.

4  Steffan Mathias, Paternity, Progeny, and Perpetuation: Creating Lives after Death in the Hebrew Bible (T&T Clark, 2020), 114.

5  Alhena Gadotti, 'Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld,' and the Sumerian Gilgamesh Cycle (De Gruyter, 2014), 113.  For more on the Sumerian cult of the dead, see, e.g., Helga Vogel, “Death and Burial,” in Harriet Crawford, ed., The Sumerian World (Routledge, 2013), 429-431, who remarks that “the idea that the dead needed to be served food and drink can be regarded as central to Mesopotamian mortuary practices” (429).

6  Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld, lines 255-270, in Alhena Gadotti, 'Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld,' and the Sumerian Gilgamesh Cycle (De Gruyter, 2014), 159.

7  Alhena Gadotti, 'Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld,' and the Sumerian Gilgamesh Cycle (De Gruyter, 2014), 114.

8  Steffan Mathias, Paternity, Progeny, and Perpetuation: Creating Lives after Death in the Hebrew Bible (T&T Clark, 2020), 116.

9  Lugalbanda and the Anzud Bird, lines 182-183, in Jeremy Black, et al., The Literature of Ancient Sumer (Oxford University Press, 2004), 26.

10  Alhena Gadotti, 'Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld,' and the Sumerian Gilgamesh Cycle (De Gruyter, 2014), 123.

11  Gilgamesh and Huwawa A, lines 23-29, in Daniel E. Fleming and Sara J. Milstein, The Buried Foundation of the Gilgamesh Epic: The Akkadian Huwawa Narrative (Brill, 2010), 184.

12  Gilgamesh and Huwawa A, lines 30-33, in Daniel E. Fleming and Sara J. Milstein, The Buried Foundation of the Gilgamesh Epic: The Akkadian Huwawa Narrative (Brill, 2010), 184.

13  Gilgamesh II.158-160, in Sophus Helle, Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic (Yale University Press, 2021), 24.

14  Gilgamesh II.148-150, in Sophus Helle, Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic (Yale University Press, 2021), 23.

15  Gilgamesh V.203-204, in Sophus Helle, Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic (Yale University Press, 2021), 50.

16  Gilgamesh VIII.26, in Sophus Helle, Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic (Yale University Press, 2021), 72.

17  James McKeown, Genesis (Eerdmans, 2008), 74 n.3.

18  Gilgamesh X.239-248, in Sophus Helle, Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic (Yale University Press, 2021), 96.

19  Gilgamesh IX.76-78, in Sophus Helle, Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic (Yale University Press, 2021), 83.

20  Gilgamesh X.31-34, 129-133, 228-231, in Sophus Helle, Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic (Yale University Press, 2021), 89, 92, 96.

21  Gilgamesh XI.323-331, in Sophus Helle, Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic (Yale University Press, 2021), 112.

22  Shamshi-Adad I of Assyria, inscription A.0.39.1, in Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia: Assyrian Periods 1:50.

23  Sin-iddinam of Larsa, inscription E4.2.9.2, in Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia: Early Periods 4:160.

24  Nur-Adad of Larsa, inscription E4.2.8.7, in Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia: Early Periods 4:149.

25  Rim-Sin I of Larsa, inscription E4.2.14.15, in Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia: Early Periods 4:293.

26  Iddin-Dagan of Isin, inscription E4.1.3.2, in Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia: Early Periods 4:24.

27  Adad-narari I of Assyria, inscription A.0.76.2, in Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia: Assyrian Periods 1:134.

28  Gilgamesh and Huwawa A, lines 32-33, in Daniel E. Fleming and Sara J. Milstein, The Buried Foundation of the Gilgamesh Epic: The Akkadian Huwawa Narrative (Brill, 2010), 184.

29  Tremper Longman III and John H. Walton, The Lost Story of the Flood: Mythology, Theology, and the Deluge Debate (IVP Academic, 2018), 132-133.

30  Bill T. Arnold, Genesis (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 132.

31  Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture (Zondervan Academic, 2022), 208.

32  Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture (Zondervan Academic, 2022), 212.

33  Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture (Zondervan Academic, 2022), 213.

34  Alex Varughese and Christina Bohn, Genesis 12-50: A Commentary in the Wesleyan Tradition (Beacon Hill Press, 2019), 35.

35  Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 256.

36  Bill T. Arnold, Genesis (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 131.

37  Jonathan Grossman, Abraham: The Story of a Journey (Maggid Books, 2023), 13.

38  David W. Cotter, Genesis (Liturgical Press, 2003), 89.

39  Adam E. Miglio, The Gilgamesh Epic in Genesis 1-11: Peering into the Deep (Routledge, 2023), 132.

40  Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 256.

41  Terence E. Fretheim, Abraham: Trials of Family and Faith (Fortress Press, 2024 [2007]), 33.

42  Jonathan Grossman, Abraham: The Story of a Journey (Maggid Books, 2023), 14.

43  Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-17 (Eerdmans, 1990), 372.

44  Adam E. Miglio, The Gilgamesh Epic in Genesis 1-11: Peering into the Deep (Routledge, 2023), 134.

45  Brian Neil Peterson, Genesis: A Pentecostal Commentary (Brill, 2022), 125.

46  Scott W. Hahn, Kinship by Covenant: A Canonical Approach to the Fulfillment of God's Saving Promises (Yale University Press, 2009), 99.

47  Adam E. Miglio, The Gilgamesh Epic in Genesis 1-11: Peering into the Deep (Routledge, 2023), 132.

48  John Goldingay, Genesis (Baker Academic, 2020), 206.

49  Adam E. Miglio, The Gilgamesh Epic in Genesis 1-11: Peering into the Deep (Routledge, 2023), 120.

50  Adam E. Miglio, The Gilgamesh Epic in Genesis 1-11: Peering into the Deep (Routledge, 2023), 132.

51  John C. Lennox, Friend of God: The Inspiration of Abraham in an Age of Doubt (SPCK, 2024), 43.

52  Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-17 (Eerdmans, 1990), 372.

53  R. R. Reno, Genesis (Brazos Press, 2010), 141.

54  Iain Provan, Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters (Baylor University Press, 2014), 172.

55  Samuel L. Boyd, Babel: Political Rhetoric of a Confused Legacy (Fortress Press, 2023), 172.

56  Jonathan Grossman, Abraham: The Story of a Journey (Maggid Books, 2023), 13.

57  R. R. Reno, Genesis (Brazos Press, 2010), 139.

58  Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture (Zondervan Academic, 2022), 213.

59  Jonathan Grossman, Abraham: The Story of a Journey (Maggid Books, 2023), 15-16.