Draw near unto me and I will draw near unto you;
seek me diligently and ye shall find me; ask, and ye shall receive;
knock, and it shall be opened unto you.
– Doctrine and Covenants 88:6
In the Beginning
The biblical story of Abraham begins in Ur of the Chaldees, where we are first introduced to Abraham only as an adult; not a word is spared for his formative years of youth and preparation. Not so in other ancient sources, which take us back to his boyhood and birth and even before, all the way back to the creation of the world, during which, as Genesis relates, God used the word “good” to describe the result of each successive creative period (Gen. 1:10, 12, 18, 21, 25).
With the creation of man, however, and with God’s blessing pronounced upon them, God saw that his creation was “very good” (Gen. 1:31). As to why it was now so, Genesis itself offers no explanation, but ancient rabbinic texts do: the Genesis passage “teaches that … the Holy One … brought out all the souls of the righteous – the souls of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” and their future descendants, “the souls of Israel,” all they who would keep God’s law. [1]
In this sense, the world was created “for the sake of Abraham” [2] and his wife Sarah, [3] which “is tantamount to saying that it was created for the sake of since they are the parents of the people of Israel.” [4] And more than a mere beneficiary, Abraham was actually a participant with God in the creation, according to the rabbis. [5] “God created the world with Abraham,'” says rabbinic tradition.[6]
What motivated God to undertake the grand enterprise? Tradition insists that he acted out of hesed, a Hebrew word whose meaning includes loving-kindness and mercy. The Psalmist declared that “the world is built on hesed,“ [7] while the medieval Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides taught that “all being is an act of divine hesed, for the universe has come into existence only by virtue of God’s abundant grace or loving-kindness.” [8] But another essential element of God’s hesed is his loyalty to the covenant, [9] which apparently was a factor even in the Creation, for tradition indicates it was then when God first made a covenant with Abraham. [10]
Such traditions bear conspicuous resemblance to Abraham’s own writings as restored in the Book of Abraham, in which the Patriarch reports being shown in vision a vast host of premortal spirits among whom “were many of the noble and great ones; and God saw these souls that they were good, and he stood in the midst of them, and he said: These I will make my rulers; for he stood among those that were spirits, and he saw that they were good; and he said unto me: Abraham, thou art one of them; thou wast chosen before thou wast born” (Abr. 3:22-23).
Abraham then beheld how he and the other noble spirits, called “gods” in the Book of Abraham, participated with the Lord in the creation for the benefit of the future righteous (Abr. 3:24-28; 4:1). Latter-day prophets have further explained that Abraham and others were not only appointed and foreordained to their early missions, [11] but trained and prepared to perform them (D&C 138:56).
That Genesis may well have originally contained such information was indicated by Joseph Smith, who said that the first word of Genesis, altered long ago, originally spoke of a council of the gods called forth by the head god before creation of the world. [12]
Likewise, the prominent biblical scholar Nahum Sarna has emphasized that Genesis as it has come down to us is unique among all other ancient Near Eastern creation dramas in its failure to mention a gathering of the gods before creation – indicating, says Sarna, that anciently an account of that gathering was had in ancient Israel also. [13] But in Genesis as we have it, Abraham is not mentioned until his due time in human history.
The beginning of that human history took place in the most ideal and idyllic setting, the beautiful Garden of Eden planted for Adam and Eve by God, who then actually walked and talked with them there (see Gen. 2-3). A wealth of ancient tradition adds that the garden was what would later be symbolically re-created on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount: Zion, a place of supreme holiness, beauty, and perfection, a venue where gods and human beings associate. [14] As one scholar explains, “The notion of Zion as the first of God’s creations, which is not explicit in the Bible, is reflected in rabbinic literature.” [15] Human history began, in a word, with Zion.
But Zion’s pristine glory was soon lost when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and were expelled, an event that turned out to be but the first in a series of escalating acts of mankind’s disobedience. As the story unfolds in those early chapters of Genesis, sometimes called primeval history, the errant human race seems bent on distancing itself ever further from its Creator. [16]
An apparent exception is the brief mention of Enoch, who walked with God and then was not, for God took him (Gen. 5:24), but there is no explanation in Genesis of what that cryptic passage might mean beyond some kind of unique fellowship between Enoch and God. Nor did Enoch’s experience turn the tide of further rebellions by the human race, with each new breach bringing its consequent punishment.
