In the study of comparative religion, an Abrahamic religion is any of those religions deriving from a common ancient Semitic tradition and traced by their adherents to Abraham ("Father/Leader of many" Hebrew אַבְרָהָם Arabic ابراهيم), a patriarch whose life is narrated in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, and as a prophet in the Qur'an and also called a prophet in Genesis 20:7. This forms a large group of largely monotheistic religions, including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the Bahá'í Faith. Abrahamic religions are comprised of over half of the world's religious adherents. Many adherents of these religions, however, will reject this grouping of their faiths on the grounds that they contain inherently and fundamentally incompatible ideas concerning Abraham and concerning God.
According to the Jewish tradition, Abraham was the first post-flood person to reject idolatry through rational analysis (Shem and Eber carried on the Tradition from Noah), hence he symbolically appears as a fundamental figure for monotheistic religion. In that sense, Abrahamic religion could be simply called monotheistic religion, but not all monotheistic religions are Abrahamic. In Islam he is considered as the first monotheist in a world where monotheism was lost (Abraham being a phophet in a line of phophets starting with Adam) and is often referred to as Ibrahim al-Hanif or Abraham the Monotheist.
The term, desert monotheism, is sometimes used for a similar purpose of comparison in historical contexts, but not for modern faiths.
It should be noted however, that Amenhotep IV or Akhenaten, born in 1353 BCE, is the earliest verifiable historical advocate or prophet of monotheism. Today, around 3.7 billion people are followers of Abrahamic religions.
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