God. A biography - O Lord, God of my master Abraham

O Lord, God of my master, Abraham, grant me good fortune this day, and deal graciously with my master Abraham. (p 62).

So says Abraham's anonymous servant, gone to the well in a city in a foreign country, looking for a bride for Abraham's grown son, Isaac. Sarah has died. Abraham has purchased his first piece of promised land, a burial cave for his wife. This is, of course, after the big catharsis, after the games. Life has settled down. But, in the story, a revolution has happened.

To this point in God's story, God's actions have been all but motiveless and therefore numinously, ominously unpredictable. Suddenly, and this is a measure of the victory that Abraham has won over God by raising his knife against Isaac, God is beginning to become a known quantity, defined and constrained by his past commitments. (p61)

But even more, Abraham is counting on his god as an instrument. "Ancient Mesopotamian religion did know a category of a god with whom dealings at this level and in this manner were standard. This was the personal god, typically referred to by the name of his client; that is , as 'the god of X,' 'the god of Y,' and so on." (p63). Contrast this to the Canaanite god, El, "him whose authority over nature and society was broadest but whose involvement in any individual human being's life was smallest." (p61) A close, local fit to the Lord, yahweh.

It's like, in this part of Genesis, a single person, Abraham, is getting connected with personal agency, the big deal in Christianity, saved through your personal savior, protected by the hand of your god, grace. The ties that bind. "Abraham's servant knows that his master worships a god named yahweh, 'the Lord,' but he sees fit to address him doubly: 'O Lord [yahweh], God of my master Abraham.'"

It is just by such shifts, as one person talks about another's god, that religion changes. Some of the changes are deliberate, others accidental. (p64)

So in the story, this crazy, unpredictable personality, becomes intimately available to a figurehead as a personal agency, through a compounding of local ideas on divinity, through an identification of names. A plausible etiology of the compound character evolving through this story. But, regardless, the change is evident in the story, without explanation. Later, this agency is passed on through the generations: "the God of Isaac," "the God of Jacob." After that, it is passed on to a tribe or whatever--a people, a nation, Israel.