Fortunately, each time there followed a divine manifestation of mercy. Even after the Flood, God spoke again in mercy to man.
Pivotal Time, Pivotal Man
Ominously, however, the pattern is broken with the Tower of Babel, whose builders set out to “make a name for ourselves” (NRSV Gen. 11:4) in their rebellion against the Almighty. [17] Again there was punishment, but no word of divine mercy. As pointed out by German scholar Gerhard von Rad, it was a time of cosmic crisis.
The whole primeval history … seems to break off in shrill dissonance, and the question … arises … urgently: Is God’s relationship to the nations now finally broken; is God’s gracious forbearance now exhausted; has God rejected the nations in wrath forever? That is the burdensome question which no thoughtful reader of ch[apter] 11 can avoid; indeed, one can say that our narrator intended by means of his whole plan of primeval history to raise precisely this question and to pose it in all its severity. [18]
The implication is that the world again seems to be ripe for destruction, which is precisely what the Apostle Peter, according to an early Christian source, reported about the world of Abraham: “The whole world was again overspread with errors, and .
.. for the hideousness of its crimes destruction was ready for it, this time not by water, but fire, and … already the scourge was hanging over the whole earth.” [19] Never in the troubled history of mankind had there been greater darkness and depravity. It was a world as far from Zion as possible.
A more detailed description is given in the book of Jubilees, an ancient Jewish source, which speaks in terms reminiscent of several Book of Mormon passages recounting the wickedness of that people and the hold that Satan had on their hearts. [20]
Noah’s children began to fight one another, to take captive, and to kill one another; to shed human blood on the earth, to consume blood; to build fortified cities, walls, and towers; men to elevate themselves over peoples, to set up the first kingdoms; to go to war-people against people, nations against nations, city against city; and everyone to do evil, to acquire weapons, and to teach warfare to their sons. City began to capture city and to sell male and female slaves … They made molten images for themselves. Each one would worship the idol which he had made as his own molten image. They began to make statues, images, and unclean things; the spirits of the savage ones were helping and misleading them so that they would commit sins, impurities, and transgression. Prince Mastema [Satan] was exerting his power in effecting all these actions and, by means of the spirits, he was sending to those who were placed in his control the ability to commit every kind of error and sin and every kind of transgression; to corrupt, to destroy, and to shed blood on the earth. [21]
So expert did they become at fighting that, according to Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin, it was during this era that the art of warfare reached its “highest standard,” thanks in large measure to the chariot, one of the most important instruments on the field of battle and “assuredly a formidable and decisive instrument of warfare.” [22]
The image of the chariot struck terror into the hearts of people everywhere. “There was worldwide cruelty, inhospitality, insecurity, suspicion,” making for “a world of desperate wickedness.”[23] Who in that violent and cruel age could ever have guessed that generations earlier there had existed on this earth a society of perfect righteousness, peace, and love? It was Enoch’s city of Zion (see Moses 7:12-21), known to in the latter days thanks to the scriptures restored through Joseph Smith.
Those scriptures speak also of the light that had once visibly emanated from the city (see Moses 7:17), in contrast to the darkness that had settled over the planet by Abraham’s day, when, according to the Book of the Rolls, mankind “wandered in error and rebelled,” and “Satan certainly blinded their hearts and left them in darkness without light.” [24]
As with so much of Abraham’s life and times, the condition of his world looks both backward and forward – backward to the time of the Flood, when “Satan had a great chain in his hand, and it veiled the whole face of the earth with darkness; and he looked up and laughed, and his angels rejoiced” (Moses 7:26). And forward to the latter-days, when, as Enoch had foretold, “a veil of darkness shall cover the earth” (Moses 7:61).
