Lech Lecha: Avraham’s Origin Story and the Torah’s Silence

For years I've been bothered by the Torah's silence on Avraham's backstory. I recently stumbled upon an answer which caused me to rethink how I learn pshat.

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Lech Lecha: Avraham’s Origin Story and the Torah’s Silence

Ask a typical Jew who received a typical Jewish Day School education to share what they know about the early years of Avraham Avinu. They’ll likely tell you about how Avraham discovered Hashem at a young age and spread knowledge of monotheism throughout the land (Rambam, Hilchos Avodah Zarah v’Chukos ha’Goyim 1:3), or how he smashed his father’s idols (Rashi on Bereishis 11:28), or how he was thrown into a fiery furnace for his beliefs and was miraculously saved (ibid. and Ramban on Bereishis 12:10).

The problem is that the Written Torah doesn’t say anything about any of this. Avram makes his first appearance at the end of Parashas Noach. He is presented as an offspring of Terach in an utterly unremarkable manner:

Terach lived seventy years and he fathered Avram, Nachor, and Haran. These are the descendants of Terach. Terach fathered Avram, Nachor, and Haran, and Haran fathered Lot. Haran died before his father Terach, in the land of his birth, in Ur Kasdim. Avram and Nachor took for themselves wives. The name of Avram's wife was Sarai and the name of Nachor's wife was Milkah, the daughter of Haran, the father of Milkah and the father of Yiskah. Sarai was barren; she had no child. Terach took his son, Avram, and his grandson, Lot, the son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law, Sarai, the wife of Avram. And they set out with them from Ur Kasdim to go to the land of Canaan, and they came to Charan and dwelled there. The days of Terach were two hundred and five years; and Terach died in Charan. (Bereishis 11:26-32)

A reader with no prior knowledge of the text who stopped reading here would have no inkling that this “son of Terach” would go on to become a “main character,” and certainly not one who would change world history. Yet, in the very next verse, seemingly out of the blue, Hashem speaks to Avram and promises him greatness:

Hashem said to Avram, "Go forth from your land, and from your family, and from your father's house, to the land that I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing. And I will bless those who bless you, and one who curses you I will curse, and all the families of the land will be blessed through you." (Bereishis 12:1-3)

The question is: Why is the Written Torah silent about Avraham’s backstory? Why wouldn’t it mention the noble qualities and achievements which prompted Hashem to choose him? What are we to infer from this silence?

This question has bothered me every year for as long as I can remember. I was never able to find a satisfactory answer, nor could I think of one myself. This year I thought of a new possibility: What if the Torah didn’t need to tell us Avraham’s backstory? After all, the Torah wasn’t given to non-Jews. It was given to the offspring of Avraham. Perhaps the Torah is silent because it expected its readers to be sufficiently familiar with these events.

Turns out, R’ David Tzvi Hoffmann (ibid.) raises the question that has bothered me and gives this very answer!

Avraham certainly showed himself worthy for this designation before it was entrusted to him, which happened when he was already 75 years old. [However,] the Torah doesn’t tell us anything about Avraham during his youth. Everything we know about [those years] is only from later aggados (homilies). Indeed, we may ask: How can it be that the Torah doesn’t even hint at any of this? Why, exactly, was Avraham chosen by Hashem? [Why does the Torah] instead take us directly into the events through which Hashem promised Avraham a name and reputation? In contrast, by Noach it was apparently necessary to announce at the outset that “Noach was a righteous man, etc.” (ibid. 6:9) so that his salvation from the flood waters wouldn’t arouse bewilderment. This answer has two parts.

The first is that the reputation and greatness of Avraham Avinu was well-known to the generation that received the Torah, such that it was unnecessary to provide descriptions of his youth or his merits in order for them to recognize it. The second is that the deeds of Avraham Avinu, as described in the subsequent parshiyos, are sufficient to paint a picture of his character: he built altars to Hashem wherever he went, he separated from his family (i.e. Lote) in order to establish peace and even endangered himself for his sake, he withstood all the trials Hashem tested him with, he fulfilled the mitzvos of Hashem, his sole yearning was to bequeath fear of God to his offspring after him. [For] someone whose qualities and deeds such as these are recounted, it would be utterly unnecessary to provide a specific introduction to demonstrate that he was worthy of his designation [as Hashem’s chosen one].

In short, the Torah’s primary readers were sufficiently familiar with Avraham Avinu’s backstory from their own oral history and didn’t need a recap. Instead, the Written Torah, which is a record of the hashgachah (providence) on the Children of Israel, begins its narrative at the point where that hashgachah commences: “Go forth from your land, etc.” Once that story is underway, the Torah highlights other noteworthy deeds of Avraham Avinu so we can learn from his character, but there was no need to do so before the account of the hashgachah began.

This answer has prompted me to rethink one of the core principles of my own approach to learning pshat (the straightforward meaning of the text), which I adopted from the Ralbag. Unlike Rashi and Ramban, Ralbag rejects as pshat any open miracles which are not openly mentioned in the text.[1] He reasons that “the Torah would not have remained silent from mentioning [an open miracle] explicitly, since it its custom to publicize the concept of miracles” (Ralbag Beur ha’Milos on Shemos 2:1; see also Ralbag on Shemos 9:33, Yehoshua 10:12, and elsewhere). Presumably, this is how Ralbag would account for the Torah’s omission of the story about Avraham’s miraculous salvation from the fiery furnace: he would maintain that such a miracle never happened. If such a miracle did happen, the text would have mentioned it explicitly, just like it mentions the miraculous salvation of Chananya, Mishael, and Azaryah when they were thrown into a fiery furnace and miraculously saved (see Daniel Chapter 3).

I now realize that even if one agrees with the Ralbag in general, R’ David Tzvi Hoffmann’s approach provides a basis for saying that a miracle of this nature could have happened, but the Torah still didn’t mention it because it was already known to the initial recipients. This approach is taken by the Ibn Ezra, who shares the Ralbag’s stance on open miracles, but who nevertheless comments: “Our Early Sages said that Avraham was thrown into a fiery furnace. This was not mentioned in Scripture. [Nevertheless,] if it a tradition, we will accept it as words of Torah” (Ibn Ezra, Second Commentary to Bereishis 11:28)

It is possible the Ralbag would be open to accepting R’ David Tzvi Hoffman’s answer. In the very first paragraph of his commentary on Bereishis (Hakdamah to Parashas Bereshis: Chelek 1) Ralbag writes that the Torah addressed itself to “the people who lived in the days of Moshe Rabbeinu” in an effort to correct “the opinions of [those people] ... due to the fact that science was exceedingly undeveloped at that time.” If the Torah’s contents were determined in part by deficiencies in the knowledge of its first audience, then it stands to reason that the Torah might also take into consideration the knowledge they possessed. If there were already a thriving oral tradition about the founder of Israel, there would be no need for the Torah to restate that information for them.

But the real takeaway for me isn’t about the Ralbag or R’ David Tzvi Hoffmann’s answer to my question. The real takeaway is a greater awareness of the question, “Who was the Torah writing this for?” – a question that has come to occupy an increasingly centralized position in my learning and continues to yield insight.

[1] for more on this topic, see my article entitled Shemos: Seventy Souls and Seventy Perspectives

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