I'm reading Paul Johnson's A History of the Jews, and one paragraph in particular that discusses the chronology at the time of Abraham is worded in a confusing manner.
It is likely that Abraham left Ur after the time of this king, and so carried within him to Canaan tales of the ziggurat to heaven as well as the much earlier Flood story. When did he make this voyage? Dating the patriarchs is not such a hopeless task as was once supposed. In Genesis, antediluvian datings are, of course, schematic rather than actual but genealogies are not to be despised, any more than the other sources as Manetho, an Egyptian priest who lived in Hellenistic times, c. 250 BC, enable us to date Egyptian history with reasonable confidence as far back as the First Dynasty, 3000, BC. Berossus, a Babylonian priest who corresponds roughly to Manetho, gives us a similar king-list for Mesopotamia, and archaeology has unearthed others. If we examine the lists of ante- and post-diluvian names in Genesis, we find two groups with ten names on each, though the datings vary as between the near-original Hebrew Massoretic text, the Greek Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch. These groupings are akin to lives of the Sumerian kings before the flood at Shuruppak. The earliest king-list gives only eight ante-diluvian kings, but Berossus has ten, fitting the Genesis pattern. The link between the two is perhaps Abraham, who brought the tradition with him.
Could someone clarify what all of this means?
EDIT: Corrected misspelling.
I am not a Biblical scholar so you may need someone more specialized to provide exact details, but I am a Near Eastern Historian so I can comment on the chronology more generally.
Paul Johnson wrote this in the late 1980s, at a time when the Biblical narrative was under heavy attack in the secular academy and Bible criticism enjoyed a new level of popularity. In the quoted passage, he appears to be reacting to that trend by saying that the early genealogies of kings should not be rejected as complete fantasy just because they're Biblical, that there are cross-cultural parallels which suggest there is some semblance of utility left in, at least, the relative arrangement of the kings' names.
The passage is challenging to understand without knowing the meaning of the writers and societies he mentions. You should find sufficient explanations for each with a quick Google search, and it would be worth your time if you want to understand why he argues that they are similar enough to be considered related, if not exactly parallel.
In short, I think the passage means something like this:
Dating Abraham is difficult, but the stories framing his narrative show parallels with Egyptian historiographic texts that can be dated more accurately than the early stories of the Bible. Given similarities between late Babylonian and Egyptian historians, it seems reasonable to infer that the early stories of the Bible have some, at least rough, connection to the dates outlined in these parallel traditions.
I suspect he goes on to guess at an approximate date for the life of Abraham, but it isn't included in the quoted passage.
He's saying that a lot of the early Bible was made up by Abraham, which contradicts the idea that Moses wrote them by divine inspiration or whatever.