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"And Isaac was forty years old when he took Rebekah to wife, the daughter of Bethuel
the Syrian of Padan-aram, sister to Laban the Syrian" (Gen. 25: 20).
If the reader will consult a map, he will see that immediately North of Palestine is
Syria, this is the Aram of Scripture. To the East is the River Euphrates, and between the
Euphrates and the Tigris is Aram-Naharaim, "Syria of the two rivers" or Mesopotamia.
South of this, and still between the two rivers is Babylonia, the Shinar of the O.T., and
lower still, near the Persian Gulf is Chaldea, from which Abraham commenced his great
journey at the call of God.
When Joshua spoke of the period when Israel's fathers
"dwelt on the other side of the flood in old time, even Terah, the father of Abraham, and
the father of Nahor";
and when he further said in the name of the Lord:
"I took your father Abraham from the other side of the flood" (Josh. 24: 2, 3, see
also 14, 15),
the English reader may be confused. The word flood in the original is Nahar, and occurs
nowhere else in Joshua but in the first chapter where we read:
"From the wilderness and this Lebanon even unto the great river the river Euphrates"
(1: 4).
Urquhart, quoting Dr. Harper, Sayce and Ainsworth, tells us that:
"There is a well in the neighbourhood (of Haran) which is called by the natives `the
well of Rebekah'. There is nothing to distinguish it from the other wells of the district
except the limestone slabs, the accumulation of which shows that the well must have
been in use from remote times. It may have been that Laban's homestead was placed
close by, and that at this very spot Eliezer lifted up his heart in silent prayer to God, and
bowed in fervent thanksgiving when the sign he had asked was given."
The statement that Abraham's kindred were idolators when on the "other side of the
river", is borne out by the testimony of the Monuments:
"Its temple was dedicated to the Babylonian moon-god like the temple of Ur.
Between Ur and Haran there was thus a natural connexion, and a native of Ur would have
found himself more at home in Haran than in any other city of the world" (Sayce, "The
Higher Criticism on the Verdict of the Monuments").
Sin, the moon-god, is called in an inscription of B.C.800, "the Lord of Haran".
Urquhart draws our attention to another evidence that the Ancestors of Israel dwelt in
Haran.
In Gen. 30: 20, Leah calls her sixth son Zebulun: