The "old Abraham full of years" to whom Shreve compares Sutpen is obviously the Old Testament patriarch (260). That figure is best known as the mythic father of the covenant between God and His chosen people, and as the human father whose faith was so great that he was willing to sacrifice his son Isaac in obedience to God's command. Shreve's "Abraham," however, seems entirely his own invention, who - in a quotation that sounds biblical but that Shreve makes up - "raised about me sons to bear the burden of mine iniquities and persecutions" (260).
The son Sutpen wants is only one of the two boys at the heart of his "design." The other is referred to as "the boy-symbol at the door," another poor white child like the boy he himself once was in Tidewater, an "amazed and desperate child" whom he will take inside the front door of his big mansion and so "rive forever free from brutehood just as his own (Sutpen's) children were" (210).
