Astral Codex Ten

Abraham

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Abraham

Article

Abraham is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between March 20, 2023 and September 12, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Abraham was childless, and tried to name his servant Eliezer his heir”; “she told Abraham to sleep with her servant Hagar”; “the Biblical Abraham would famously feed and host any guest who came to his door”. It most often appears alongside A Change of Heart, ACX, Adams.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: March 20, 2023
  • Last seen: September 12, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Half An Hour Before Dawn In San Francisco
March 20, 2023 · Original source
The light from the lurid sea - okay, the lurid creek channel - is the reflection of a billboard. Something something SF. Mirrored in the water, “SF” looks like “86”. The number eighty-six appears only once in the Torah; it was Abraham’s age when his son Ishmael was born. Abraham was childless, and tried to name his servant Eliezer his heir. God disagreed - he must bear a son. Abraham’s wife Sarah was 75 and doubted she could have biological children, so she told Abraham to sleep with her servant Hagar. Abraham and Hagar had a son, and they called his name Ishmael. Then an angel descended, and prophesied this was not the destined child, not how things were supposed to go. “He will be a wild donkey of a man,” said the angel. “His hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.” So the esoteric meaning of 86 is “to produce an heir by unnatural means and have it go badly for everyone, because you rejected Eliezer”. He who has ears to hear, let - no, sorry, that’s overcomplicating things, S+F is literally just sof, Hebrew for “end”.
Open Thread 283
July 02, 2023 · Original source
If the paper accurately reported its results as being about kindness/honesty in the current generation, that would address most of my concerns. But I would still worry that these terms can change meaning over time. For example, the Biblical Abraham would famously feed and host any guest who came to his door, which is better than most modern people. But also, he kept slaves, had a child with one of them, and then agreed to his jealous wife’s demand to send the slave-woman and child out into the desert to die. So was Abraham more or less “kind” than we are? I think a Bronze Age Hebrew would say kinder (because hospitality is most important, but what you do with slaves is your own business) and most moderns would say less kind (because feeding anyone who comes to your door is so crazy you don’t even really get credit for it, but keeping slaves is monstrous). So I think there’s still room for people to anchor on the morality of their childhood.
Your Review: The Synaptic Plasticity and Memory Hypothesis
September 12, 2025 · Original source
Abraham, Jones, and Glanzman, npj Science of Learning (2019)