Abraham

Abraham was of Andite blood. As the Urantia Papers tell us:

78:0.1 The second Eden was the cradle of civilization for almost thirty thousand years. Here in Mesopotamia the Adamic peoples held forth, sending out their progeny to the ends of the earth, and latterly, as amalgamated with the Nodite and Sangik tribes, were known as the Andites. From this region went those men and women who initiated the doings of historic times, and who have so enormously accelerated cultural progress on Urantia.
78:4.1 The Andite races were the primary blends of the pure-line violet race and the Nodites plus the evolutionary peoples. In general, Andites should be thought of as having a far greater percentage of Adamic blood than the modern races. In the main, the term Andite is used to designate those peoples whose racial inheritance was from one-eighth to one-sixth violet. Modern Urantians, even the northern white races, contain much less than this percentage of the blood of Adam.
78:4:4 These early Andites were not Aryan; they were pre-Aryan. They were not white; they were pre-white. They were neither an Occidental nor an Oriental people. But it is Andite inheritance that gives to the polyglot mixture of the so-called white races that generalized homogeneity which has been called Caucasoid.
78:4:6 These Andites were adventurous; they had roving dispositions. An increase of either Sangik or Andonite stock tended to stabilize them. But even so, their later descendants never stopped until they had circumnavigated the globe and discovered the last remote continent.
78:5:2 These Andites inaugurated new advances throughout Eurasia and North Africa. From Mesopotamia through Sinkiang the Andite culture was dominant, and the steady migration toward Europe was continuously offset by new arrivals from Mesopotamia. But it is hardly correct to speak of the Andites as a race in Mesopotamia proper until near the beginning of the terminal migrations of the mixed descendants of Adam. By this time even the races in the second garden had become so blended that they could no longer be considered Adamites.

Curiously, Victor Mair made the discovery of Andite mummified descendents from the Sinkiang (Xinjiang) region of China in 1994. They were taller than the Chinese, looked like western man, were reddish colored, and wore Celtic Tartan clothing. See The Tarim Mummies, J. P. Mallory and Victor H. Mair, Thames and Hudson, London, 2000.

As Jews and Christians well know Abraham bore two names: Abram and Abraham. According to the Bible story he was 99 years old when his name was changed. Yahweh, El Shaddai, spoke directly with Abraham to produce this shift. Gen 17:4 "my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations."

We can question whether it was Michael who spoke with Abraham or if it may have been Melchizedek standing in for Yahweh. In Gen 14:18-19 we are told that "Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine. He was priest of God Most High, 19 and he blessed Abram.

The first name, Abram, is easy. It is composed of Ab and ram. Ab is the Hebrew name for father. ram means high, or lofty, or exalted.

But when we encounter Abraham we run into a seriously difficult problem. The first part, Ab, we know = father. The second part, raham, has given untold trouble to biblical scholars. Everybody and his brother has speculated about the origin since it has no known etymology. This speculation has been going on for centuries. For example we find remarks like:

Etymology.-Critical View:
The original and proper form of this name seems to be either "Abram" or "Abiram" (I Kings, xvi. 34; Deut. xi. 6), with the meaning, "my Father [or my God] is exalted." The form "Abraham" yields no sense in Hebrew, and is probably only a graphic variation of "Abram," the h being simply a letter, indicating a preceding vowel, a; but popular tradition explains it "father of a multitude" (ab hamon), given as a new name on the occasion of a turning-point in the patriarch's career (Gen. xvii. 5). The name is personal, not tribal; it appears as a personal name in Babylonia in the time of Apil-Sin (about 2320 B.C.; Meissner, "Beiträge zum Altbabylonischen Privatrecht," No. 111), and is not employed in the Old Testament in an ethnical sense (for example, it is not so employed in Micah, vii. 20, nor in Isa. xli. 8).
The unedited full-text of the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia.
2. Etymology: Until this latest discovery of the apparently full, historical form of the Babylonian equivalent, the best that could be done with the etymology was to make the first constituent "father of" (construct -i rather than suffix -i), and the second constituent "Ram," a proper name or an abbreviation of a name. (Yet observe above its use in Assyria for a woman; compare ABISHAG; ABIGAIL). Some were inclined rather to concede that the second element was a mystery, like the second element in the majority of names beginning with 'abh and 'ach, "father" and "brother." But the full cuneiform writing of the name, with the case-ending am, indicates that the noun "father" is in the accusative, governed by the verb which furnishes the second component, and that this verb therefore is probably ramu ( = Hebrew racham) "to love," etc; so that the name would mean something like "he loves the (his) father." (So Ungnad, also Ranke in Gressmann's art. "Sage und Geschichte in den Patriarchenerzahlungen," Zeitschrift fur alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (1910), 3.) Analogy proves that this is in the Babylonian fashion of the period, and that judging from the various writings of this and similar names, its pronunciation was not far from 'abh-ram.
3. Association: While the name is thus not "Hebrew" in origin, it made itself thoroughly at home among the Hebrews, and to their ears conveyed associations quite different from its etymological signification. "Popular etymology" here as so often doubtless led the Hebrew to hear in 'ab-ram, "exalted father," a designation consonant with the patriarch's national and religious significance. In the form 'ab-raham his ear caught the echo of some root (perhaps r-h-m; compare Arabic ruham, "multitude") still more suggestive of the patriarch's extensive progeny, the reason ("for") that accompanies the change of name Gen 17:5 being intended only as a verbal echo of the sense in the sound. This longer and commoner form is possibly a dialectical variation of the shorter form, a variation for which there are analogies in comparative Semitic grammar. It is, however, possible also that the two forms are different names, and that 'ab-raham is etymologically, and not merely by association of sound, "father of a multitude" (as above). (Another theory, based on South-Arabic orthography, in Hommel, Altisraelitische Ueberlieferung, 177.)
(from International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia)
Hottinger supposes the word to be derived from the Arabic root [Arabic] rahama, which signifies to be very numerous. Hence [Arabic] ab raham would signify a copious father or father of a multitude. This makes a very good sense, and agrees well with the context. Either this etymology or that which supposes the inserted hhe to be an abbreviation of the word hamon, multitude, is the most likely to be the true one. But this last would require the word to be written, when full, ab-ram-hamon.
Smegma Orientale, Johann Heinrich Hottinger, Adriani Wyngaerden, Heidelberg, 1658.
Not a single name with raham as an element in all the tens of thousands known Semitic names has been found. There is also no known West Semitic root raham. The reference to Arabic rahama "to sprinkle, to rain steadily, to be numerous," is too precarious to be considered.
Early Babylonian Letters from Larsa, Henry Frederick Lutz, Yale University Press, 1917
The term raham does not appear as such in Hebrew although it does in Arabic, leading some scholars to conclude that raham was an archaic Hebrew term, whose use was discontinued by the time the Genesis story was written down, thus necessitating the explanatory "the father of a multitude" for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the meaning of the raham portion of the name of Abraham. Some scholars, attempting to find a Hebrew etymology for the name appropriate to the biblical context, suggest that the ham of Abraham is an abbreviated form of the word hamon, meaning multitude, and that the name Abraham is actually Abir (chief)-ham or "chief of multitude." (Francis Brown, S.R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, eds., A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, p.4.) It has also been suggested that raham is nothing more than an embellishment on the word ram to further exalt the bearer of the name (Joshua Steinberg, Millon ha Tanahk, p.8.)
The Trials of Abraham: The Making of a National Patriarch, Martin Sicker, iUniverse, Lincoln, NE, 2004.

