Haran

The site is Harran, on the Balikh, a tributary that runs south into the Euphrates, in Şanlıurfa province in southeastern Turkey, roughly 44 km southeast of Şanlıurfa itself. The coordinates carried on this page land on the ruin field. The Harran plain sits at the southern edge of the belt where rain-fed grain farming works, which is why a city could live there at all, and it sits on the road that ran from Assyria west toward Carchemish and the Mediterranean. The distances in the story are worth stating as approximations: roughly 600 miles from Ur to Harran by the river road, and roughly 400 miles from Harran to Shechem by the caravan roads. Genesis 31:23 gives the one hard number the text supplies, seven days of pursuit before Laban overtook Jacob in Gilead. The name is attested in the second millennium BC. Harran appears in Old Assyrian and Old Babylonian material, including the archive from Mari at Tell Hariri, which André Parrot began excavating in 1933, where a treaty is sworn in the temple of the moon god at Harran. The same body of texts names settlements in the Balikh valley whose names line up with the family names of Genesis 11, among them Nahur, Sarugi and Til-Turahi against Nahor, Serug and Terah. That evidence shows the names of Genesis 11 belong to the naming habits of that region in that period, which is a real fact about where the family story is set. It does not show that those towns were founded by or named for those men, and this page does not say it does. Harran held the temple of the moon god Sin called Ehulhul, one of the two great centers of the moon cult, the other being Ur. Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, rebuilt Ehulhul, and his own Harran inscriptions say the temple had last been rebuilt by Ashurbanipal. His mother Adad-guppi was a lifelong devotee of Sin at Harran, and her memorial inscription records a life of 104 years. Henri Pognon found one copy of that inscription at Harran and published it in 1907. A second and better preserved copy came to light in the 1950s, reused in the pavement steps of the Great Mosque at Harran, and C. J. Gadd published the Harran inscriptions of Nabonidus in Anatolian Studies 8 (1958). Where the temple stood is inferred rather than excavated to a verdict. The Great Mosque of Harran is widely held to stand on or beside the site of Ehulhul, and the recovery of Nabonidus-period stelae reused in its fabric is the main reason for holding it. The inference is reasonable and it is an inference. No excavation has laid bare a temple plan that can be labelled Ehulhul. Seton Lloyd and William Brice surveyed the site for the British Institute at Ankara in 1951 and published a site plan and work on the citadel in Anatolian Studies 1. David Storm Rice of the School of Oriental and African Studies worked four seasons between 1951 and 1959 on the Great Mosque and a citadel gateway, established the mosque's plan and ornament, and published his Harran studies through Anatolian Studies in the 1950s. Nurettin Yardımcı directed Turkish excavations from 1983 covering the mosque, the mound and the surrounding plain, and Turkish work at Harran Höyük has continued since. What no one contests is the shape of the place: an old and important city on the caravan road, a cult center of the moon god, an Assyrian provincial capital, destroyed and rebuilt more than once. After Nineveh fell in 612 BC, the rump Assyrian state under Ashur-uballit II held Harran. The Babylonian Chronicle records that Harran fell to the Babylonians and their allies in 610 BC, and that an Assyrian and Egyptian attempt to take it back the following year failed. That is the campaign 2 Kings 23:29 stands beside, when Pharaoh Neco marched up to help the king of Assyria at the Euphrates and Josiah went out to stop him and died at Megiddo. The chronicle text is BM 21901, published by C. J. Gadd in 1923 and edited by A. K. Grayson in Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles (1975). The taunt of 2 Kings 19:12, spoken about a century earlier, lists Haran among the cities whose gods did not save them, which fits a city long inside the Assyrian empire and punished when it moved against it. One body of evidence about the Haran chapters is genuinely contested. Tablets from Nuzi at Yorghan Tepe near Kirkuk, excavated for the American Schools of Oriental Research and Harvard by Edward Chiera and Robert Pfeiffer between 1925 and 1931, were read by Cyrus Gordon and by E. A. Speiser as parallels to the customs of Genesis 29 to 31: adoption of a son-in-law, service in place of a bride price, and household gods whose possession carried a claim on an estate, which would explain both why Rachel took the teraphim and why Laban chased her. Speiser put that reading into his Genesis volume in the Anchor Bible in 1964 and it spread widely. Thomas L. Thompson, in The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives (1974), and John Van Seters, in Abraham in History and Tradition (1975), argued that the parallels had been overstated and in places misread, and that the Nuzi texts do not establish a second millennium setting for the patriarchs. M. J. Selman answered in Essays on the Patriarchal Narratives (1980), conceding the over-reading, keeping the parallels that hold, and holding that the customs of Genesis are at home in the ancient near east. This page names the three positions with their books and their dates and stops there. The parallels are not proof, and the critique is not disproof. A word about the pictures and the map. The engravings on this page are Gustave Doré's, drawn from imagination in 1866 rather than from the site. This site holds no image of Laban searching the tents, none of the night flight, none of the covenant heap at Mizpah, and no photograph of the Harran mound or its minaret. No map in this site's atlas reaches upper Mesopotamia, so the place is given here by coordinates and prose rather than by a plate.