In Nablus I met up with Avner Goren, an archaeologist with an encyclopedic knowledge of biblical history. We went looking for evidence of Abraham's Shechem but found nothing that could be tied to the patriarch. Everything seemed harmonious while we were there, but before long lethal battles would erupt between Palestinians and Israelis. Automatic arms' fire would fill the air around the tomb thought to be that of the Prophet Joseph, Abraham's great-grandson. Canaan is still a battlefield, as it has been on and off for thousands of years.

Genesis says nothing about how long Abraham remained in Shechem. All we learn is that from there he pulled up his stakes. . .for the high country east of Bethel and pitched his tent with Bethel to the west and Ai to the east, and he built there an altar to the Lord, and he invoked the name of the Lord. Some scholars believe that since Bethel was a Canaanite cultic site, the Bible, by directly connecting Abraham to it, provided a way for the Hebrews to claim it as their own.

From Bethel, the modern Arab town of Baytin, Abraham journeyed south to the Negev desert. It was mainly downhill traveling, over brushland and into the barrens. Irrigation makes the Negev bloom today, but in Abraham's time a dry, rocky expanse filled the landscape between Beersheba and the Gulf of Aqaba. To make matters worse, an especially severe drought struck the Negev soon after his arrival, forcing him to move again. Abram went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was grave in the land. The attraction of Egypt was the Nile and its extravagantly fertile delta.

At this point Abraham must have been questioning God's promises that he would give him a child and a homeland. He was still childless, and after reaching Canaan, he had been uprooted yet again.

One spring morning I drove from Cairo to Avaris, an archaeological site at Tell el Daba, where Abraham may have established himself. The area produces rice, corn, cotton, and, during the spring months, wheat. I was cordially received by Manfred Bietak, chairman of the Institute of Egyptology at the University of Vienna, who is leading the excavation of the site.

"Absolutely blank," was his immediate reply when I asked what the Egyptian historical sources say about Abraham. "As far as the Egyptians are concerned," he said, "it's as if Abraham never set foot in the delta."

The timing of Abraham's arrival in the delta is as indeterminate as where he settled. Some scholars believe that an Abraham figure could have come to Egypt at the time of the Hyksos (an Egyptian word meaning "foreign rulers") in the first half of the second millennium b.c., but most argue he would have been there much earlier.

Whoever the pharaoh was during Abraham's stay in Egypt, he was implicated in Abraham's life in the most intimate way. As Abraham approached the Egyptian border, he said to Sarai his wife, "Look, I know you are a beautiful woman, and so when the Egyptians see you and say, 'She's his wife,' they will kill me while you they will let live. Say, please, that you are my sister, so that it will go well with me on your count and I shall stay alive because of you."

Genesis continues, and Pharaoh's courtiers saw her and praised her to Pharaoh, and the woman was taken into Pharaoh's house. That Sarah was no longer a young woman did not seem to have discouraged the pharaoh.

Genesis offers no moral judgments on this peculiar turn of events, nor does it go into any other aspect of Abraham's life when Sarah was presumably in the pharaoh's harem. The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, a compilation of largely Roman Catholic biblical studies, suggests that Abraham's deception calls into question his faith that God would protect him and fulfill the promise that, To your seed I will give this land. The JPS Torah Commentary, a Jewish analysis, makes the point that Abraham would have erred if he had expected God to work a miracle to get him out of this fix. As it turned out, God did intervene. And the Lord afflicted Pharaoh and his household with terrible plagues because of Sarai the wife of Abram.

The lack of detail about Abraham's behavior is a frustrating example of the gaps spawned by the transformation of oral traditions into the written stories of Genesis. If Abraham's deception is open to interpretation, the pharaoh's reaction was abundantly clear. And Pharaoh summoned Abram and said, "What is this you have done to me? Why did you not tell me she was your wife? Why did you say, 'She's my sister,' so that I took her to me as wife? Now, here is your wife. Take her and get out!"

Abraham was a rich man when he left Egypt—heavily laden with cattle, with silver and gold. By now I see him, consciously or not, beginning to lay the foundation for the establishment of monotheistic religion. To understand Abraham's connection with monotheism, says James Kugel of Harvard University, you have to look beyond Genesis itself, which says nothing directly about it. "Centuries and centuries after Abraham might have lived, there were interpreters who read his story in Genesis. These interpreters lived from around the third century b.c. on. When they got to chapter 12, they said, 'Oh, why does God start speaking to Abraham and promise him all these wonderful things, like making him a great nation?' Eventually they went to the Book of Joshua, where it says that Abraham's family all worshiped other gods." Kugel says the interpreters concluded that Abraham was the only one who didn't worship these other gods.

In numerous later works—including the Book of Jubilees (found with the Dead Sea Scrolls), the New Testament, early Christian writings, and the Koran—Abraham is presented as a model of faith and pure monotheism. The idea caught on and became fixed.

After returning to Canaan, Abraham settled a land dispute between his herdsmen and those of his nephew, Lot, who had left Egypt with him. He did this not by fighting but by letting the younger man decide. Lot picked the verdant valley of the Jordan River down to the southernmost shore of the Dead Sea, where the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah stood. Abraham—known ever more as a peacemaker—was content to remain among the mountains and deserts of the Promised Land, making his temporary home under terebinth trees in Mamre.

By now God had appeared to Abraham, reconfirming his gift of the Promised Land. "Raise your eyes and look out from the place where you are to the north and the south and the east and the west, for all the land you see, to you I will give it and to your seed forever. . . . Rise, walk about the land through its length and its breadth, for to you I will give it."

In the ancient Middle East, walking around a property was a ritual for taking final possession of a piece of land. Genesis makes no mention that Abraham fulfilled God's order to walk about the land. But the Genesis Apocryphon, an interpretive text found in the 1940s among the Dead Sea Scrolls, fills in this blank, describing at length a journey Abraham made around the Promised Land.

To show his gratitude to God, Abraham built an altar in Hebron, which lies in a hollow in the mountains of Judah some 15 miles (24 kilometers) southwest of Jerusalem. Although Israel largely withdrew its military forces from the overwhelmingly Arab city in January 1997 as part of the peace process with the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli government kept control of a strip including a small Jewish neighborhood along al Shuhada Street in the center of the old town. Some 450 Jews live on al Shuhada Street (with 210,000 Arabs around them), which was closed to Arab traffic and guarded at either end by Israeli soldiers. I found it eerie driving along the silent, empty street, with the storefronts shuttered.

In Hebron, Abraham suddenly found himself an active military commander. An emissary brought him word that Lot had been captured in Sodom by four warmongering kings. Genesis, which at times is very precise, recounts that Abraham marshaled 318 of his retainers and struck the enemy at night, chasing them north past Damascus in Syria and freeing Lot.

Returning in triumph, Abraham reached Salem—the town that most likely became Jerusalem, sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. It may have been there that he had a "conversation" with God in which he expressed his doubts about the divine promises. As Robert Alter of UC Berkeley points out, "This first speech to God reveals a hitherto unglimpsed human dimension of Abram." God's promise of a very great reward prompted Abraham to complain about what he thought had been the Lord's failure to fulfill earlier pledges. He said, "O my Master, Lord, what can You give me when I am going to my end childless. . . . to me you have given no seed."