Abraham had been born in "Ur of the Chaldees." Ur lay on the western
side of the Euphrates in Southern Babylonia, where the mounds of
Muqayyar or Mugheir mark the site of the great temple that had been
reared to the worship of the Moon-god long before the days of the Hebrew
patriarch. Here Abraham had married, and from hence he had gone forth
with his father to seek a new home in the west. Their first
resting-place had been Harran in Mesopotamia, on the high-road to Syria
and the Mediterranean. The name of Harran, in fact, signified "road" in
the old language of Chaldæa, and for many ages the armies and merchants
of Babylonia had halted there when making their way towards the
Mediterranean. Like Ur, it was dedicated to the worship of Sin, the
Moon-god, and its temple rivalled in fame and antiquity that of the
Babylonian city, and had probably been founded by a Babylonian king.

At Harran, therefore, Abraham would still have been within the limits of
Babylonian influence and culture, if not of Babylonian government as
well. He would have found there the same religion as that which he had
left behind him in his native city; the same deity was adored there,
under the same name and with the same rites. He was indeed on the road
to Canaan, and among an Aramaean rather than a Babylonian population,
but Babylonia with its beliefs and civilization had not as yet been
forsaken. Even the language of Babylonia was known in his new home, as
is indicated by the name of the city itself.

Harran and Mesopotamia were not the goal of the future father of the
Israelitish people. He was bidden to seek elsewhere another country and
another kindred. Canaan was the land which God promised to "show" to
him, and it was in Canaan that his descendants were to become "a great