This ruminating about the origin of Abraham's name led to the following amusing remark, which I reproduce in full here:

https://www.abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Abraham.html#.UcyfEfm1E0J

Abraham
Abraham is the famous arch-father of all believers (Romans 4:11, Galatians 3:7). God cuts the covenant with Abraham of which Jesus is the fulfillment (Genesis 15, Galatians 3:7, 16, 29).

The Abarim Publications Editorial Team looked on dozens of web sites and countless hard-copies and all but a few merrily report that the name Abraham comes from the Hebrew words ab and hamon and means Father Of A Multitude. That these two words contain no R seems not to bother anyone.
The verbal explanation of Genesis 17:5 is hard to trace etymologically, as the new element  (rhm) does not exist in Hebrew. Perhaps God is suggesting that something unique is happening to Abram. There are some other words in Hebrew that are used only once, and are often highly significant.
The phrase "father (of) many nations" reads  (ab-hamon-goyim), and that doesn't sound like "Abraham" at all (as mentioned, no R).

Whatever the name Abraham may mean, it certainly is not a compound of ab and hamon and certainly does not mean Father Of A Multitude. The Jewish Encyclopedia merrily states that "The form 'Abraham' yields no sense in Hebrew," but that displays boldness of the other side of the spectrum. The change from Abram to Abraham is accompanied by the initiation of the covenant of which the Messiah is the final result. It's impossible to defend that God would link a sign of no sense to an event that profound.

The only change from Abram to Abraham is the addition of the letter heh after the rosh, and, much to our amazement, we see the verb  (brh ; means to cut a covenant!) emerge in the heart of the new name. But, though certainly pleasing to a poetic eye, this may be a long shot. And to shoot even longer: Perhaps the new name is now a compilation of the words  (abar), meaning to fly, from the root  (abr) that has to do with flying and the flight of birds, plus the word  (hem), which is the third person plural independent nominative pronoun, or simply "they": Fly They Will! It's not mentioned anywhere in the Bible, but since God has wings (God has no body and thus also no wings, but He does have an attribute that anthropomorphized results in wings; Psalm 36:7) man made in His image should have wings too, or at least when we're done growing.

The word from the "many nations" part mentioned above, and which is favored by many,  (hamon) denotes a multitude in the sense of a large, specifically noisy crowd. This word comes from the verb  (hama), cry aloud, make noise. If the segment  comes indeed from , it denotes massive noise much rather than simply a multitude.
BDB Theological Dictionary concludes a troublesome paragraph by quoting J. Halévy's Revenue des Études Juives, which states that  is in fact (abir c, abbir), meaning strong one, denoting strength or leadership in a man. And  comes from , but is never used anywhere in Scriptures. And it means multitude...(?)

If the name had been  it would have meant Chief Of A Multitude. But now that the name is  it means Flight 'n Noise, or Fly They Will, with at the heart of it the letter heh to claim Abraham as Hebrew arch father and forming the verb  (to cut a covenant) which states the reason for the name Abraham.

The Hebrew name Abraham may very well be the most extraordinary name ever constructed.

Additional note: Very few people realize that Shem, the son of Noah, outlived Abraham by 25 years. See for an explanation of this the name Shem. [As well as Noah . . .]