mark9950

A response from a minister about the city of UR.

Notice that he said many religions came from the city of UR.

Now the question I do not believe can be answered is how do we know for a fact without doubt that the God of the bible is THE GOD not just a god?Abraham was probably influenced by religions of many gods.How do we know for a fact that abraham even worshipped a God that really exists and not just a god.


My question to him:

You wrote:

Where is the city of UR where abraham the patiarch walked? Well if you did not know UR is in IRAQ close to KUWAIT. But kuwait and iraq are muslim countries,how did that happen that iraq and kuwait are muslim and abraham the patriarch wasn't or was he a muslim(muslims believe that he was a muslim)? One may conclude that we really do not know if paganism cam from truth or what we consider truth came from paganism.Do We? Which came first truth or paganism?


His response:

Dear Mark,

Thanks for the e-mail and sorry for the delay in getting back.

Regarding the city of UR:

UR

Abraham's native city in southern Mesopotamia; an important metropolis of the ancient world situated on the Euphrates River. Strategically situated about halfway between the head of the Persian Gulf and Baghdad, in present-day Iraq, Ur was the capital of Sumer for two centuries until the Elamites captured the city. The city came to be known as "Ur of the Chaldees" after the Chaldeans entered southern Babylonia after 1000 B.C.

Abraham lived in the city of Ur (Gen 11:28,31) at the height of its splendor. The city was a prosperous center of religion and industry. Thousands of recovered clay documents attest to thriving business activity. Excavations of the royal cemetery, from about 2900 to 2500 B.C., have revealed a surprisingly advanced culture, particularly in the arts and crafts. Uncovered were beautiful jewelry and art treasures, including headwear, personal jewelry, and exquisite china and crystal.

The Babylonians worshiped many gods, but the moon god Sin was supreme. Accordingly, the city of Ur was a kind of theocracy centered in the moon deity. Ur-Nammu, the founder of the strong Third Dynasty of Ur (around 2070-1960 B.C.), built the famous ZIGGURATS, a system of terraced platforms on which temples were erected. The Tower of BABEL (Gen 11:3-4) was a seven-story ziggurat made of brick. It is a miracle of God's providence that Abraham resisted Ur's polluted atmosphere and set out on a journey of faith to Canaan that would bless all mankind.

Ur's glory was suddenly destroyed about 1900 B.C. Foreigners stormed down from the surrounding hills and captured the reigning king, reducing the city to ruins. So complete was the destruction that the city was buried in oblivion until it was excavated centuries later by archaeologists.
(from Nelson's Illustrated Bible Dictionary)

UR OF THE CHALDEES. Abraham's native city customarily is located in southern Babylonia, not very far from the ancient city of Uruk to the NE and about 150 miles from the head of the Persian Gulf. Eridu is to the SW. Modern excavation of the site of Ur began in 1854 with J. E. Taylor. The city was then only a ruined site named the Mound of Bitumen (Arab. al muqayyar). In 1918 H. R. Hall resumed excavations. Sir Leonard Woolley conducted excavations from 1922 to 1934. The famous royal cemeteries, dating c. 2500 B.C., yielded jewelry and art treasures of unbelievable beauty, particularly gorgeous head attire, personal jewels, and a golden tumbler and cup of Queen Puabi (formerly rendered Shubad). Several musical instruments and other beautifully crafted objects demonstrate that this city had achieved a high level of civilization 500 years before Abraham. The Heb. Bible is quite clear in its statements that Abraham's home was originally in Lower Mesopotamia in the city of Ur and that he emigrated to Haran and Upper Mesopotamia on his way to Canaan (Gen 11:28-31; 12:1-4; 15:7; Neh 9:7). Interestingly enough, Ur in connection with Abraham is referred to as "Ur of the Chaldeans." The qualifying phrase "of the Chaldeans" is not an anachronism, as many critics contend (cf. Jack Finegan, Light from the Ancient East, p. 57, n. 28). It is rather an instance of numerous archaic place names being defined by a later scribal gloss to make clear to a subsequent age where and what these places were when their history and locality had been forgotten. The Chaldeans came into southern Babylonia after 1000 B.C. It was, of course, quite natural for the Hebrew scribe to define the then incomprehensible foreign name by a term intelligible to his own day. As a result of archaeological excavation, the city of Ur is now one of the best-known sites of southern Babylonia. Woolley in his Abraham: Recent Discoveries and Hebrew Origins (1936), pp. 72-117, gives a description of the worship of the city god of Ur, the moon god Nannar and his consort Ningal. Woolley describes in minute detail the sacred temenos of the city in which were the famous ziggurat and the various buildings erected to the moon god and his consort, with a description of the moon god ritual. It is now possible to have a far clearer idea of Abraham's surroundings when "the God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran" (Acts 7:2). Archaeology has revealed that in Abraham's day Ur was a great and prosperous city, with perhaps 360,000 people living in the city and its suburbs. The biblical chronology as preserved in the MT would place the life of Abraham, at least in part, under the new Sumero-Akkadian Empire of Ur-Nammu, the founder of the strong Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2070-1960 B.C.).

