Where was Haran, where Abraham stopped?

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Haran is Harran, a town in south-eastern Turkey near the Syrian border, in the valley of the Balikh, a tributary of the Euphrates, about 40 km south-east of Şanlıurfa; the map point stands on its mound, about 665 km north-east of Jerusalem and about 620 km from Shechem in a straight line, and about 925 km from Ur if Ur is Tell el-Muqayyar in southern Iraq. Its name, Harranu, means “road” in Akkadian: it lay where the routes from Nineveh and Babylonia to Syria and Anatolia crossed, about 90 km east of the Euphrates ford at Carchemish, and it was the city of the moon god Sin. Here Terah stopped on the way from Ur to Canaan, “and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there”, and here he died; from Haran Abram set out at seventy-five with Sarai and Lot, and Stephen recalls that God “removed him into this land” from Charran after his father's death. Two generations later Rebekah sent Jacob back “to Laban my brother to Haran”, where he served fourteen years for Leah and Rachel and where eleven of his sons were born; the well where he met Rachel lay outside the town, among shepherds who told him: “Of Haran are we.” The Haran of the city is not the Haran of the family: Abram's brother Haran, the father of Lot, who died in Ur, is spelt with a different first letter in Hebrew, and the Synodal Bible keeps them apart as Харран and Аран. The region fits the patriarchs' kin: Abraham's servant went to “the city of Nahor” nearby to find Rebekah, and the names of Abraham's forebears Serug, Nahor and Terah recur as place names around Haran in cuneiform records. The mound of Harran has been dug since the 1950s, but the great temple of Sin known from the texts of Nabonidus has not been securely located, and the standing ruins, the citadel, walls and Umayyad mosque, are of Islamic date. The debate is less about Haran than about Ur: a minority put Ur of the Chaldees in the north near Haran, which would make Terah's journey short. The article on Haran tells the city's later history, from the last king of Assyria to Crassus and Julian.