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We inadvertently printed an incorrect draft of this article in our January/February 2000 issue. The correct text follows:
Pope John Paul II is planning a millennium pilgrimage in 2000 that will take him to Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Sinai—and Iraq! Why Iraq? Because that is where the patriarch Abraham was born—at Ur.
But wait a minute. The Pope may be going to the wrong Ur. Perhaps he should be going to Turkey.
More than 40 years ago, Cyrus Gordon, the eminent Biblical scholar and Near Eastern polymath who recently celebrated his 91st birthday, argued that the commonly designated Ur, on the west bank of the Euphrates River in southern Iraq, is not the Ur where Abraham was born.1
I talked to the still-very-much-with-it scholar in a telephone interview at his Massachusetts home. Gordon told me that before the middle of the 19th century, everyone located Ur in the north, based on the only evidence then available, the Biblical text.2 With the decipherment of cuneiform, a southern Ur was identified in Iraq, an Ur that ultimately produced fabulous finds. As a result, scholars changed their focus to the southern Ur. As Claus Westermann has remarked, “After Leonard Woolley’s work at [southern] Ur, the idea that this great and ancient center of civilization must have been ‘Abraham’s homeland’ captured the imagination.”3 But in the Bible, “there is no trace of any connection with Ur in the south; there is only the name.”4
One thing seems clear: There was more than one Ur. Places named Ur, or something linguistically close enough to it to be a candidate for Abrahamic Ur (such as Ura), have turned up in numerous ancient inscriptions—at Ugarit (on the Mediterranean coast in modern Syria), at Nuzi (in northeastern Iraq), at Alalakh (in Turkey about a hundred miles north of Ugarit) and, most recently, in the extraordinary archive from Ebla (in northern Syria, east of Ugarit). The Ebla tablets include references to places called Ur, Ura and Urau. Unfortunately, none of these references can be located with precision,5 but the findspots of the tablets indicate the cities were most likely somewhere in central or northern Syria or southern Turkey—relatively near Haran.
And Haran is where Abram, as he was then called, went with his father, Terah, after they left Ur (Genesis 11:31). There is no dispute regarding the location of Haran, where Terah died (Genesis 11:28–32).6 The ancient name has stuck to the site.7 It is about 10 miles north of the Syrian border, in Turkey, strategically located on the east-west highway that links the Tigris River with the Mediterranean Sea. It was a major city in the Middle Bronze Age (first half of the second millennium B.C.E.), the probable date of the patriarchal age, if we accept the position that there was such an age, and such a person as Abraham.8
Unfortunately, except for a small sounding, Haran has never been excavated. A major expedition was planned by Harvard professor Lawrence Stager, but bureaucratic obstacles laid by the Turkish government blocked the way. That was when Stager (and his financial backer, Leon Levy) moved instead to Ashkelon, in Israel. (Ashkelon is now the most prominent American excavation in the Holy Land.) What we know about Haran, therefore, comes mostly from cuneiform archives such as the Nuzi tablets, which provide a vivid picture of life in Haran during the Middle Bronze Age.
Perhaps the major objection to identifying Biblical Ur with the southern Ur in Iraq is that it is so far away from Haran—nearly a thousand miles. As the author (Yoshitaka Kobayashi) of the entry on Haran in the Anchor Bible Dictionary notes, “The traditional site of Ur in S[outhern] Mesopotamia may be reexamined as some seek the location near Haran.”
Moreover, if Abram left for Canaan from the southern Ur, he certainly took an unnecessarily long route by going all the way north to Haran. As one scholar has remarked, “Haran is not normally on the way from Ur in southern Mesopotamia to Canaan.”9 As another has stated, “Any route from the Ur excavated by Sir C. Leonard Woolley to Canaan would not go so far north or east as Haran.”10 Traveling from Ur to Canaan, Abraham could have cut west long before reaching Haran—at Mari, for example.