It should be noted, however, that other scholarship points to a northern location for the Ur from which Abraham came. Mesopotamian literature mentions this "northern Ur," as attested in the archival materials at Alalakh, Ugarit, Hattusha, and Ebla, although its precise location is unknown. (See ABRAHAM.) Third Dynasty kings took the new title "king of Sumer and Akkad." The greatest work of Ur-Nammu was the erection of the great ziggurat at Ur, upon which Abraham gazed, as did Joseph upon the pyramids in Egypt. Happily, the ziggurat at Ur is the best-preserved type of this characteristic architectural feature of early Babylonia. The resurrection of Ur offers a fine example of archaeology's increasing ability to illustrate ancient biblical history.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: C. L. Woolley, Excavations at Ur (1954); M. E. L. Mallowan and D. J. Wiseman, Ur in Retrospect (1960); C. J. Gadd, Archaeology and Old Testament Study (1967), pp. 87-101; C. L. Woolley, Ur 'of the Chaldees,' rev. P. R. S. Moorey (1982).
(From The New Unger's Bible Dictionary)

Regarding the Muslim faith:

You realize, don't you, that the muslim faith was established AFTER Christ walked the earth and thousands of years before Abraham. Abraham has NO concept of the muslim faith as it was not invented yet. It would be like stating that the ancient Indians were all Christian for they came from the land where Washington and Adams and Jefferson were as Christians.

To answer your other question about paganism: Clearly TRUTH came first because God was with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden giving them the truth. Paganism came later, AFTER Adam and Eve sinned. Ever hear of Nimrod?

NIMROD
Cush's son or descendant, Ham's grandson (Gen 10:8). "Nimrod began to be a mighty one in the earth," i.e. he was the first of Noah's descendants who became renowned for bold and daring deeds, the Septuagint "giant" (compare Gen 6:4,13; Isa 13:3). "He was a mighty hunter before Jehovah," so that it passed into a proverb or the refrain of ballads in describing hunters and warriors, "even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before Jehovah." Not a mere Hebrew superlative, but as in Gen 27:7 "bless thee before Jehovah," i.e. as in His presence, Ps 56:13 "walk before God." Septuagint translated "against Jehovah"; so in Num 16:2 lipneey (OT:6440), "before," means opposition. The Hebrew name Nimrod means "let us rebel," given by his contemporaries to Nimrod as one who ever had in his mouth such words to stir up his band to rebellion. Nimrod subverted the existing patriarchal order of society by setting up a chieftainship based on personal valor and maintained by aggression.

The chase is an image of war and a training for it. The increase of ferocious beasts after the flood and Nimrod's success in destroying them soon gathered a band to him. From being a hunter of beasts he became a hunter of men. "In defiance of Jehovah," as virtually" before Jehovah" (Prov 15:11) means, Nimrod, a Hamite intruded into Shem's portion, violently set up an empire of conquest, beginning with Babel, ever after the symbol of the world power in its hostility to God. From that land he went forth to Asshur and builded Nineveh. The later Babylonians spoke Semitic, but the oldest inscriptions are Turanian or Cushite. Tradition points to Babylon's Cushite origin by making Belus son of Poseidon (the sea) and Libya (Ethiopia): Diodorus Siculus i. 28. Oannes the fish god, Babylon's civilizer, rose out of the Red Sea (Syncellus, Chronog. 28). "Cush" appears in the Babylonian names Cissia, Cuthah, Chuzistan (Susiana). Babylon's earliest alphabet in oldest inscriptions resembles that of Egypt and Ethiopia; common words occur, as Mirikh, the Meroe of Ethiopia, the Mars of Babylon. Though Arabic is Semitic, the Mahras' language in southern Arabia is non-Semitic, and is the modern representative of the ancient Himyaric whose empire dates as far back as 1750 B.C. The Mahras is akin to the Abyssinian Galla language, representing the Cushite or Ethiopic of old; and the primitive Babylonian Sir H. Rawlinson from inscriptions decides to resemble both. The writing too is pictorial, as in the earliest ages of Egypt. The Egyptian and Ethiopic hyk (in hyk-sos, the shepherd kings), a "king," in Babylonian and Susianian is khak. "Tyrhak" is common to the royal lists of Susiana and Ethiopia, as "Nimrod" is to those of Babylon and Egypt. Ra is the Cushite supreme god of Babylon as Ra is the sun god in Egypt. (See BABEL).

