Babylon by Paul Kriwaczek

Author:Paul Kriwaczek
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2010-08-09T04:00:00+00:00

In Genesis 11:31, ‘…Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son’s son, and Sarai his daughter in law, his son Abram’s wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there.’

Those who believe in the Hebrew Bible as history have long sought the background to the tale of Abraham and his family, their trek around the arc of the Fertile Crescent, from Ur of the Chaldees in Sumer to Haran in the north, and from there westward to the land of Cana’an, in the years following the collapse of Ur’s empire. Perhaps, they suggest, Terah took his family from Ur because of the Elamite onslaught and the consequent move of the moon cult from the conquered southern city to safer Haran in the north. Terah’s family have names that coincide with nearby places known to have flourished in this era: Serug, Terah’s grandfather, corresponds with Sarugi – Seruj today; Nahor, Terah’s father and also the name of his second son, with Nahur on the Habur River; Terah himself has been identified with Til Turahi on the Balikh River; his third son, Haran, matches the name of the city itself, some 50 kilometres south-east of today’s anl1urfa (formerly Edessa), in Turkey. Believers propose that the names of these towns record settlements founded by the figures mentioned in the Bible. Moreover, contemporary letters refer to Haran as the locus of a tribe known as Benjamites, meaning ‘sons of the south’.

Terah’s family were not Sumerian. They have long been identified with the very people, the Amurru or Amorites, whom Mesopotamian tradition blamed for Ur’s downfall. William Hallo, Professor of Assyriology at Yale University, confirms that ‘growing linguistic evidence based chiefly on the recorded personal names of persons identified as Amorites…shows that the new group spoke a variety of Semitic ancestral to later Hebrew, Aramaic, and Phoenician.’ What is more, as depicted in the Bible, the details of the patriarchs’ tribal organization, naming conventions, family structure, customs of inheritance and land tenure, genealogical schemes, and other vestiges of nomadic life ‘are too close to the more laconic evidence of the cuneiform records to be dismissed out of hand as late fabrications.’

The Hebrew patriarchs of which the Bible tells are very different from the utterly uncouth savages of the Sumerian texts, as they travel the steppe with their ‘flocks and herds and tents’. (Abraham’s camels are an anachronism; camels would not be domesticated for several centuries yet.) Their customs may have been different from those of the city folk, but no less respectable and honourable.

Amazingly, we may actually know what some of Abraham’s distant relatives looked like. The Amorites took over the town of Mari, on the banks of the Euphrates in today’s Syria, in ancient times the most distant outpost of Sumerian civilization and a place that was believed to have once, around the twenty-fifth century BCE, exercised hegemony over all Mesopotamia.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.