As for Enoch himself, who had been known as a seer because of his visions (see Moses 6:36), he had been taken up with the rest of his righteous city (7:69), leaving behind a line of mortals with the patriarchal priesthood authority to establish Zion again on the earth (8:2). [25]
By Abraham’s day, however, that authority had apparently disappeared due to generations of apostasy. “They cast off the Kingdom of Heaven from themselves,” reports the Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer. [26] Even so, Zion had also left precious scriptural records prophesying that righteousness would again be established on the earth. Where these records were before Abraham came on the scene – whether they were hidden away in the earth or locked away in some treasury or perhaps even enshrined in some temple or palace as a now-unreadable relic of an earlier age – we do not know.
We do know of ancient prophecies about Abraham, which may well have been contained in those records, prophecies such as that found in a text called 1 Enoch. There the patriarch Enoch foretold-in a passage whose context unquestionably refers to Abraham [27] -that one of Enoch’s descendants “shall be chosen as a plant of righteous judgement; and his posterity shall come forth as a plant of eternal righteousness.” [28]
Enoch’s great-grandson Noah, according to a recently restored column of the Genesis Apocryphon, similarly saw in vision and recorded that from his posterity “will spring a righteous plant” that “will stand forever” – another prophecy whose context seems necessarily to refer to Abraham. [29]
And according to Pseudo Philo, on the day that Abraham’s great-great-grandmother gave birth to her son Serug, she foretold: “From this one there will be born in the fourth generation one who will set his dwelling on high and will be called perfect and blameless; and he will be the father of nations, and his covenant will not be broken, and his seed will be multiplied forever.” [30] Abraham was the hope of Zion, a Zion long since fled from the world.
Urof the Chaldees
Thus had the world become at the time when, in the words of John Taylor, “a singular kind of personage appeared on the stage of action, named Abraham.” [31] The particular stage on which he appeared – as attested in the Bible, Book of Abraham, and numerous ancient sources – was Ur of the Chaldees. Most Bible maps today locate the city of Ur in southern Mesopotamia, in present-day Iraq. After lying buried and in ruins for millennia, the city began to be excavated in the 1850s, the results convincing some that it was Abraham’s native city. [32]
But it was Sir Leonard Woolley’s celebrated excavations in the 1920s that stirred public imagination. Among the artifacts Woolley unearthed was a gold and lapis lazuli figure of a ram standing with its forefeet and head in the branches of a tree. Now on display in British Museum, the figure calls to mind Abraham’s ram in a thicket, and left no doubt in Woolley’s mind that he had found Abraham’s birthplace. His dispatches to London created widespread excitement, and when he later published a book describing his excavations – Ur of the Chaldees – it was full of references to Abraham, who later became the subject of another book by Woolley called Abraham: Recent Discoveries and Hebrew Origins.
Public opinion since has generally followed Woolley in his location of Abraham’s Ur.
In 1982, when the Cornell University Press published a revised and updated version of Woolley’s book on Ur, the reviser made a monumental alteration, which he explained in the preface: “Ur’s fame as the birthplace of Abraham has given it a special position in the literary legacy of Judaism and Islam. Contrary to the view consistently argued by Woolley, there is no actual proof that Tell el-Mukayyar, the Ur of this book, was identical with Ur of the Chaldees’ in Genesis 11:29-32.” Therefore, “it seemed best to write of the excavations of Ur at this time without mention of Abraham.” [33]
It was a wise decision, for as scholars of the Bible had long recognized, the great Ur of the south was not Ur of the Chaldees until long after Abraham’s day, making it an anachronism. So where was Abraham’s Ur? According to Genesis, when the aged Abraham sends his servant back to his “country and kindred” to find a wife for Isaac, it is to the city of Nahor, in northern Mesopotamia.
It was this region, insisted the assiduous biblical scholar Nachmanides in the thirteenth century, that was always the habitat of Abraham’s ancestors, and where he himself was born. [34] A similar conclusion is reached by the modern eminent biblical scholar Claus Westermann, who insists that “upper Mesopotamia in the region of Haran was the place of origin of the patriarchs. There is no trace of any connection with Ur in the south; there is only the name.” [35]
Not everyone agrees with Westermann – the issue of a northern versus the southern Ur continues to be disputed, as it has been recently in the pages of Biblical Archeology Review [36] – but a majority of scholars now favor a northern Ur, [37] and for compelling reasons. Abraham and his family follow customs from the area of northern Mesopotamia, which contains various places that in antiquity bore or contained the name “Ur” or a close variation. The name Nimrod also occurs as a place name in a number of locations in the region.
