History Globe
Question
How far did Abraham travel from Ur to Canaan?
From Ur to Haran is about 925 km in a straight line and from Haran to Shechem, Abram's first stop in Canaan, about 620 km: some 1,545 km in all, about 52 days on foot at 30 km a day, and the real route along the Euphrates and down through Syria was longer.
Genesis tells the journey in two stages. Terah "went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there." After Terah's death Abram, seventy-five years old, took Sarai and Lot "and the souls that they had gotten in Haran; and they went forth to go into the land of Canaan; and into the land of Canaan they came", passing through to the place of Shechem. The map's Abraham tour shows the stages at the conventional year 1900 BC; the age of the patriarchs is disputed.
The figures assume that Ur is Tell el-Muqayyar in southern Iraq, the usual identification; if, as some scholars hold, Ur of the Chaldees lay in northern Mesopotamia near Haran, the first stage was far shorter. Haran is Harran in south-eastern Turkey, on the Balikh, where the routes from Mesopotamia to Syria crossed; Shechem is Tell Balatah by Nablus.
Scripture: Gen 11:31; Gen 12:4–6; Acts 7:2–4; Heb 11:8
Sources
- Straight-line distance between the places' points: OpenBible.info Bible Geocoding Data (CC BY 4.0)
- History Globe tour “Abraham's journey” (the conventional year and the disputed age of the patriarchs)
- C. L. Woolley and P. R. S. Moorey, Ur 'of the Chaldees' (1982)
- C. H. Gordon, 'Abraham and the Merchants of Ura', Journal of Near Eastern Studies 17 (1958) (the northern Ur)
- T. M. Green, The City of the Moon God: Religious Traditions of Harran (1992)
Checked against its sources; not yet read by a historian.