Genesis 11:27-30
And Sarai was barren
The family is introduced with a death, a marriage and a closed womb. All three facts will be load bearing for the next fourteen chapters.
Places of the Bible
Ur of the Chaldeans
The city the story starts by leaving, described in six verses and never revisited.
Ur is given one paragraph. Terah takes Abram and Sarai and Lot and goes forth from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan, and they come to Haran and dwell there. Nothing is said about what the city looked like or why they left, and Terah dies before reaching the destination. Everything the Bible will spend the next fifty chapters on begins with a journey that stops halfway.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Ur of the Chaldeans
- 01
- 02
Genesis 11:31
They went forth to go into the land of Canaan
The destination is stated before the call is recorded, and the party stops short of it. Terah is the one leading at this point.
- 03
Genesis 11:32
Terah died in Haran
The first journey ends in the wrong city. Genesis 12 starts over with the same instruction given to a different man.
Why it matters
The place matters because of what is said about it later rather than what happens in it. Joshua tells the assembly at Shechem that their fathers dwelt on the other side of the flood in old time and served other gods. Stephen, defending himself in Jerusalem, says the God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Charran, which puts the call in Ur and not in Haran. The family left a city with temples in it, and the account is content to leave it unnamed.
The music
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
No song in the catalogue reaches these chapters yet.
