Ur

Do not let the young woman be put to death in the underworld.

And if he will not help you, go to the moon god at Ur, and say the same thing.

And if he will not help you, go to the god of the sweet water at Eridu and say the same thing, because he knows the plant of life and he knows the water of life, and he is the one who will bring me back." And I wanna say what those instructions actually describe because they are not invented mourning.

They are the real thing.

The husband she names is called Gugalanna, and the name means the Great Bull of Heaven.

That is the bull of heaven.

That is the animal she asked her father for in the Akkadian poem when a young king in a clean cloak insulted her in the middle of his own city, and she went up to the sky in tears and demanded it, the one that came down and opened pits in the ground and swallowed three hundred men of Uruk, the one Enkidu caught by the horns and Gilgamesh killed with a knife between the neck and the horns, and whose hindquarter was thrown at her head.

In one tradition, that bull is the husband of the Queen of the Underworld, so the lie she tells at the door of the dead is not a random lie.

A breached embankment could send water racing across flat ground with nowhere to drain.

Archaeologists have found flood deposits at several ancient Mesopotamian sites, including Ur, Kish, and Shuruppak.

These are layers of water-laid sediment separating periods of occupation.

For a time, some researchers hoped they pointed to one giant flood, perhaps the historical source of the Mesopotamian deluge tradition.

So, beneath the ground.

This is where the search became almost irresistible.

In the early 20th century, archaeologists working in southern Mesopotamia began digging through the ruins of cities whose names already sounded familiar from ancient flood traditions: Ur, Kish, Shuruppak.

These were not imaginary places.

Well, God promised it to Abraham and his descendants.

But when Abraham left Ur of the Chaldeans and made his way down to the promised land, he lived in the promised land in tents.

He did not own property.

He eventually bought property to bury his wife, Sarah.

And Haran became the father of Lot.

While his father Terah was still alive, Haran died in Ur of the Chaldeans in the land of his birth.

Abraham and Nahor both married.

The name of Abraham's wife was Sarai and the name of Nahor's wife was Milcah.

She was the daughter of Haran, the father of both Milcah and Ishcah.

Now Sarai was childless because she was not able to conceive.

Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot, son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, the wife of his son Abram, and together they set out from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan.

But when they came to Haran, they settled there.

Though all this land has been promised to Abraham and will be in his possession forever, he is, for the present, an alien and a stranger in this land, which was promised to him.

If Abraham had remained in Ur or even in Haran, he likely would have been surrounded by family members at Sarah's death and had his convenient family crypt already prepared.

However, to have remained in Ur or Haran would have deprived him.

of the hope of the resurrection that he now possesses.

In his current situation, Abraham was as physically disadvantaged as a man could possibly be.

Nehemiah 9, 7 through 8.

You are the Lord.

the God who chose Abram and brought him out of Ur, of the Chaldeans, and gave him the name Abraham.