Gordon points to another objection: The southern Ur lies on the west bank of the Euphrates. Here’s why that matters: When Abraham was an old man, he sent his servant back to “the land of my birth”—Ur—to find a wife for his son Isaac (Genesis 24:4). Abraham’s obedient servant went back to the land of Abraham’s birth and there found Rebekah, Laban’s sister. (Actually, Laban is the first person to greet Abraham’s servant.) A generation later, Isaac’s son Jacob went back, presumably to Ur, to work for Laban. After working for Laban for 20 years, Jacob fled back to Canaan. To do so, however, he had to cross the Euphrates (Genesis 31:21). If Ur was on the west bank of the Euphrates, as the southern Ur is, it would not be necessary to cross the Euphrates to travel to Canaan. Ergo, the southern Ur cannot be the place that Abraham sent his servant.11
In addition, we are told that Laban lived in Paddan-Aram, in the Haran region (Genesis 28:2, 5, 6, 7). Scholars equate this with Aram-Naharaim, Abraham’s ancestral home (Genesis 24:10). Both terms refer, although somewhat vaguely, to areas in upper (northern) Mesopotamia, as indicated in other Biblical references.12
What turned scholars’ attention to southern Ur as the place of Abraham’s birth were the remarkable excavations at the site. It was identified as Ur shortly after Henry Rawlinson deciphered cuneiform. In 1854, an Englishman named J. E. Taylor dug up at the site some foundation deposits containing clay cylinders with cuneiform writing all over them. When they were deciphered, they identified the site as Ur.
In 1922, Sir Leonard Woolley began a major excavation of the site that continued until 1934. He made a number of spectacular discoveries, including the so-called royal tombs, rich with grave goods in gold, silver and lapis lazuli. He also came upon a mud layer that he linked with Noah’s Flood. Woolley was a prolific popular writer with a flair for publicity, which might account for the fact that he referred to his Ur as “the biblical home of Abraham” and to his finds as “worthy of Abraham.” If his purpose was to connect the site to the Biblical patriarch, he was successful.
The southern Ur reached its zenith in what is called the Ur III period, about 2100–2000 B.C.E. In the two subsequent centuries it was a major port. The city expanded to 125 063acres. As to whether this was Abrahamic Ur, the author (Jean-Claude Margueron) of the entry on Ur in the Anchor Bible Dictionary notes “a certain contradiction in the closeness suggested by the Genesis text between a prodigious urban capital and a nomad clan.”
The defenders of the southern Ur do so largely on the basis of their view as to what Ur the Biblical author had in mind (the Biblical author calls it “Ur of the Chaldees”), rather than the place where Abraham was born. This, for example, is the view of Harvard professor Peter Machinist, whom I talked to after reading his entry on Ur in the HarperCollins Bible Dictionary. There Professor Machinist states that Gordon’s suggestion of a northern Ur has been “largely rejected today in favor of the southern Ur.” But as Machinist and I discussed the matter, he said that he was rethinking this statement and the whole issue. In his entry on Ur, Machinist said, he had not adequately distinguished between two kinds of questions: What Ur did the Biblical author or authors have in mind when they referred to “Ur of the Chaldees”; and where in actual fact was Abraham’s original home, assuming of course that there was a historical Abraham? Machinist called the first question a historiographic issue; the second, a historical issue.
On the historiographical issue, Machinist explained that he, like most critical Biblical scholars, would characterize Genesis 11:27–32 as composed of two authorial strands: P or the Priestly source (perhaps Genesis 11:27a, 32), which frames the passage; and J or the Yahwist strand (perhaps Genesis 11:27b–31), which forms the core of the passage.13 Whether the reference to “Ur of the Chaldees” in verses 28 and 31 belongs to P or J or both is a matter of debate, but both would put the composition solidly in the first millennium B.C.E. and, if P, then likely in the sixth century B.C.E. This fits nicely with the reference to Ur as “of the Chaldees” or Chaldeans, who founded the Neo-Babylonian empire in Mesopotamia in this period (626–539 B.C.E.) and rebuilt Ur—the southern Ur—to fabulous heights after a millennium of decline.14 Thus Machinist remains convinced that Ur of the Chaldees was, for the Biblical writer, the southern Ur. At the very least, he says, the burden of proof is on those who would argue otherwise.