Nimrod was the Bel, Belus, or Baal, i.e. lord of Babel, its founder. Worshipped (as the monuments testify) as Bilu Nipra or Bel Nimrod, i.e, the god of the chase; the Talmudical Nopher, now Niffer. Josephus (Ant. 1:4) and the tortures represent him as building, in defiance of Jehovah, the Babel tower. If so (which his rebellious character makes likely) he abandoned Babel for a time after the miraculous confusion of tongues, and went and founded Nineveh. Eastern tradition pictures him a heaven-storming giant chained by God, among the constellations, as Orion, Hebrew Keciyl (OT:3685), "fool" or "wicked." Sargon in an inscription says: "350 kings of Assyria hunted the people of Bilu-Nipru"; probably = the Babylon of Nimrod, nipru meaning hunter, another form of Nebrod which is the Septuagint form of Nimrod. His going to Assyria (Gen 10:10-12) accords with Micah's designating Assyria "the hind of Nimrod" (Mic 5:6). Also his name appears in the palace mound of Nimrud. The fourfold group of cities which Nimrod founded in Babylonia answer to the fourfold group in Assyria. So Kiprit Arba, "king of the four races," is an early title of the first monarchs of Babylon; Chedorlaomer appears at the head of four peoples; "king of the four regions" occurs in Nineveh inscriptions too; after Sargon's days four cities had the pre-eminence (Rawlinson, 1:435,438,447).
(from Fausset's Bible Dictionary)

mark9950

To renew this tread

Doctor X

mark9950:

Um . . . the problem right off the bat is that Abraham is a fictional character and the patriarchal stories do not fit what is known historically.

That is a lot to swallow, I understand. There are a couple of texts on the subject.

Thomas Thompson has a few books:

The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: the Quest for the Historical Abraham

This is a rather "heavy" book that, frankly, makes my head hurt. It is best for understanding what the assumptions of previous scholarship do not really work. You have to like linguistics.

A far more accessible and up-to-date work is:

The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel

I prefer this to the more concise and popular The Bible Unearthed by Silverman and Finkelstein. Their's is, however, a good summary.

A hard to find but wonderfully concise yet compete text is John C.H. Laughlin's Archeology and the Bible

Basically, one has to understand the archeology and known history of the region rather relying on anachronistic texts.

--J.D.

Just fixing the Amazon links...

Haran

Oh yeah... This is an unbiased bibliography. You might try reading something other than the minimalists.

Doctor X

If one has the ability to overturn scholarship of the last thirty years with something other than sweeping fallacy, I would find the information enlightening.

--J.D.

mark9950

Is it true that even though the egyptians were meticulous record keepers they did not write any reference in their records of moses exodus?

I have seen from another site that the egyptians today do not believe any exodus happened.

chimaira

Abraham was Moslem because it was Moslem in the sense that it "was submitted to God" and Yéshua also was Moslem in the sense that also was submitted to him to God, Yéshua was not Christian because the Christians adore Yéshua, but Yéshua was not adored.

The_Unknown_Banana

One christian argument I've heard runs something along the lines of the Egyptians not wanting to write about things that would be shameful to them, or something. Don't have a link or anything though...

Doctor X

Actually he was Japanese and a samurai sinced he was one "who served. . . ."

mark9950:

Absolutely.

Laughlin JCH. Archaeology and the Bible

I cannot recommend that book too highly for a very readable introduction to the issues.

--J.D.

Celsus

I agree. That's why I had it added to the reading list at the top.

Joel