Genesis 11:31-32
They came unto Haran, and dwelt there
A journey to Canaan becomes a residence somewhere else. The text records the settling without comment and then records a death.
Places of the Bible
Haran
The waypoint that twice became a home, and twice had to be left again.
Haran is where Terah’s journey stops. The family sets out for Canaan and settles here instead, and Terah dies in it, so the first thing the place does is absorb a migration. Then Abram is called out of it at seventy-five, and Genesis 12 begins with an instruction that is mostly a list of things to leave: thy country, and thy kindred, and thy father’s house.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Haran
- 01
- 02
Genesis 12:1-5
Get thee out of thy country
The call is three departures deep and one destination wide: a land that I will show thee. Abram was seventy and five years old when he departed out of Haran.
- 03
Genesis 29:1-14
The stone upon the well’s mouth
Jacob arrives, moves a stone no one else was waiting to move, and meets Rachel at the well before he has spoken to anyone else in the town.
- 04
Genesis 29:25-30
Behold, it was Leah
The deceiver is deceived in the dark by a father with two daughters. Another seven years of service are agreed in the morning.
- 05
Genesis 31:1-21
Return unto the land of thy fathers
He leaves as his grandfather did, and takes twenty years of livestock with him. Haran hands the family back a generation larger.
Why it matters
Two generations later the family comes back. Rebekah is fetched from here for Isaac, and Jacob is sent here to escape his brother and to find a wife, and he stays twenty years. Everything that shapes Israel happens in Haran rather than in Canaan: four wives, eleven of the twelve sons, the flocks, the wages changed ten times, and the long argument with Laban that ends in a heap of stones and a border neither man will cross. The promise runs through a foreign town on the way to the land.
3 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
