Judaism
Judaism's beginning starts strangely enough without Jews. The Bible records twenty generations of humanity before the appearance of the First Jew, Abraham. His personality would act as a paradigm for his descendants who would eventually become the Jewish people. He was a religious revolutionary who refined his spirituality to such a degree that God spoke to him, in other words, he became a Prophet (although his wife Sarah became a greater Prophet) He was an iconoclast who openly challenged the universal beliefs of his time and insisted that there was only one God. He was stubbornly willing to give up his own life rather than compromise his beliefs (Murray, 51).
The people that would evolve from Abraham would have to manifest all of those qualities in order to perform the role that God had set for them. In fact the only time the Torah defines the nature of the Jewish people it is to identify them as a "Stiff necked" or stubborn. Still, if God required a people to carry a message through Crusade, Inquisition, Pogrom, and Holocaust, "stubbornness" would be the essential character trait.
Abraham is quick to implement the humanitarian role that God has ordained for him. His plea for the innocent people of Sodom, a scene we might have expected to find in the prophetic literature hundreds of years later, is a superb example of universalism at the starting point of Judaism's development. Abraham's concern extends far beyond the narrow responsibility of his own family. In this dramatic confrontation with God, he argues for people with whom he has no connection other than that they are fellow human beings, and he pleads that if good people could be found among them, they must be saved. (Genesis 18:22-32) As Rabbi Gunther Plaut writes, Abraham's "horizon is not....
