section_path: Historicity and origins of the narrative/Amorite origin hypothesis
section_name: Amorite origin hypothesis
paragraph_text: Amorite origin hypothesis
  
  In 1915, Lewis Bayles Paton suggested that Abraham was an Amorite, based on his early name, which was identical with the Amorite name Abi-ramu. That name was found in a tablet of Apil-Sin, the fourth king of the First Dynasty of Babylon, which was Amorite-dominated. But ultimately, he concluded that Abraham was an Amorite-Aramean to explain away discrepancies within the biblical text. More recently, scholars like Daniel E. Fleming and Alice Mandell have argued that the biblical portrayal of the Patriarchs' lifestyle appears to reflect the Amorite culture of the 2nd millennium BCE as attested in texts from the ancient city-state of Mari, suggesting that the Genesis stories retain historical memories of the ancestral origins of some of the Israelites.