Latter-day Saints have an additional reason for locating Abraham’s Ur somewhere in northern Mesopotamia: as we will see, the Book of Abraham depicts heavy Egyptian influence there during Abraham’s day, making the southern location impossible: ancient Egypt never exercised control over the southern Ur, but it did in upper Palestine and in the region of Urfa.
Even without the Book of Abraham, however, a number of eminent biblical scholars assert that Abraham’s Ur of the Chaldees has to have been in northern Mesopotamia, and point to the most likely location as the modern Turkish city of Urfa (or Sanli-Urfa, “famous Urfa”). [38]
Urfa is not the only place in the northern region that claims the distinction of being Abraham’s birthplace, [39] but its claim is particularly compelling. Urfa was previously called Edessa, but before that was known as Erekh or Orhay, [40] both names appearing to contain the name Ur. Founded by Abraham’s nemesis Nimrod as the city where he ruled, [41] landmarks of the city memorialize both men: “the names of Nimrod and Abraham cling to this city and its environ to the present time.” [42]
Located in southeastern Turkey some twenty-five miles north of Haran, Urfa happens also to be in the region of other sites that have been identified as ancient cities bearing the names of several of Abraham’s immediate ancestors. [43] In Urfa is a cave that was thought to be Abraham’s birthplace long before the city of Urfa came under Islamic control. [44] It is now a Muslim shrine located just a stone’s throw away from where Abraham is said to have been saved by divine intervention when Nimrod tried to take his life. [45]
But as neatly as the evidence seems to point to Urfa, does it really matter where Abraham was born? In Gianni Granzotto’s masterful biography of Columbus, whose birthplace is claimed by various countries, the chapter analyzing the explorer’s native land is titled “The Irrelevant Country.”
Would history have been different, Granzotto asks, if Columbus had not been born in Genoa? After all, wherever Columbus’s birthplace, he left it early to pursue his dreams. “And dreams have no native country.” [46] So it is with Abraham’s Ur. Wherever it was, he would eventually leave it behind to go forth and “be a blessing” (Gen. 12:2) to the world. And blessings have no native country.
- See, for example, Levenson, Sinai and Zion, 128-37, including: “some in Israel saw in Zion the cosmic mountain which is also the primal paradise called the Garden of Eden. . . . The equation of the Temple Mount and paradise .
. . [has its] roots in the mythopoetic mind of the ancient Near East.” See also Callendar, Adam in Myth and History, 50-54, discussing relevant Israelite and Mesopotamian traditions; and Martha Himmelfarb, “The Temple and the Garden of Eden in Ezekiel, the Book of the Watchers, and the Wisdom of Ben Sira,” in Scott and Simpson-Housley, Sacred Places, 63-78.
- As the scholars state: “Abraham and his seed are to be chosen as the race through which God would bring truth and righteousness’ into the world.” Black, 1 Enoch, 290, translation on 86. “The sentence … describes the election of Abra(ha)m, the ancestor of the chosen people.” VanderKam, Enoch: A Man for All Generations, 68. “Abraham and his seed chosen as the race in and through which God would reveal his righteous judgments-the plant of righteous judgment.'” Charles, Book of Enoch, 272 n. 5. See also Charlesworth, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 1:74 n. 93j (noting that Ethiopian commentators also insisted that it referred to Abraham).
- See “Abraham’s Ur: Is the Pope Going to the Wrong Place?” Biblical Archeology Review 26.1 (January/February 2000): 16ff. “Abraham’s Ur: Did Woolley Excavate the Wrong Place?” Biblical Archeology Review 26.1 (January/February 2000): 20ff. Alan R. Millard, “Where Was Abraham’s Ur? The Case for the Babylonian City,” Biblical Archeology Review 27.3 (May/June 2001): 52ff.
