Though at his death, aged 137
(Gen. 25:17), Ishmael disappears
from the Bible, he remained in the
consciousness of the Jews. We
cannot follow the full gestation of
the story, but we can read its
denouement. The source of
Genesis may have thought that the
Edomites of the Negev, one of
Israel’s inveterate enemies, were
the nation that descended from
Ishmael, but a later generation of
Jews thought otherwise. The sec-
ond century BCE Book of Jubilees,
which is largely a retelling of
Genesis from a slightly different
perspective, informs us that
Abraham before his death sum-
moned all his sons and grandchil-
dren, including Ishmael and his 12
offspring, and bade them to contin-
ue to observe circumcision, to avoid
ritual uncleanness and marriage
with the Canaanites. Then, at the
end of the same passage, a crucial
identification is made, though
almost certainly not for the first
time: the sons of Ishmael, and their
cousins, the offspring of Abraham
and another wife, Keturah, with
whom they intermarried, did indeedbecome a great nation, as God had
promised. They were the Arabs.
Abraham sends Ishmael and his
offspring to settle “between Pharan
and the borders of Babylon, in all
the land to the East, facing the
desert. And these mingled with
each other, and they were called
Arabs and Ishmaelites” (Jubilees
20:11-13).
Both the name and the identifica-
tion stuck, first among the Jews—
the historian Josephus discusses it
at length in speaking of the
Nabateans, Israel’s Arab neighbors
east of the Jordan—and then
among the Christians of the Middle
East. For these latter, the Arabs
were either “Ishmaelites” or
“Saracens.” The latter word is of
unknown origin, but the Middle
Eastern Christians of the pre-
Islamic era parsed it in biblical
terms: “Saracen” came from
“Sarah” and the Greek “kênê,”
empty or void, thus “Sara-is-bar-
ren.” When the Church historian
Sozomen wrote his Church History
in 440 CE, he pointed to the obvi-
ous similarities between Arab and
Jewish customs, like circumcisionISHMAELITESANDARABS
LECTURE TWO