English

Christian, Islamic, Jewish, and Baha'i symbols

Adjective

Abrahamic ‎(comparative more Abrahamic, superlative most Abrahamic)

1. Pertaining to Abraham, the patriarch. [First attested in the early 19^th century.]^[1]
   • 1832, Issac Cullimore, “Criteria for Determining the Accuracy of Scripture Chronology”, in The Morning watch: or, Quarterly journal on prophecy, and theological review, volume 4:

     [T]he Noachic and Abrahamic churches are connected by Shem, and the other long-lived patriarchs, who existed before the apostasy of Noah's posterity, and survived it

   • 1896, James S. Kennedy, “Spiritual Development of St. Paul”, in The Methodist review, page 66:

     Paul's faith was at this crisis in his spiritual illumination more Abrahamic than Christlike in its character.

2. (of a religion) Descended from the religious tradition of Abraham.
   • 2005, Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart, quoting Jacques Derrida, Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, page 121:

     [The messianic] does not belong properly to any Abrahamic religion (even if I may here continue “entre nous” for essential reasons of language and of place, of culture, and of provisional rhetorical and historical strategy of which I will speak later, to give to it names inscribed by the Abrahamic religions).

   • 2007, Hent De Vries, Religion: Beyond a Concept, ISBN 0823227251, page 123:

     Most anthropologists, myself at the forefront, are doubtless incredibly naive about the nature of Christianity and provincial with respect to the depth and riches of Abrahamic-based theory for the analysis of religious phenomena more broadly no less than for philosophy.

   • 2009, Stig Jarle Hansen, Atle Mesøy, Tuncay Kardas, The Borders of Islam, ISBN 0231154224, page 158:

     Christianity, not Islam, was the first of the Abrahamic cults to come to the Sudan.

   Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Baha'i Faith are all Abrahamic religions.

Usage notes

Not all religions that revere Abraham are considered Abrahamic. The term always covers Christianity, Islam and Judaism, and often includes Bahá'í. Other faiths descended from these religions, such as Rastafari and Mandaeism, are sometimes not described as Abrahamic even if they consider Abraham holy.^[2]

Synonyms

• (pertaining to Abraham): Abrahamical, Ibrahimic
• (of the family of religions revering Abraham): Abrahamist, Ibrahimic, Semitic

Related terms

• Abrahamism

Translations

References

1. ↑ Lesley Brown (editor), The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 5th edition (Oxford University Press, 2003 [1933], ISBN 978-0-19-860575-7), page 7
2. ↑ “Meanings of ambiguous terms beginning with the letters "A" to "R"”, in (Please provide the title of the work), Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance, accessed 2012-06-09