The above makes a reference that Ur-Nammu built the Tower of Babel in 2,000 B.C.
and called it Babel."
and Abram were in the same Chapter of the Book of Genesis.
As to Genesis 10, regarding the diversity of races, we cannot separate it from Chapter 11. The events of Chapter 11:1-9 are very much earlier than critics commonly suppose and go back to the earliest nomadic and sedentary civilization of Babylonia far beyond 2501 B.C. (Septuagint 3066 B.C.), which Driver alleges is the Biblical date of the Flood and rightly protests that pre-Semitic Sumerian, Babylonian and Egyptian are three distinct languages that antedate this period.
The Hebrew Bible will place the Flood at 2501 B.C. if the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 are used unwarrantedly for chronological purposes. The genealogies are obviously abbreviated and cannot be used to calculate either the age of the human race or the time of the Flood. The Deluge certainly took place long before 4000 B.C. and the ancient scene depicted in Genesis 11:1-9 doubtlessly belongs to a period not more than a century and a half after that world engulfing event.
Abram’s native city is not simply Ur in the OT (Gen. 11:31, etc.) but "Ur of the Chaldees [Chaldeans]." The qualifying phrase "of the Chaldeans" is not an anachronism as many critics hold, but as in the case of numerous archaic place names, is a later scribal gloss to explain to a subsequent age, when Ur and its location had utterly perished in southern Babylonia. This is where after 1000 B.C. the race of the Chaldeans became dominant and eventually established the Neo-Babylonian or Chaldean Empire, which the Hebrew scribe defined the then incomprehensible foreign name (Hebrew - K(ah)Sh(uh)D(ee)M, Kasdite; K(ah)S(uh)D(ee), Kasdiy, Kas-dee’, with a possible connection to Kesed, a relative of Abram) by an appellation customary in his own day.
The polytheistic eastern ancestry of the Hebrews is indicated in Joshua 24:2: "Your fathers dwelt of old time beyond the River, even Terah, the father of Abraham, and the father of Nahor (Nachor): and they served other gods." This idolatrous environment out of which Abram came has been illuminated by the excavations of Ur. Until 1854 this site was completely unknown as far as being the location of the ancient city of Ur was concerned. TheArabs called it al Muqayyar, "the mound of bitumen." In that year J. E. Taylor conducted some simple excavations which yielded cuneiform cylinders stating that Nabonidus of Babylon (556-539 B.C. ) had there restoredthe ziggurat of Ur-Nammu. Further excavations by H. R. Hall in 1918, and C. L. Woolley (1922-1934) have made Ur a very well known site.
In Louis Waddell’s list of Sumerian Kings shown during Urash’s Dynasty of "Panch" in the Great Gap (3180 B.C.-2751 B.C.) of 430 years is named as No. 24 Rumau or Pashipadda ("Mesanni-padda") and No. 25 was called Uruduki Raman Durashi-padda or Rutasa Rama ("Anni-padda") which is dated around 2900 B.C.
The ziggurat of Ur-Nammu of Abraham’s day was erected on top of a smaller structure which may have been as old as the reign of Mes-Anne-pada of the First Dynasty of Ur (c. 2800-2600 B.C.), but its upper part was the work of Nabonidus. The bulk of the great artificial mountain had been constructed by Ur-Nammu, and his name and title were discovered stamped on the bricks. The tower was a solid mass of brickwork, 200 feet long, 150 feet wide and about 70 feet high. The facing, covering the inner core of unbaked brick, consisted of baked brick set in bitumen, eight feet in thickness. This was an artificial hill made by men to worship their gods on mountain tops on a flat plain, called "the hill of heaven" or the "mountain of God."
