Ur in Easton's Bible Dictionary
light, or the moon city, a city "of the Chaldees," the
birthplace of Haran (Gen. 11:28,31), 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. (See
ABRAHAM
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"
(Sayce).
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