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Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, The Family of Abraham on the Road, 1650 to 1660. Public domain.

Genesis 11 and 15 · Place · Featured Study

Ur

Ur was a royal city of Sumer near the head of the Persian Gulf, and its ruins stand beside the old course of the Euphrates.

Today
Tell el-Muqayyar, near Nasiriyah
Region
Sumer, in southern Mesopotamia
Site
30.962, 46.104 (probable)
First named
Genesis 11:28 “During his father Terah’s lifetime, Haran died in…”
Last named
Nehemiah 9:7 “You are the LORD, the God who chose…”

The first step of Abram's faith was out of one of the great cities of its age.

Summary

Ur of the Chaldeans is the first city Genesis names in the story of Abram's family.

  • The LORD reminds Abram that He brought him out of Ur (Genesis 15:7), and Nehemiah 9:7 says the same.
  • Its patron was the moon god Nanna, called Sin in Akkadian.
  • Most scholars place Ur in the south of Mesopotamia, and some have looked for it in the north near Haran.

Ur of the Chaldeans

Genesis 11 names Ur in two verses of Terah's account.

During his father Terah’s lifetime, Haran died in his native land, in Ur of the Chaldeans.
Genesis 11:28BSB

Josephus adds that Haran's tomb was still shown at Ur in his day.

And Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai the wife of Abram, and they set out from Ur of the Chaldeans for the land of Canaan. But when they arrived in Haran, they settled there.
Genesis 11:31BSB

This is the departure Genesis 15:7 later credits to the LORD.

Strong's Hebrew dictionary glosses Ur as a place in Chaldea. The Encyclopaedia Judaica explains the phrase Ur of the Chaldeans by the Chaldean tribes who held the region from the eleventh century BC.

From Ur to Haran

Spruner's plate of 1865 runs from the head of the Gulf to the Armenian highlands.

Haran lies far up the Euphrates from Ur, and Canaan lies beyond the plate to the west.

4 numbered places joined by the route in the text's order: 1, Ur; 2, Babylon; 3, Haran; 4, Urfa, OpenBible score 53.
N

about 250 km (155 miles)

  • Located: the site is known
  • Proposed: the northern site put forward for Ur
  • The route, in the order the text gives
  1. 1Ur, The city the family left Genesis 11:31
  2. 2Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar II, king at Babylon, rebuilt the shrines of Ur
  3. 3Haran, Where the family settled and Terah died Genesis 11:31 to 32
  4. 4?Urfa, OpenBible score 53, The northern proposal for Ur

Base map: Albania, Iberia, Colchis, Armenia, Mesopotamia, Babylonia, Assyria, Karl von Spruner and Theodor Menke, Atlas Antiquus, plate XXVII (Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1865), public domain. Places with a place page stand at its coordinates and the others at the point cited for each, set on the plate by Haran and Babylon, as the plate prints them.

Four places; the line joins the two places of the departure, and the dotted ring carries OpenBible's identification score out of 1,000.

Ur Through Time

Kings, conquerors and the men who dug the tell.

Six moments in the life of the city, from its royal tombs to its excavators.

  1. The twenty-sixth and twenty-fifth centuries BCThe First Dynasty of Ur buries its kings and queens in the Royal Cemetery
  2. The twenty-second and twenty-first centuries BCThe Third Dynasty of Ur rules Sumer and Akkad
  3. About 1940 BCUr falls to the Elamites in the reign of Ibbi-Sin
  4. About 400 BCThe last dated business document found at Ur is written
  5. 1854J. E. Taylor identifies the tell from an inscription of Nabonidus
  6. 1922 to 1934Leonard Woolley digs twelve seasons for the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania

Six events in order.

The City of the Moon God

Ur's own god, and the gods Joshua remembers.

The great ziggurat at the centre of Ur housed the shrine of Nanna. Ur-Nammu built it on a base 64 m long and 45 m wide, and Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, restored it in the sixth century BC.

And Joshua said to all the people, “This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: ‘Long ago your fathers, including Terah the father of Abraham and Nahor, lived beyond the Euphrates and worshiped other gods.
Joshua 24:2BSB

Israel's covenant renewal at Shechem opens with this memory of the family's gods.

The Tell of Muqayyar

The size of the city in four periods, and what Woolley made of one layer.

Ur grew from about 15 hectares to 140, its largest in the Isin-Larsa period.

The four counts as a table
PeriodArea in hectares
Jemdet Nasr15
Early Dynastic90
Ur III108
Isin-Larsa140

The area the city covered in four periods, each drawn from zero.

