In Jewish and Christian literature and art, we find the patriarch Abraham described as the father of the mathematical sciences. If we read the Old Testament, we never find Abraham explicitly descrived as a mathematician or scientist. In the Bible, Abraham is honored as a man who lived by faith—a patriarch called by God to leave his homeland and trust in God’s promises. There appears to be no mention of experience with any of the mathematical arts. So, where did this tradition interpretation of Abraham the mathematician come from?
The inspiration for that later interpretation is found in Genesis 15:5, where God calls Abraham to “look toward heaven and number the stars.” The Hebrew verb translated “number” (saphar) means not only to count (in a common way) but to record or reckon, implying a knowledge of the art. Ancient readers who believed Abraham had come from “Ur of the Chaldees”—a region associated with the astronomical learning of the Chaldeans—reasoned that this call to “number the stars” was more than a rhetorical figure. They believed that God was addressing a man trained in the mathematical sciences, a man experienced in numbering the stars. For such a man, the divine promise that his descendants would outnumber the stars would be shocking, because he would know how vast that number was.
The earliest explicit description of Abraham as a student of mathematics comes from Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher (not a Christian) who lived around the time of Christ. Philo wrote in Greek and works to harmonize the Jewish Scriptures with Greek philosophy. In his work “On Abraham” he argued that Abraham, having been raised among the Chaldeans, was “trained in the study of the motions of the stars and the harmony of the universe.” Philo used this to illustrate an important moral point: Abraham’s greatness lay in moving beyond human arts and sciences, which he understood well, to seek the Creator Himself. Abraham, in Philo’s view, represents the wise man who ascends from philosophy to theology–as we do in classical Catholic studies.
A few decades later, another Jewish writer, Josephus, expanded this idea in his work on The Antiquities of the Jews. Josephus again argued that Abraham learned the mathematical sciences of the Chaldeans but added that he “communicated to the Egyptians arithmetic and delivered to them the science of astronomy.” Josephus claimed that Abraham was not only a learned man but also a teacher who brought the mathematical sciences from Mesopotamia to Egypt. Josephus intended this to show that the wisdom of the Hebrews was older and more authoritative than that of the Egyptians or Greeks. Josephus, then, is the source of the later tradition of “Abraham the mathematician.”
Through Josephus, this idea passed into Christian and medieval thought. Many respected writers have repeated the notion that Abraham introduced arithmetic and astronomy to the Egyptians. It became part of the standard medieval account of the history of learning, in which the sciences were traced from the patriarchs through the ancient world to the present. In the sixteenth century, Renaissance artists in Europe worked this image into western art. The Flemish painter Frans Floris presented “Arithmetic” in 1557 with a book labeled “Abraham” at the feet of a woman representing Arithmetic. That image identified Abraham as the earliest known source of mathematical wisdom, standing alongside Pythagoras, who represented its later Greek development.
So, the tradition that honors Abraham as the “father of mathematics” is not drawn directly from any explicit biblical reference, but on a tradition of interpretation seen in the writings of Philo and Josephus and continued by many after them. It shows the effort made by Jewish and Christian thinkers to connect the classical liberal arts curriculum with the divine revelation given to the Jews. For these writers, mathematics was not a secular pursuit borrowed by God’s people from pagan nations, but the means by which by an ancient patriarch became a follower of the one true God. In this way Abraham came to represent the union of reason and faith—a true model of classical liberal arts education.
Mr. William C. Michael, O.P.
Headmaster
Classical Liberal Arts Academy