But what of the Ur of the historical Abraham? Where did he come from, assuming that there was such a historical figure? On this level, Machinist states that he is not prepared to make a judgment. But he does say that he would now revise the statement in his HarperCollins Bible Dictionary article that Gordon’s position is “largely rejected” today. Indeed, Claus Westermann has come to the opposite conclusion: “Many [scholars] took over Gordon’s thesis … The majority … incline to a northern Mesopotamian origin.”15 I have already quoted passages from the Anchor Bible Dictionary entries on Ur and Haran in which the authors express hesitations in identifying Abraham’s Ur as the southern Ur. Machinist recognizes that today more people than he supposed would “hesitate or even reject” identifying the historical Ur of Abraham with the Ur of southern Mesopotamia.
Gordon points out that the southern Ur is never referred to in ancient inscriptions as “Ur of the Kasdim [in English, Chaldeans].” Moreover, the Kasdim (Kalduin Akkadian) never appear in any historical record before the early ninth century B.C.E., hundreds of years after Abraham’s time, so this reference could not be a part of the original tradition, assuming there was a historical Abraham. In short, the reference to Kasdim is clearly anachronistic as applied to the patriarchal period, the first half of the second millennium B.C.E. As Roland de Vaux has stated, “The [southern] Ur could not have been called Ur of the Chaldaeans at that time [first centuries of the second millennium B.C.].”16
Gordon mentions two possibilities for the location of Abraham’s Ur, both in southern Turkey near the Syrian border. One is Ura, northeast of Haran. Another is Urfa, about an hour’s drive from Haran. Urfa, called Orhai in Syriac Christian literature, may be related to Ur.17 Even today, local tradition in Urfa insists that this is where Abraham was born. The chief mosque in Urfa is (or was) named the Mosque of Abraham and the pool with the sacred fish is called “The Lake of Abraham the Beloved.”18
Another possibility is that Ur, as used in the Bible, refers not to a city, but to a region. In Genesis 11:28 we are told that Abram’s brother died “in the land of his birth, Ur of the Chaldees.” The text says that Ur is the land of his birth, rather than the city of his birth.19 Moreover, in the early Greek translation of the Bible known as the Septuagint, instead of “Ur of the Chaldees,” Genesis 11:28 says, “the land of the Chaldees.” If we retroject the Greek word for “land” into Hebrew, we get Eretz (as in Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel). In early consonantal Hebrew, Ur and Eretzbegin with the same two letters (aleph, resh); the two words differ only in that Eretz has a third letter, a tsade. It is therefore possible that the Septuagint preserves the original tradition; the tsade somehow fell out in the Hebrew text that has come down to us. The Bible thus refers not to a city but to a country. And at the time this passage was composed, the Chaldeans dominated the north as well as the south.
Still another possibility, of course, is that the reference to Ur is without any historical basis. For Westermann, “Ur of the Chaldees represents the pagan world from which Terah departed for Canaan. The name is not meant primarily to convey geographical information, but to indicate the old capital of the pagan Empire.”20 He calls the journey from Ur to Canaan a “secondary itinerary,” as demonstrated by “the tremendous distances, the fact that Haran is not normally on the way from Ur in southern Mesopotamia to Canaan, and that the starting point is a city and the destination a country. It is certain that this itinerary did not arise immediately out of or after a journey described here. It is a later construction that originated a very long time after the event it intends to describe.”21 J. Alberto Soggin suggests that the itinerary from Ur to Haran to Canaan represents not Abraham’s route, but the route of the exiles who returned from Babylonia in the sixth century B.C.E.22
We will probably never know for sure which Ur is Abraham’s Ur, where it all began in response to God’s call to “go forth … to the land that I will show you” (Genesis 12:1). But there is at least a serious question as to whether the Pope will be going to the right place if he is looking for Abraham’s birthplace in Iraq.23
