Five lives that hold the whole story together

Abram was born in Ur of the Chaldees, a wealthy city in southern Mesopotamia, and grew up in a household that served other gods — Joshua 24:2 says so plainly. His father Terah took the family out and stopped halfway, at Haran. It was in Haran, already seventy-five years old, that Abram heard the command that splits his life in two: leave your country, your kindred and your father's house for a land that will be shown to you later. No map, no name, no deadline. Only a direction.

What follows is twenty-five years of waiting. God promises him descendants «as the stars of the heaven» and Sarah cannot conceive. In between, Abraham does what anyone would do: he looks for shortcuts. He passes his wife off as his sister to save his own skin, first in Egypt and later with Abimelech. He accepts Sarah's arrangement and fathers Ishmael by Hagar, the Egyptian servant, opening a family wound the Bible does not hide. When Isaac is finally born, Abraham is a hundred and Sarah ninety; the boy's name means «he laughs», because both of them had laughed when they were told.

The hardest episode comes later. God asks for the son of the promise on Mount Moriah, and Abraham gets up early, splits the wood and climbs. The text grants him not one spoken thought: only the boy's question — where is the lamb? — and the father's answer: God will provide himself a lamb. The angel stops the knife at the last moment. It is the scene Jewish tradition calls «the binding», and the one Christians read with another hill in mind.

Abraham died at a hundred and seventy-five and was buried beside Sarah in the cave of Machpelah, at Hebron — the only piece of the promised land he ever actually owned, because he bought it and paid for it. He never saw the nation, the country or the multitude. He saw one son and a cave. The rest he left open.

Abraham is the man by whom the Bible defines faith, and it is worth noticing what the word means there. Not certainty, not enthusiasm: setting out. Hebrews puts it without decoration — «he went out, not knowing whither he went» — and Genesis 15:6 settles the matter: he believed, and it was counted to him for righteousness. Paul will build half the New Testament on that verse, and James will qualify it by remembering that the same faith also climbed a mountain.

The second thing he teaches is that the story does not tidy him up. He lies twice about his wife, he runs out of patience, he sends Hagar and her son into the desert. The Bible records all of it and still calls him the friend of God. That may be the most useful part of his story: the promise never depended on his being flawless.

When Samuel arrives at Bethlehem to anoint the future king, Jesse presents seven sons and forgets the eighth, who is out with the sheep. Someone has to go and fetch him. Out of that comes the line that sums up the whole chapter: man looks on the outward appearance, the Lord looks on the heart. David goes back to the field and nothing happens for a while; what pulls him out is a stalled war and a Philistine giant who has spent forty days taunting an entire army.

After the victory comes the long, rough part: Saul, jealous, hunts him for years through the hills of Judah. David lives in caves, feigns madness before a foreign king and leads a band of the discontented and the indebted. Twice he has Saul at his mercy and twice he lets him walk away. Many of the psalms now read in hospital rooms come out of those years — written in the open, not in a palace.

He reigns seven years in Hebron and thirty-three in Jerusalem, which he takes and makes his capital. He brings the ark up into the city dancing before it. And then comes the fall: Bathsheba, and the order to leave Uriah to die in the front line to cover the adultery. The prophet Nathan stands in front of him with a parable about a lamb and takes him apart in five sentences. David's answer — I have sinned against the Lord — and Psalm 51 are the reason his figure does not collapse: the story does not acquit him, but it does not discard him either.

His last years are spent paying for it inside his own house: the rape of Tamar, the murder of Amnon, Absalom's rebellion and death. He dies leaving the throne to Solomon and the plans for the temple he was not allowed to build. The promise of 2 Samuel 7 — a throne established for ever — is the one the New Testament picks up when it calls Jesus «son of David».

David teaches that prayer does not have to be polite. In the psalms that carry his name there is jubilation and there is reproach, there is «the Lord is my shepherd» and there is «how long?». That range is why they still work three thousand years later: they give words to states of mind that usually have none.

And he teaches that repentance is measured by what you do once you are caught. David does not negotiate with Nathan or look for someone to blame: he admits it and he writes. The Bible does not hide his worst chapter — the adultery and the killing are on the record for good — and still calls him a man after God's own heart. Both things stand together.

Paul first appears minding the coats of the men stoning Stephen, and consenting to his death. He was a Pharisee, the son of Pharisees, trained in Jerusalem under the best teacher in the city, and convinced that this new movement was a blasphemy to be cut out. He asked for letters to go to Damascus and bring back followers of the Way in chains. He had the law on his side and a clear conscience.

Outside Damascus a light knocks him to the ground and a voice asks the question that rearranges his biography: why persecutest thou me. He gets up blind. He spends three days without food or drink in a stranger's house until Ananias arrives — having argued back against the instruction to go, with good reason — and calls him «brother Saul». Then come years of silence in Arabia and in Tarsus before Barnabas goes looking for him and brings him to Antioch.

What follows is some twenty years on the road: three great journeys through Cyprus, Asia Minor, Macedonia and Greece, founding communities in port cities and keeping them going afterwards by letter. He worked at his trade, making tents, so as not to be a charge on the churches. The list he draws up himself in 2 Corinthians 11 is the best summary of his life: five times thirty-nine stripes, three shipwrecks, prisons, a night and a day in the deep, perils of rivers, of robbers and of false brethren.

One argument runs under all his letters: whether non-Jews had to become Jews to belong. He said no, confronted Peter in public over it and won the point at the council in Jerusalem. That decision is why Christianity left Palestine. He ended up a prisoner, appealed to Caesar as a Roman citizen, was shipwrecked on his way to Italy and spent two years under house arrest in Rome, receiving visitors and writing. Acts ends there, without saying how he died.

Paul is the proof that nobody is out of reach. The text does not present him as a sincere seeker who needed a nudge: he was on his way to arrest people. The scene with Ananias, who resists going to see him because he knows exactly who he is, is there so that it cannot be read as a comfortable conversion.

His other lesson is about strength. He asked three times for a physical problem he calls «a thorn in the flesh» to be taken away, and the answer was no. What he got instead — «my grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness» — sums up his theology better than anything else he wrote: what holds you up is not your own capacity.