Easton's Bible Dictionary
light, or the moon city, A city "of the Chaldees," the
birthplace of Haran ( Genesis
11:28 , 11:31
), the largest city of Shinar or northern Chaldea, and the principal commercial
centre of the country as well as the centre of political power. It stood near
the mouth of the Euphrates, on its western bank, and is represented by the mounds
(of bricks cemented by bitumen) of el-Mugheir, i.e., "the bitumined," or "the
town of bitumen," now 150 miles from the sea and some 6 miles from the Euphrates,
a little above the point where it receives the Shat el-Hie, an affluent from the
Tigris. It was formerly a maritime city, as the waters of the Persian Gulf reached
thus far inland. Ur was the port of Babylonia, whence trade was carried on with
the dwellers on the gulf, and with the distant countries of India, Ethiopia, and
Egypt. It was abandoned about B.C. 500, but long continued, like Erech, to be
a great sacred cemetery city, as is evident from the number of tombs found there.
The oldest king of Ur known to us is Ur-Ba'u (servant of the goddess Ba'u), as
Hommel reads the name, or Ur-Gur, as others read it. He lived some twenty-eight
hundred years B.C., and took part in building the famous temple of the moon-god
Sin in Ur itself. The illustration here given represents his cuneiform inscription,
written in the Sumerian language, and stamped upon every brick of the temple in
Ur. It reads: "Ur-Ba'u, king of Ur, who built the temple of the moon-god."
"Ur was consecrated to the worship of Sin, the Babylonian moon-god. It shared
this honour, however, with another city, and this city was Haran, or Harran. Harran
was in Mesopotamia, and took its name from the highroad which led through it from
the east to the west. The name is Babylonian, and bears witness to its having
been founded by a Babylonian king. The same witness is still more decisively borne
by the worship paid in it to the Babylonian moon-god and by its ancient temple
of Sin. Indeed, the temple of the moon-god at Harran was perhaps even more famous
in the Assyrian and Babylonian world than the temple of the moon-god at Ur.
"Between Ur and Harran there must, consequently, have been a close connection
in early times, the record of which has not yet been recovered. It may be that
Harran owed its foundation to a king of Ur; at any rate the two cities were bound
together by the worship of the same deity, the closest and most enduring bond
of union that existed in the ancient world. That Terah should have migrated from
Ur to Harran, therefore, ceases to be extraordinary. If he left Ur at all, it
was the most natural place to which to go. It was like passing from one court
of a temple into another.
"Such a remarkable coincidence between the Biblical narrative and the evidence
of archaeological research cannot be the result of chance. The narrative must
be historical; no writer of late date, even if he were a Babylonian, could have
invented a story so exactly in accordance with what we now know to have been the
truth. For a story of the kind to have been the invention of Palestinian tradition
is equally impossible. To the unprejudiced mind there is no escape from the conclusion
that the history of the migration of Terah from Ur to Harran is founded on fact"
Hitchcock's Dictionary of Bible Names
Smith's Bible Dictionary
was the land of Harans nativity, ( Genesis
11:28 ) the place from which Terah and Abraham started "to go into the land
of Canaan." ( Genesis
11:31 ) It is called in Genesis "Ur of the Chaldaeans," while in the Acts
St. Stephen places it, by implication, in Mesopotamia. ( Acts
7:4 ) These are all the indications which Scripture furnishes as to its locality.
It has been identified by the most ancient traditions with the city of Orfah in
the highlands of Mesopotamia, which unite the table-land of Armenia to the valley
of the Euphrates. In later ages it was called Edessa, and was celebrated as the
capital of Abgarus or Acbarus who was said to have received the letter and portrait
of our Saviour. "Two, physical features must have secured Orfah, from the earliest
times, as a nucleus for the civilization of those regions. One is a high-crested
crag, the natural fortifications of the crested citadel....The other is an abundant
spring, issuing in a pool of transparent clearness, and embosomed in a mass of
luxuriant verdure, which, amidst the dull brown desert all around, makes and must
always have made, this spot an oasis, a paradise, in the Chaldaean wilderness.
Round this sacred pool,the beautiful spring Callirrhoe, as it was called by the
Greek writers, gather the modern traditions of the patriarch." --Stanley, Jewish
Church, part i.p.7.
A second tradition, which appears in the Talmud, finds Ur in Warka, 120 miles
southeast from Babylon and four east of the Euphrates. It was the Orchoe of the
Greeks, and probably the Ereck of Holy Scripture. This place bears the name of
Huruk in the native inscriptions, and was in the countries known to the Jews as
the land of the Chaldaeans. But in opposition to the most ancient traditions,
many modern writers have fixed the site of Ur at a very different position, viz.
in the extreme south of Chaldaea, at Mugheir , not very far above-- and probably
in the time of Abraham actually upon--the head of the Persian Gulf. Among the
ruins which are now seen at the spot are the remains of one of the great temples,
of a model similar to that of Babel, dedicated to the moon, to whom the city was
sacred. (Porter and Rawlinson favor this last place.)
International Standard Bible Encyclopedia
ur ('ur, "flame"; Codex Vaticanus Sthur; Codex Sinaiticus
Father of Eliphal, one of David's "mighty men," in 1
Chronicles 11:35 ; in the parallel 2
Samuel 23:34 called "Ahasbai."
abraham, bible commentary, bible history, bible reference, bible study, chaldean city, define, edessa, orfah, ur