177. The God of Abraham Praise

The Story Behind the Hymn

Thomas Olivers, already discussed elsewhere in this collection as the Welsh Methodist preacher who composed the tune 'Helmsley' for 'Lo, He Comes with Clouds Descending' (hymn 136), also personally wrote the text of this hymn in 1770, adapting it from the Yigdal, a Hebrew liturgical poem summarizing the thirteen principles of Jewish faith formulated by the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides, traditionally recited or sung in synagogue worship.

According to a widely repeated account, Olivers attended a Sabbath service at a London synagogue, where he heard a well-known Jewish cantor named Meyer Lyon (also known by the professional name Leoni) sing the traditional Yigdal melody, and was sufficiently moved by both the words and the tune that he asked Lyon to teach him the melody directly so that he could adapt it, together with a new English text closely following the Yigdal's own content, for Christian congregational use.

The resulting hymn represents an unusually direct and openly acknowledged act of borrowing from Jewish liturgical tradition into Christian hymnody, at a time when relatively little formal contact or exchange existed between English Christian and Jewish religious communities, and the tune retains its original Hebrew name, 'Leoni,' in tribute to the cantor who taught it to Olivers.

Olivers himself had a notably turbulent early life before his conversion — reportedly orphaned young and drawn into troublemaking as a youth before hearing George Whitefield preach — and he went on to work for a period as an itinerant Methodist preacher and, later, as an editor of John Wesley's own periodical, making this hymn, with its roots reaching directly back through a London synagogue cantor to medieval Jewish philosophy, one of the more unusual cross-cultural collaborations found anywhere in the history of English hymnody.