Terah

Terah appears at the end of the Genesis 11 genealogy as the father of Abram (Abraham), Nahor and Haran. He takes his family from Ur of the Chaldees toward Canaan but stops at Harran, where he dies at 205. Joshua 24:2 remembers that Terah and his ancestors served other gods beyond the river.

That single line grew into a well-known body of legend. A midrash tells how the young Abram, left in charge of his father's idol shop, smashed the idols. The Apocalypse of Abraham, a Jewish text from around the late 1st century CE preserved only in Old Church Slavonic, opens with Abraham realizing his father's idols are powerless; one falls and breaks, another burns, and in the end fire falls from heaven and consumes Terah's house. The Quran calls Abraham's idol-worshipping father Azar.

Terah is known from Genesis and the traditions built on it.