Paul, the Animal Apocalypse, and Abraham’s Gentile Seed Matthew Thiessen One of the most striking claims that the apostle Paul made—and he made quite a few—is that gentiles, as gentiles, were not merely included in God’s eschatological salvation in Christ but had also become sons and seed of Abraham. 1 To be sure, Jews frequently acknowledged that certain non- Jewish kinship groups were genealogically related to Abraham. Afer all, the ancestral narrative of Genesis explicitly links the Ammonites and Moabites to Lot, Abraham’s nephew. Further, Genesis connects various kinship groups to Ishmael, Abraham’s son through Hagar (Gen 25:12–18; compare with 1 Chr 1:28–31). 2 It also connects the Midianites and other kinship groups to the sons Abraham had through Keturah (Gen 25:1–6). Finally, it connects the Edomites to Esau, Abraham’s grandson (Gen 36). 1. Te former claim, as Paula Fredriksen and Terence Donaldson make clear, was fairly common among early Jews. Paula Fredriksen “Judaism, the Circumcision of Gentiles, and Apocalyptic Hope: Another Look at Galatians 1 and 2,” JTS 42 (1991): 532–64; Terence Donaldson, Judaism and the Gentiles: Jewish Patterns of Universalism (to 135 CE) (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007). 2. For a discussion of the identity of the peoples associated with these fgures, see Ralph W. Klein, 1 Chronicles: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), 72–73. Te LXX of Gen 25 has ostensibly the same list of persons but with two slight modifcations: frst, Dumah (דומה) is rendered as Ἰδουμα; second, Jetur (יטור) is rendered as Ἰετουρ, although see the slight variations in a number of LXX manuscripts in John William Wevers, Genesis, SVTG 1 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1974), 243. In Chronicles, the LXX translator renders יטורas Ἰεττουρ. It is possible, therefore, that the LXX translator of Genesis believed, on etymological grounds, that two of Ishmael’s sons were the fathers of the Idumaeans and the Ituraeans, something the LXX translator of 1 Chronicles also believed. -65-