Woolley's flood layerthe Encyclopaedia Judaica, the article Ur

Outside the wall of Ur, Woolley found a layer of red soil about 2.5 m deep with no remains in it, between the early settlement below and the later city above. He took it for the mark of a great flood and linked it to the flood stories of Sumer and Babylon, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica reports that other scholars have not accepted his reading.

What Genesis Leaves Unsaid

What Genesis does not record about the call and the family's years in Ur.

Genesis 12:1 gives God's word to Abram without saying where he was when it came. Genesis does not say how long the family lived in Ur, or what Terah did there.

And Stephen declared: “Brothers and fathers, listen to me! The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham while he was still in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran,
Acts 7:2BSB

Stephen answers the question Genesis leaves open.

The City with Foundations

Abraham left a city men built and looked for the one God builds.

By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, without knowing where he was going.
Hebrews 11:8BSB

Hebrews counts the departure itself as faith.

For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.
Hebrews 11:10BSB

The tents of Canaan pointed past every city of the earth, Ur among them.

The Voices

Three teachers on the city Abram left, from Jerome to Adam Clarke.

died 420 · Jerome

The fire of the Chaldeans

The reading1 paragraph

Jerome, in his Hebrew Questions on Genesis, reads Ur as the Hebrew word for fire. He records a Jewish legend that Abraham was thrown into the fire for refusing to worship it, and was freed by God's help.

1662 to 1714 · Matthew Henry

An idolatrous country

The reading1 paragraph

Matthew Henry notes that Haran died in Ur before the family left that idolatrous country, and draws the lesson to hasten out of our natural state before death surprises us in it.

1762 to 1832 · Adam Clarke

A city whose place was not known

The reading1 paragraph

Adam Clarke calls Ur a city of some consequence in Chaldea whose situation was not well known, two decades before Taylor read the inscription at the tell.

Where Was Ur?

Two answers, each with its holders and the strongest objection.

The southern Ur, at Tell el-MuqayyarJ. E. Taylor and Leonard Woolley

The Encyclopaedia Judaica holds the southern site and explains the move to Haran by the bond between the two centres of the moon cult.

The objection: a family bound for Canaan from the south would go far out of its way to reach Haran.

A northern Ur, near UrfaJamieson, Fausset and Brown and Cyrus H. Gordon

Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, in 1871, identified Ur with Orfa, the modern Urfa near Haran. Cyrus H. Gordon, in his article Abraham and the Merchants of Ura of 1958, tied Abraham to Ura, a town of the north. Spruner's atlas of 1865 prints Ur Casdim, with two question marks, west of the Tigris.

The objection: Genesis calls it Ur of the Chaldeans, and the Chaldeans held the south.

Books to Read Next

The first of these two can be read free online.

Antiquities of the Jews, Book 1, chapters 6 and 7
Flavius Josephus, translated by William Whiston · about AD 93

Josephus tells of Terah's family leaving Chaldea and of Abram coming into Canaan.

Read at Project Gutenberg

Ur of the Chaldees: A Record of Seven Years of Excavation
Leonard Woolley · 1929

Woolley tells the story of his first seven years of digging at Ur.

Out of Ur by Faith

Ur was a city of kings and of the moon god, and God called a family out of it with a promise. God has prepared a city for those who long for a better country, and Christ is the way into it. The call that brought Abram out of Ur asks the reader to follow God by faith.

Sources

Scripture is the Berean Standard Bible.

  1. Strong's Hebrew dictionary, h218.
  2. The Encyclopaedia Judaica, the article Ur (Gale, 2007), as the Jewish Virtual Library prints it.
  3. Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 1.6.5, translated by William Whiston, public domain.
  4. OpenBible.info, Bible Geocoding Data, ancient.jsonl, CC BY.
  5. Jerome, Hebrew Questions on Genesis, on Genesis 11:28.
  6. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, 1710, on Genesis 11:28.
  7. Adam Clarke, Commentary on the Bible, 1832, on Genesis 11:31.
  8. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible, 1871, on Genesis 11:28.
  9. Cyrus H. Gordon, Abraham and the Merchants of Ura, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 17 (1958), pages 28 to 31.
  10. Leonard Woolley, Ur of the Chaldees: A Record of Seven Years of Excavation (London, 1929), the library record.

Every cited work: the sources registry →

Keep Studying

The whole shelf: The Great Stories: Beginnings →