Ethnically, the Jewish nation came from the patriarch Abraham, whose native city was Ur of the Chaldees (prob. in modern-day Iraq, near the Persian Gulf). Abraham, called out by the Lord, spent his life wandering through the Middle East. He fathered many of the Arab nations through Ishmael, his son by Hagar (an Egyptian slave); and he fathered the Jewish nation through Isaac, his son by Sarah (his wife). Isaac’s son Jacob was later re-named Israel by God. He is the father of the Israeli people. They are also called Jewish after Jacob’s Son, Judah, who became the most prominent of the twelve tribes of Israel. But the great mystery of the Gospel, as Paul explains in the New Testament, is that all of us who believe in the promises of God, as Abraham believed, are adopted into his family, to become the true sons and heirs of Abraham, along with the Jews who still believe in the promised Christ, who came from the seed of Abraham and David some two thousand years ago.