Abraham stands at the head of three world religions, and the book of Genesis maps his household in remarkable detail. He is the son of Terah, brother of Nahor and Haran, and husband of Sarah — who is also, Genesis notes, his half-sister through their father. Called out of Ur, Abraham is promised descendants as numerous as the stars, and the family tree that follows traces exactly how that promise runs, and forks, across four generations.
The defining tension of the family is genealogical. Sarah is barren for decades, so she gives her Egyptian servant Hagar to Abraham, who bears Ishmael. Then Sarah conceives Isaac in old age, and the two lines split forever: Ishmael, the elder, is sent away with Hagar; Isaac, the son of promise, inherits the covenant. After Sarah's death Abraham takes a third wife, Keturah, who bears six more sons — Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak and Shuah — the ancestors of further peoples pushed to the margins of the inheritance.
The pattern of a divided birthright repeats with uncanny precision down the line. Isaac marries Rebekah — his cousin's daughter, drawn from Nahor's branch to keep the bloodline close — and she bears the twins Esau and Jacob, who struggle from the womb over the same single blessing. Jacob, renamed Israel, then fathers twelve sons by four women: his wives Leah and Rachel and their servants Bilhah and Zilpah. Those twelve become the twelve tribes of Israel, so that the whole nation reads its origin off one man's complicated, many-mothered household.
This genogram follows the Genesis narrative as received in the Hebrew Bible. Its branches are claimed as literal ancestry by an extraordinary share of humanity: Jews and Christians trace descent through Isaac and Jacob, while Islamic tradition traces the Arab peoples and the Prophet Muhammad through Ishmael, honored as a patriarch in his own right. Few family trees anywhere carry heavier consequence — the split between two half-brothers, Isaac and Ishmael, still shapes the religious map of the modern world.
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