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Japanese Abraham is named 311 times in the Bible, counting the years he was called Abram. In the King James Version, “Abraham” appears 250 times in 230 verses and “Abram” 61 times in 50. God gave him the new name in Genesis 17:5, and after that verse he is Abraham everywhere except two verses that look back on the change.
Behind the name stands a promise God made at the very start. When he called a childless man out of Haran, he promised him, “I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing” (Genesis 12:2). We can watch that name travel through Scripture. It runs from the genealogies of Genesis to the letters of Paul and Peter, and it is spoken by Moses in prayer (“Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, thy servants,” Exodus 32:13), by the prophets, by Stephen before the council, and by Jesus himself.
How many times is Abraham mentioned in the Old and New Testaments?
| Name (KJV) | Old Testament | New Testament | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abram | 61 | 0 | 61 |
| Abraham | 176 | 74 | 250 |
| Both names | 237 | 74 | 311 |
He is named in 27 books, 16 of the Old Testament and 11 of the New. Genesis holds most of them, 193 in all (134 “Abraham” and 59 “Abram”), since his whole life is told there, from his birth in chapter 11 to his burial in chapter 25. After Genesis the books that speak of him most are Luke (15), John (11, every one of them in chapter 8), Hebrews (10), and then Exodus, Romans and Galatians with 9 each.
These are whole words in the King James Version, without the Apocrypha, and “Abraham’s” is counted with “Abraham” (it comes 19 times). If you search another translation you will get a different total, and a list that leaves out “Abram” will give you 250.
Where is Abraham first mentioned in the Bible?
In Genesis 11:26, in a single line of family history: “And Terah lived seventy years, and begat Abram, Nahor, and Haran.” A few verses later comes a sentence that hangs over the rest of his story: “But Sarai was barren; she had no child” (Genesis 11:30). Then God speaks to him, “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee” (Genesis 12:1), and the Bible tells us simply that “Abram departed, as the LORD had spoken unto him” (Genesis 12:4).
The New Testament begins with him too. Its first verse is “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1). The last time his name appears in the Bible’s order of books is in Peter’s first letter, where he holds up Sarah to the wives in the churches: “Even as Sara obeyed Abraham, calling him lord: whose daughters ye are, as long as ye do well” (1 Peter 3:6).
Why did God change Abram’s name to Abraham?
God gave the reason himself. When Abram was ninety-nine, God appeared to him and said, “Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham; for a father of many nations have I made thee” (Genesis 17:5). Abram means “exalted father” or “high father”, and Strong’s concordance gives Abraham as “father of a multitude”. In the same conversation Sarai became Sarah (Genesis 17:15).
Look at the tense. God says “have I made thee”, and he says it to an old man whose wife was still childless and whose one son, Ishmael, had been born to Hagar (Genesis 16:15). The name was given before anyone could see it come true. The two names tell a small history of faith: 59 times in Genesis he is Abram, the name he was born with, and from Genesis 17:5 on he carries the name of the promise. Only two later verses use the old name, and both are there to tell the change: “Abram; the same is Abraham” (1 Chronicles 1:27), and the great prayer of Nehemiah 9, “Thou art the LORD the God, who didst choose Abram, and broughtest him forth out of Ur of the Chaldees, and gavest him the name of Abraham” (Nehemiah 9:7).
Who speaks of Abraham in the New Testament?
Seventy-four mentions are spread across Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, Romans, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Hebrews, James and 1 Peter. Every one is “Abraham”; the name Abram never appears in the New Testament.
Jesus speaks his name often. He answers the Sadducees with the words God spoke to Moses at the bush: “I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Matthew 22:32). In his parable the beggar Lazarus dies “and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom” (Luke 16:22). And in John 8, where every mention in that Gospel falls, he says, “Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad,” and then, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:56, 58).
The apostles return to him again and again. Stephen begins his defence with “The God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham, when he was in Mesopotamia” (Acts 7:2). James remembers that “he was called the Friend of God” (James 2:23), and Hebrews that “he went out, not knowing whither he went” (Hebrews 11:8). Paul calls him “the father of us all” (Romans 4:16) and gives every believer a share in his name: “And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:29). Why God chose him in the first place is its own question, taken up in why God chose Abraham.
Is Abraham mentioned more than anyone else in the Bible?
No. Counted the same way in the King James Version, David is named 1,064 times and Moses 847. Abraham’s 311 put him well ahead of his son Isaac, named 132 times. The phrase “the God of Abraham” comes 17 times, from God’s words to Isaac in Genesis 26:24 to Stephen’s speech in Acts 7:32. Hebrews, speaking of Abraham and the patriarchs after him, puts it plainly: “God is not ashamed to be called their God” (Hebrews 11:16).
How old was Abraham, and when did he live?
Genesis gives his ages along the way. He was 75 when he left Haran (Genesis 12:4), 99 when God renamed him (Genesis 17:1), and 100 when Isaac was born (Genesis 21:5). He died at 175: “Then Abraham gave up the ghost, and died in a good old age, an old man, and full of years; and was gathered to his people” (Genesis 25:8).
The Bible gives no calendar year for him. Encyclopaedia Britannica places him in the early second millennium BC and dates the family’s journey from Ur to about 2000 BC, while noting that no biography of him “in the ordinary sense” can be written, since the evidence is Genesis read beside the archaeology of the period. It also records the older critical view that the stories were “only a projection of the situation and concerns of a much later period”, the 9th to 5th centuries BC.
So the name spread across the Bible as God said it would, and it has reached us. Paul, quoting the promise of Genesis 17, calls Abraham the one “who is the father of us all, (As it is written, I have made thee a father of many nations,)” (Romans 4:16–17).
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