At Ur of Chaldees, the birthplace of Abram, that divinity of the tower of Babel was Nannar, the moon god, and his most sacred shrine was located on the top-most stage, for Ur was dedicated to this their supreme deity. A whole quarter of the city of Ur was set apart for him, and he was called "the Exalted Lord," "the Crown of Heaven and Earth," "the Beautiful Lord who Shines in Heaven." Nannar was also the king of Ur. In Ur the temenos orsacred area of Nannar was a 400 by 200 yard platform raised above the level of the town. The shrine contained the statue of the god and his bedchamber. On the terrace was the ziggurat, with twin temples, the day houses of the moon god and his consort, the goddess Nin-Gal. Another temple was called "The House of Great Plenty," this was the secret ritual of a harem, of the moon god. It also was evident that Ur was a city with an inseparable cult in Abram’s day.
Ur had a busy emporium right on the Euphrates river where it had a north harbor and a west harbor with canals running through the city and around its walls.
At Borsippa (Birs-Nimrod) some ten miles southwest of Babylon, the divinity was Nebo, the god of knowledge and literature.
Despite the discoveries at Ur, especially the royal tombs, no direct evidence has been found of Abram or Abraham’s residence there, although it was a large city and Terah and his sons were just citizens who migrated from it.
"There exist no contemporary records confirming the Abram Bible story. Abram, son of Terah, a maker of idols, according to Hebrew traditions was born about 2,000 B.C. in the Ur of the Chaldees. Ur is a city of ancient Sumer in southern Mesopotamia on a site in present-day southeast Iraq. It was a principal port of Sumer, which traded with Egypt and India, was ruled by Queen Shubad, where it flourished into a brilliant culture under the Sumerians. It is one of the oldest cities in Mesopotamia, and became an important center of Sumerian culture after c. 3,000 B.C. The city declined after the sixth century B.C. Chaldees or Chaldeans were members of an ancient Semitic people of Chaldea who ruled in Babylonia and were versed in occult learning. Sumer was an ancient country of southern Mesopotamia in present-day southern Iraq. Archaeological evidence dates the beginnings of Sumer to the fifth millennium B.C. By 3,000 B.C. a flourishing civilization existed, which gradually exerted power over the surrounding area and culminated in the Akkadian dynasty founded (c. 2340) by Sargon I. Sumer declined after 2,000 B.C. and was later absorbed by Babylonia and Assyria. The Sumerians are believed to have invented the cuneiform system of writing.
Fabulous Babylon from long before the Flood dominated the Semitic world; in 2250 B.C. Sargon I extended his sway from Cyprus to Persia, eclipsing Egypt, from the Black Sea to Arabia.
Young Abram, from a notable family, must have basked in the sophisticated society and fertile philosophies of the age; he surely visited Babylon to marvel, like Herodotus many centuries later, at those massive walls eighty feet high and twenty feet thick and at the lofty Temple of Marduk where Chaldean astrologers plotted the stars. Herodotus known as "the Father of History" in the fifth century B.C., was a Greek historian whose writings, chiefly concerning the Persian Wars, is the earliest known examples of narrative history." From "God and Spacemen of the Ancient Past" by W. Raymond Drake Chapter 13 "Abraham" pg. 159.
"It is almost impossible to ascertain the exact truth of alleged events four thousand years ago, especially as there appears to be no independent proof that Abraham ever existed. Scholars sadly confess the difficulty of coordinating even Egyptian chronology with historical dates in neighboring countries. Immanuel Velikovsky in "Ages in Chaos" claims that either six hundred years are missing in Israel's history or six hundred ghost years havecrept into Egyptian history. Despite modern archaeology the problems of Biblical chronology, even geography, of the Patriarchal age remains confused. People tend to find what they are looking for. Conditioned from birth by the Bible story, both Jews and Christians interpret the most slender fact to prove that every word of the Scriptures must be true, when Students of the written text know that much can never be confirmed. Theologians fervently accept the "Lord's" manifestation in ancient Palestine yet scorn similar evidence, suggesting divine intervention in contemporary Greece and Rome." From "God and Spacemen of the Ancient Past" W. Raymond Drake Chapter 13 "Abraham" pg. 162.
