Terah

• father of Abraham

93:5.3For some time the Mel­chiz­e­dek re­ceivers had been ob­serv­ing the an­ces­tors of Abra­ham, and they con­fi­dently ex­pected off­spring in a cer­tain gen­er­a­tion who would be char­ac­ter­ized by in­tel­li­gence, ini­tia­tive, sagac­ity, and sin­cer­ity. The chil­dren of Terah, the fa­ther of Abra­ham, in ev­ery way met these ex­pec­ta­tions. It was this pos­si­bil­ity of con­tact with these ver­sa­tile chil­dren of Terah that had con­sid­er­able to do with the ap­pear­ance of Ma­chi­venta at Salem, rather than in Egypt, China, In­dia, or among the north­ern tribes.

93:5.4Terah and his whole fam­ily were half­hearted con­verts to the Salem re­li­gion, which had been preached in Chaldea; they learned of Mel­chiz­e­dek through the preach­ing of Ovid, a Phoeni­cian teacher who pro­claimed the Salem doc­trines in Ur. They left Ur in­tend­ing to go di­rectly through to Salem, but Na­hor, Abra­ham’s brother, not hav­ing seen Mel­chiz­e­dek, was luke­warm and per­suaded them to tarry at Ha­ran. And it was a long time af­ter they ar­rived in Pales­tine be­fore they were will­ing to de­stroy all of the house­hold gods they had brought with them; they were slow to give up the many gods of Mes­o­po­ta­mia for the one God of Salem.

93:5.5A few weeks af­ter the death of Abra­ham’s fa­ther, Terah, Mel­chiz­e­dek sent one of his stu­dents, Jaram the Hit­tite, to ex­tend this in­vi­ta­tion to both Abra­ham and Na­hor: “Come to Salem, where you shall hear our teach­ings of the truth of the eter­nal Cre­ator, and in the en­light­ened off­spring of you two broth­ers shall all the world be blessed.” Now Na­hor had not wholly ac­cepted the Mel­chiz­e­dek gospel; he re­mained be­hind and built up a strong city-state which bore his name; but Lot, Abra­ham’s nephew, de­cided to go with his un­cle to Salem.