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Ur Kasdim
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Ur Kasdim or Ur of the Chaldees (???? ??????????) is the town in the Hebrew Bible and related literature where Abraham (origin. Abram Gen. 17.5) may have been born. The traditional site of Abraham's birth is in the vicinity of Edessa although Ur Kasdim has been popularly identified since 1927 by Sir Charles Woolley with the Sumerian city of Ur, in southern Mesopotamia, which was under the rule of the Chaldeans — although Josephus, Islamic tradition, and Jewish authorities like Maimonides all concur that Ur Kasdim was in Northern Mesopotamia — now southeastern Turkey (identified with Urkesh, Urartu, Urfa, and Kutha respectively).
sh sources say very little about the location of Ur Kasdim.
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Ur Kasdim or Ur of the Chaldees (???? ??????????) is the town in the Hebrew Bible and related literature where Abraham (origin. Abram Gen. 17.5) may have been born. The traditional site of Abraham's birth is in the vicinity of Edessa although Ur Kasdim has been popularly identified since 1927 by Sir Charles Woolley with the Sumerian city of Ur, in southern Mesopotamia, which was under the rule of the Chaldeans — although Josephus, Islamic tradition, and Jewish authorities like Maimonides all concur that Ur Kasdim was in Northern Mesopotamia — now southeastern Turkey (identified with Urkesh, Urartu, Urfa, and Kutha respectively).
Identification of Ur Kasdim
Jewish sources say very little about the location of Ur Kasdim. In Genesis 12:1, after Abraham and his father Terah have left Ur Kasdim for the city of Haran (spelled differently in the Hebrew text than the name of Abraham's brother) in Aram-Naharaim, God instructs him to leave his land, his moladet, and his father's house. The traditional Jewish understanding of the word moladet is "birthplace". (See for example the .) In Genesis 24:4-10, similarly, Abraham instructs his servant to bring a wife for Isaac from his land and moladet, and the servant departs for Aram Naharaim. The general Jewish understanding is thus that the birthplace lay in Aram Naharaim. This view was noted in particular by Nachmanides (Ramban). (See .) This understanding of the term moladet as "birthplace" is not universally agreed; most translations, from the Septuagint to modern English versions, typically render it as "kindred" or "family". However, a further reference in Genesis 24 to the area of Aram Naharaim as being the eretz moladet, i.e. "land of nativity" of Abraham from which a wife is to be found for Isaac, appears to corroborate the traditional Jewish understanding.
The Talmud (Yoma 10a) identifies the Biblical city of Erech with a place called "Urichus". (See .) T. G. Pinches in The Old Testament in the Light of the Historical Records and Legends of Assyria and Babylonia (see ) and A. T. Clay, writing in the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia article , understood this as an identification of Uruk (modern Warka) or Biblical Erech with Ur Kasdim. However no tradition exists equating Ur Kasdim with Urichus and the latter is understood by modern scholars as a reference to Uruk which is indeed identified with Erech.
The traditional site of Abraham's birth according to Islamic tradition is a cave in the vicinity of the ancient Seleucid city of Edessa. Edessa is now named Sanliurfa, and the cave lies near the centre of this modern city and is the site of a mosque called the Mosque of Abraham. The Turkish name Urfa for the city is derived from earlier Syriac ?????, Orhay and Greek , Orrha. The tradition connecting Ur Kasdim with the site is not exclusively Islamic, the 18th century anthropologist Richard Pococke noted in his Description of the East, that it was the universal opinion of the Jews that Urfa was Ur Kasdim.
Scholars are skeptical of the identification of Ur Kasdim with Urfa. Although the origin of the Greek and Syriac names of the city are uncertain, they appear to be based on a native form, Osroe, the name of a legendary founder, the Armenian form of the Persian name Khosrau (Chosroes). Similarity with "Ur" would thus be accidental.
Ammianus Marcellinus in his Rerum Gestarum Libri () mentions a castle named Ur which lay between Hatra and Nisibis. A. T. Clay understood this as an identification of Ur Kasdim although Marcellinus makes no explicit claim in this regard. In her Travels (), Egeria mentions Hur lying five stations from Nisibis on the way to Persia, apparently the same location, and she does identify it with Ur Kasdim. However, the castle in question was only founded during the time of the second Persian Empire.
Eusebius in his Preparation for the Gospel () preserves a fragment of the work Concerning the Jews by the first century BCE historian Alexander Polyhistor, which in turn quotes a passage in Concerning the Jews of Assyria by the second century BCE historian Eupolemus, which claimed that Abraham was born in the Babylonian city Camarina, which it notes was also called "Uria". (Such indirect quotations of Eupolemus via Polyhistor are referred to as Pseudo-Eupolemus.) This site is identified with the Sumerian city of Ur located at Tell el-Mukayyar, which in ancient texts was named Uriwa or Urima.
Ur was the sacred city of the moon god and the name "Camarina" is thought to be related to the Arabic word for moon qamar, although Camarina is in fact the name of an ancient city in Sicily. The identification with Ur Kasdim accords with the view that Abraham's ancestors may have been moon-worshippers, an idea based on the possibility that the name of Abraham's father Terah is related to the Hebrew root for moon (y-r-h). Jewish tradition relates however that Terah worshipped many gods and the argument along this line remains weak.
Ur lay on the boundary of the region called Kaldu (Chaldea, corresponding to Hebrew Kasdim) in the first millennium BCE and the site remains the most popular identification of Ur Kasdim amongst scholars.
See also
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