Birthplace of Abraham

It's hard to compete with Abraham for religious universality. He's the father of the faith for the great religions of the one God -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

According to the Bible, Abraham was a native of Ur who moved with his father to Haran. From there he went into Canaan with God's promise to create a great nation that would be a blessing to all peoples on Earth (Genesis 11:27-12:3).

The past year there has been renewed debate about a central question: Was Abraham's hometown of Ur a southern city near the Persian Gulf in present-day Iraq, or a mere crossroads up north in present-day Turkey?

In other words, was Abraham an urbanite from highly sophisticated Ur, or a small-town rustic?

There's a much bigger dispute about Abraham. Modern scholars often treat him as a Semitic King Arthur whose scriptural story is hopelessly encrusted with legend. Some say he never existed. But traditional Jews and Christians stick with the Bible's account.

Champions of Abraham as a real figure, and of the southern hometown, got a boost from British archaeologist Leonard Woolley, a colorful chap who hobnobbed with mystery writer Agatha Christie and led the 400-member team that excavated Ur from 1922 to 1934.

Woolley's exploits produced a 1936 best seller, 19 volumes of technical reports and a regular BBC radio show, not to mention knighthood.

Woolley's site was inhabited across 4,000 years. It had a fabulous three-story ziggurat (tower) that evoked the Tower of Babel, which was erected in the 11th chapter of Genesis before the advent of Abraham.

And the place was called Ur for sure. But other spots in the ancient Mideast had similar names (as regularly occurs today). Cyrus Gordon, a Jewish scholar who died recently, always maintained that Abraham's Ur was a town located up north near Haran. He defended that view last year in an interview in Biblical Archaeology Review.

First, Gordon argued, the southern Ur was nearly 1,000 miles from Haran, a huge trip in those days. Also, why would the family take a roundabout route from Ur way up to Haran to go into the Holy Land (see Genesis 11:31)?

Gordon also had a biblical objection. Woolley's site lies west of the Euphrates River, while Abraham's son Jacob needed to cross the river from Ur to enter the Holy Land (Genesis 31:21).

With those factors in mind, Gordon proposed two alternates, both in southern Turkey: Ura, a bit northeast of Haran; and Urfa, an hour's drive from Haran, where residents preserve a local tradition that this was Abraham's birthplace.

But Urfa's Abraham claim can't be traced back to biblical times and the modern form of the town's name doesn't go back even that far, notes Alan Millard of the University of Liverpool, England, in BAR's current issue.

Discussing the 1,000-mile trek, Millard says we have good evidence that traders and others routinely traveled such distances in Abraham's era.

The roundabout route, he continues, could be explained by the fact that both Ur and Haran were connected by devotion to the moon god. By traditional interpretation, Abraham left his father's house in Haran (Genesis 12:1) to forsake the family's paganism.

As for river-crossing, Millard says the course of the Euphrates in ancient times is not well-defined and the river has shifted throughout the ages. And, he proposes, Ur could have been ''beyond the river'' as a concept, not literal geography.

Some question whether Abraham would have become a wandering herder if he came from an important urban center. But people do change lifestyles, then as now.

Millard also stresses that the Bible specifies Abraham's birthplace as ''Ur of the Chaldeans'' (Genesis 11:28, 31). There's no evidence for ''Chaldeans'' before the ninth century B.C., and none for applying that designation to northern Mesopotamia until much later. Presumably later Bible editors inserted the phrase to specify that the text meant the southern Ur.

Millard concludes that ''there is no insurmountable objection'' to the southern Ur as Abraham's hometown, ''as the Bible describes it.''

Obviously, either Gordon or Millard must be wrong. But to Ur is human.

This article published in the Athens Banner-Herald on Saturday, June 2, 2001.