Ishmael (Moby-Dick) Biblical in origin: in Genesis 16:1-16; 17:18-25; 21:6-21; 25:9-17, Ishmael was the son of Abraham by the servant Hagar. In 16:11-12, the most significant verses for Melville's allegory, Hagar was cast off after the birth of Isaac, who inherited the covenant of the Lord instead of his older half-brother. Melville shapes his allegory to the Biblical Ishmael as follows: And so the name points to a Biblical analogy that marks Ishmael as the prototype of "wanderer and outcast," the man set at odds with his fellows. Wright says that all Melville's heroes—with the exception of Benito Cereno and Billy Budd—are
Ben-Ishmael Tribe lineage through Ishmael, son of Abraham, via Muhammad. Leaming’s reinvention of the Ishmael story as a diverse, crypto-Muslim tribe, bridging the gap of "African and American Islam," and comprising a "lost-found nation in the wilderness of North America," was discredited by Nathaniel Deutsch in the book "Inventing America’s Worst Family: Eugenics, Islam and the Fall and Rise of the Tribe of Ishmael". Deutsch concluded that although much of the fascination with the Tribe of Ishmael has roots in American interest in Islam and the Orient, there is no reason to believe the Ishmael family was anything but a poor Christian