Who were the Chaldeans?

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The Chaldeans were tribes settled from about the ninth century BC in the marshes and river country of southern Babylonia, near the head of the Persian Gulf; Assyrian records call their land Kaldu. The Bible uses the name in three senses: the people, the dynasty of Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar that ruled Babylon from 626 to 539 BC, and the learned men of its court. The map's point for Chaldea stands at Ur, about 235 km south-east of Babylon in a straight line and 1,035 km from Jerusalem. Isaiah, in the eighth century, could still call them new: “this people was not, till the Assyrian founded it for them that dwell in the wilderness”; Job's camels are carried off by three bands of Chaldeans. From 626 BC, when Nabopolassar took the throne of Babylon, they are the power that ends Judah. Habakkuk sees God raise up “the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation”; “bands of the Chaldees” harry Jehoiakim; the Chaldeans besieging Jerusalem withdraw before Pharaoh's army, and Jeremiah warns, “Deceive not yourselves, saying, The Chaldeans shall surely depart from us”; in 586 BC “the army of the Chaldees pursued after the king, and overtook him in the plains of Jericho”, and they broke up the bronze pillars of the Temple and carried the bronze to Babylon. Ezekiel is called “in the land of the Chaldeans by the river Chebar”. In Daniel, Chaldeans are a class of wise men beside the magicians and astrologers, who answer the king “in Syriack”, that is, in Aramaic; Belshazzar is “the king of the Chaldeans”; the exiles are told, “Go ye forth of Babylon, flee ye from the Chaldeans”. Greek writers took the third sense: Herodotus calls the Chaldeans the priests of Bel at Babylon, and Diodorus describes them as a caste, like the priests of Egypt, who read the future in the stars, so that in Latin and all through the Middle Ages “Chaldean” meant astrologer. “Ur of the Chaldees”, the home Abraham left, is the puzzle: a thousand years divide him from the first Chaldean in any record. Most scholars take the phrase as a later writer's name for Ur as his readers knew it, the Sumerian city at Tell el-Muqayyar that Leonard Woolley dug from 1922 to 1934, with its royal tombs and ziggurat; a minority, after Cyrus Gordon, looks for Abraham's Ur in the north, near Haran, at a place called Ura or at Urfa. Whether Nabopolassar himself was of Chaldean stock is also debated. Of the exiles' life among them the cuneiform tablets of al-Yahudu, “Judah-town”, now tell.