Abraham the Mesopotamian

... as in, around Harran. Lyman Stone has a summary. I must first remind that I find difficult almost all the Abr[ah]am lore.

The Kaldu come into history in the Iron Age as lower-Euphrates Semites. Nabunaid/Nabonidus was of them. These were, interestingly, of northwest-Semitic origin; this king wrote in Aramaic and in Taymanitic. Later Aramaeophones came to aspirate the kap(h); the Greeks and Romans duly rendered the people as "Chaldaei". Later still, Iraqi Christians speaking their postAramaic language referred "Bet-Aramaye" to city "Perat de Mayshan" or (for Pliny) "Pratta" ("Euphrates" seems to be "river of the Furat"). So some have pondered Abraham as from some Ur of those Chaldaeans. It happens existed, once, a large city of Ur in Sumer. Christianity has assumed that's the one. Abram would then live in that Ur after several language shifts to Aramaic.

Problem: the Torah is going with a time before the Hyksos, in fact contemporaneous with this nonsense. That is the early Bronze Age. Aramaic did not then exist, independent of Canaanite. I am further unaware of any "Amorite" language trickling down to Ur, nor for that matter to Tayman, before all that Mitanni/Hittite guff in the 1500s BC. Semitic (as we know it) was spoken in Ugarit and maybe down to South Arabia, but not down the Euphrates. Why would it be there? The Euphrates hosted dense populations of cities, speaking their own paraSemitic languages, from Eblaite to Akkadian. So: no Kaldu down there, then.

Stone actually believes Torah - takes it seriously, anyway.

The Bible for Abram aligns better with some memory of north-Mesopotamians not from the Euphrates, but crossing Euphrates, to travel southwest not northwest-then-southwest. This at least shortens Abe's trip by an upriver prologue.

Now: I am unwilling to remove kasdim from the text entirely. The Chaldaeans had to come from somewhere, and north-Mesopotamia is a somewhere. Also I do not think anyone ever accused Abraham's mother of being hor(ite), nor for that matter Terah, which is what a "Hurrian" is, like "Amorite" is Amurru, or like "Hittite" refers to those northern cities claiming, in the Iron Age, the blood of old bronze Hatti.

Overall, though, Stone's thesis seems promising.