Ur Kasdim: Where Is Abraham’s Birthplace?

For a comprehensive overview of the evidence, see Steven W. Holloway, Aššur Is King! Aššur Is King!: Religion in the Exercise of Power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 388‒399. For a more concise survey, though without reference to the abundant Eblaite evidence, see William W. Hallo, “Haran,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Macmillan: 2007), vol. 8, pp. 343‒344.

Henry C. Rawlinson, “Biblical Geography,” The Athenaeum 1799 (April 19, 1862): 529‒531. Rawlinson explored the entire Near East during the Victorian period and is one of the key figures in the story of the decipherment of Mesopotamian cuneiform, used to write diverse languages such as Sumerian, Akkadian (Assyrian and Babylonian), Elamite, Hurrian, Urartian, Hittite, and more. An adapted form of this writing system was used to record Old Persian, which (since Persian is a known language) served as the key to the decipherment of the other languages.

Woolley was a great archaeologist during the 20th century, who excavated not only at Ur but also at Carchemish, where he was assisted by T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”).

For a survey of Woolley’s work, see Manuel Molina Martos, "The Royal Tombs of Ur Revealed Mesopotamia's Golden Splendor," National Geographic (May 22, 2019). At a later point, archaeologists working both at Ur and at nearby Nippur discovered the world’s oldest law code, that of Ur-Nammu, king of Sumer (r. 2047‒2030 B.C.E.), who ruled from Ur.

Woolley also pointed to something more specific, the so-called “Ram in the Thicket,” two identical gold-leaf wooden sculptures, housed today (one each) in the British Museum and at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, the co-sponsors of Woolley’s expedition and excavation. Woolley connected these objects to the “ram in the thicket” in Gen 22:13, in the story of the Aqedah (the binding of Isaac), which culminates the Abraham narratives in the book of Genesis. As more recent scholars have observed, however, there are manifold problems with this leap to a biblical connection, not the least of which is that the animals are not rams, but rather goats! Sheep do not get up on their hind legs and eat leaves from trees, but goats certainly do (in fact, they sometimes climb trees). Moreover, the horns are not caught in the thicket, but are perfectly free.

The question of how the śin in Hebrew kaśdim becomes an /l/ in English “Chaldeans” (via Greek Χαλδαῖος, etc.) is an interesting one unto itself. The answer lies in the quality of the ancient Hebrew (and more broadly Semitic) consonant śin, known as a lateral fricative (IPA [ɬ]), incorporating traits of both /l/ and /s/. Note the manner in which Hebrew בֹּשֶׂם bośɛm “spices” enters into English as “balsam” (via Greek βάλσαμον, etc.), with śin transcribed as /ls/. Semitic śin [ɬ] still may be heard in the modern South Arabian languages (Mehri, Jibbali, Soqotri, etc.).

This identification of the area as Chaldean in the Neo-Babylonian period fits with the view of those who date the book of Genesis to the exilic or post-exilic periods. These scholars read Abraham’s journey from Ur to Canaan as a piece of “(proto-)Zionist propaganda,” if you will: to serve as a model for the Jews in the Babylonian Exile (most of whom were settled in southern Mesopotamia/Chaldea) to return to the ancestral homeland following the decree of Cyrus the Great in 538 B.C.E. This view, however, is problematic both on linguistic grounds (the Torah is not written in Late Biblical Hebrew) and literary grounds, as it does nothing to alleviate the geographic problems that we will discuss in the next section.

See Hershel Shanks, “Abraham’s Ur—Is the Pope Going to the Wrong Place?” BAR 26:2 (March/April 2000), pp. 62‒63.

See also vv. 14–15

See Deut 11:24 for an explicit expansion of the word “the River” with the phrase “the River Euphrates.” For a long list of passages in which הַנָּהָר han-nahar “the River” refers specifically to the Euphrates, see David J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. 5 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 632.

Decades later, Gordon was my teacher at New York University in the 1970s, and thus his views on the matter became part of my teaching and research, as reflected in this essay.

Its official Turkish name is Şanlıurfa. During Greco-Roman-Byzantine times, the city was called Edessa, one of the great centers of Syriac Christianity.

For the most relevant study, see Cyrus H. Gordon, “Abraham and the Merchants of Ura,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 17 (1958), pp. 28‒31. See also Cyrus H. Gordon, “Where Is Abraham’s Ur?” Biblical Archaeology Review 3.2 (June 1977), pp. 20–21, 52.

George Bush is distantly related to the two scions of the presidential family bearing the same name. He taught at New York University (alma mater of the present writer) and advocated for the return of the Jews to the Holy Land. A fascinating character to be sure, whose story now has been told in lively fashion in, Shalom Goldman, God’s Sacred Tongue: Hebrew and the American Imagination (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 199‒207, 314‒15.

George Bush, Notes Critical and Practical on the Book of Genesis (New York: Gould, Newman & Saxton, 1839), 189.

Editor’s note: For a discussion of this passage and its reception, see Martin Lockshin, "Did an Aramean Try to Destroy our Father?" TheTorah (2015); Naomi Graetz, "Arami Oved Avi: The Demonization of Laban," TheTorah (2018).