Is Mr. Velikovsky year’s associated with the 801 missing years seen earlier in chapter 3 of this book, regarding Josephus’ record of the Genesis genealogy? Most scholars will avoid Immanuel Velikovsky as a radical revisionist who advocates lowering Egyptian chronology by as much as eight centuries.
As will be seen after reading this section of this book one will be enlighten to a 954 year variation just as strange as the 801 years.
If one had to do a term paper on this subject the following quotation is all you would find in most text.
"Abraham was the founder of Judaism and the ancestor of both Arabs and the Jews. Scholars believed Abraham lived about 4,000 years ago. The story of his life is told in Genesis, the first book of the Bible. During his early life, Abraham was called Abram. He was born in the city of Ur (of the Chaldees), in ancient Mesopotamia (now Iraq). The people of Ur, like most people at that time, worshipped many gods. However, Abram believed in one God. At Gods command, Abram left Ur and traveled westward with his wife, Sarah; his nephew Lot; and other members of his household. After they reached a land called Canaan, (now Israel), God told them the land would be theirs." From The World Book Encyclopedia "ABRAHAM."
Christians who read the Bible as the sole source of the history of Abram or Abraham would not know any different on the subject since they have been programmed from birth to believe what they have heard about him. Some ancient mythologies have more information than this.
Abram had a keen business brain, he promoted trade between the Babylonians and the Hittites, becoming wealthy enough to purchase land in Canaan, command his own private army, and even defeat a coalition of Kings. According to Josephus Flavious, 'Antiquities 1-8', later in Egypt, Abram and his wife were honored by Pharaoh himself, a place where he is said to have taught the Egyptian Court mathematics and astronomy which he had learned from the Chaldeans.
Eventually Abram led his people to the land of Canaan, still some of their religious ideas did not eradicate the ancient traditional forms. The city formed was Haran (presently in southern Turkey) and archaeologists have found that most of the names of his ancestors of his genealogy were names of cities.
In the region of Haran there is unmistakable evidence of the extended Hebrew residence in the vicinity of the Balikh and Habur Rivers, two tributaries of the Euphrates east of the great bend south of ancient Carchemish.
The town of Haran (Gen. 11:31; 12:5) is still in existence on the Balikh River sixty miles west of Tell Halaf. It was flourishing in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries B.C., as is known from in its cuneiform sources. The name appears in Assyrian documents as Harranu ("road") because of the trade route (Damascus-Nineveh-Carchemish). Terah may have chosen Haran because of its idolatry and worship of the moon god.
- The city of Nahor, which was Rebekah’s home (Gen. 24:10) which Abraham sent his servant to bring her for his son Isaac’s wife, occurs often as Nakhur in the Mari tablets, discovered in 1935 and belonging to theeighteenth century B.C. The Mari references and Assyrian records of the seventh century B.C., where Nahor occurs as Til-Nakhiri ("the Mound of Nahor"), located in the Balikh Valley below Haran.
- Serug (Assyrian Sarugi).
- Terah (Til Turakhi, the "Mound of Terah," in Assyrian times).
- Others listed in Genesis 11:10-30 have left traces in this territory, called Paddan-Aram (Aramaic paddana, "field or plain" of Aram) in Genesis (25:20; 26:6, 7; etc.).
- Reu corresponds to later names of towns in the Middle-Euphrates valley.
- Peleg recalls later Paliga on the Euphrates just above the mouth of the Habur.
- Abram + -im or ‘am, father of the multitude or many nations, and the people of God.
I have gone to great detail in this book to prove that a Sargon (as Scorpion) existed during the Age of Taurus the Bull 4530 B.C., long before the other three rulers whom would have existed at the beginning of the Age of Aries the Ram in 2370 B.C. which is the beginning of the next chapter of this book. Also see "Sargon Did He Exist?" listed in the TOC for Chapter Four.
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