Where Is Abraham's Ur? - The BAS Library
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Home > Magazines > BAR > June 1977

Where Is Abraham’s Ur?

By Cyrus H. Gordon

The notice in the December 1976 BAR (“The Promise of Ebla,” BAR 02:04) that a new Ebla tablet refers to “Ur in Haran,”a reopens the discussion of where Ur of the Chaldees, Abraham’s birthplace, was located. While we would welcome the full publication of the Ebla tablet, the Biblical evidence is by itself conclusive in placing Ur of the Chaldees in the Urfa-Haran region of south central Turkey, near the Syrian border, rather than in southern Mesopotamia where it is located on so many “Biblical” maps. Genesis 11:31 relates that “Terah took Abram … and they went out … […]

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Footnotes

1.

Another source reports that in the Ebla tablet “Ur is described as in the territory of Haran” (Wm. S. La Sor, Theology News and Notes, December 1976, p. 21).

2.

Seton Lloyd and William Brice, “Harran”, Anatolian Studies, Vol. I, 1951, pp. 77–111.

3.

In his Excavations At Ur, 1950, Woolley refers to his Ur as “the biblical home of Abraham” (page 128.)

4.

Le Palais Royal d’Ugarit, IV, Textes Accadiens des archives sud (Archives internationales) (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1956, pp. 103–5).