Connect

Ur, Abraham’s Hometown

Would you, at 75 years old, leave your home with a fireplace to live in tents on mountains for the rest of your life, enduring cold winters and wind? When God asked Abraham to do this, he obeyed. He took his family and left his homeland for a foreign place, never to return.

Abraham’s hometown was Ur, located in Mesopotamia. At that time, it was situated at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers where they flowed into the Persian Gulf. Today, the ruins of this ancient city are in inland Iraq. From archaeological excavations, we now know that Ur had a highly advanced and prosperous economy, far beyond what people had imagined.

Image: The route of Abraham from Ur to Canaan, a journey of about 1,900 kilometers.

In the 1900s, when skeptics, using Nietzsche’s theory, declared that “God is dead” and dismissed the Bible as mythology filled with errors, God was quietly at work. In 1923, a team of archaeologists led by Sir Charles Leonard Woolley began a long excavation on a sand dune in Iraq called Tell al-Muqayyar. By the spring of 1929, beneath the rolling sands, they uncovered five temples surrounding the towering ziggurat of King Ur-Nammu. The largest temple measured 100 x 60 yards (1 yard = 0.9 meters). These temples were dedicated to the moon god, Nin-Gal. Later excavations confirmed this was the biblical city of Ur (Genesis 11:31).

Image: The Ziggurat of Ur, a two-story brick building. The bricks of the lower level were bonded with bitumen, while the bricks of the upper level were bonded with mortar. This temple has been largely preserved and restored.
Image: The famous Ziggurat of Ur, built with fired bricks and bitumen. This was the tallest building in Ur, and it is easy to imagine the immense cost of this temple four thousand years ago.

The rediscovery of Ur and its immense scale astonished archaeologists. In Abraham’s time, Ur was a civilized, advanced city. Excavated artifacts, such as mathematical clay tablets, reveal that the inhabitants already knew and applied the Pythagorean theorem (that the sum of the squares of the two sides of a right triangle equals the square of the hypotenuse) in their architecture.

Image: An illustration of the city of Ur during the Third Dynasty of Ur. The earliest constructions in Ur date back to the Ubaid period around 5500 BCE. The city flourished again in the 27th century BCE, becoming a sacred site for the Sumerians who worshipped the moon god.
Image: The “Queen’s Lyre” from Ur, dating to 2600 BCE, is now at the British Museum. Musical instruments like flutes, harps, lyres, and zithers were already in use in ancient Egypt and Ur between 4000 and 3000 BCE. Wall paintings in ancient Middle Eastern tombs, temples, and palaces show that lyres and zithers were the most commonly used instruments.

Over 400 years before Abraham was born, Ur already had a very high level of material civilization and art. Yet God called him to leave all of it behind and travel to Canaan, which was then a wilderness. Abraham, by faith, left Ur of the Chaldees for a place he would later receive as an inheritance. He followed God’s call step by step, not based on what he could see, but solely on God’s word. Because of his faith, he received God’s promise: “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing” (Genesis 12:2).

Image: Jewelry and gold ornaments for women from Ur, dating to 2600 BCE, show that Ur was already quite prosperous over 400 years before Abraham’s birth.
Image: The sides of the “Standard of Ur” show that Ur’s productivity was quite advanced at the time.
Image: The “Lament for Ur,” now at the Louvre Museum. This is a Sumerian lamentation poem mourning the fall of the city of Ur to the Elamites in 2006 BCE and the end of the Third Dynasty of Ur. The Sumerians cried out to the god Enlil, “How long will we be in great distress?” and “How long will the enemy cast their eyes on all that is mine?” But the god they worshipped, Enlil, was not the true God, so he could never answer their question.
Image: The base of a statue of the god Ningirsu (also known as Ninurta) from Ur, dating to 2110 BCE, now at the Louvre Museum. The base of this statue reflects a custom of the time: the victor would place his foot on the heads of his enemies (Joshua 10:24; Psalm 110:1).

(Compiled and edited based on the Chinese Union Version and a comprehensive biblical interpretation.)

Chinese Church of Iowa City

About

Media

Resources

Chinese Church of Iowa City

About

Media

Resources

en_USEnglish
zh_CN简体中文 zh_TW繁體中文 en_USEnglish