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Second II Look
Hershel Shanks has reopened the debate raised long ago by Cyrus Gordon, about which Ur was Abrahams.* Was the patriarch born in some northern Mesopotamian Ur rather than in Babylonia? I believe the case for identifying the Ur (of the Chaldees) in Genesis 11:28,31 (compare with Nehemiah 9:7) with Ur, now Tell el-Muqayyar, in southern Babylonia, remains strong, although the available information precludes certainty. For our purposes, I assume that there was a man named Abraham and that the stories about him are very ancient.
A number of cuneiform texts mention several places named Ur, or something very like it, but most can be dismissed so far as Genesis is concerned:
(1) The Ebla tablets from the third millennium B.C. name Ura and Uru among scores of places within Ebla's immediate neighborhood. There is nothing to show they had any particular importance, however.1 According to an Alalakh text of about 1600 B.C., a village named Ure lay at the western edge of the Fertile Crescent.2 Other Alalakh tablets from about 1450 B.C. attest to a place called Ure and a village named Ura.3 The Nuzi tablets from about 1400 B.C. name a Great Uri and a Small Uri in Nuzi's vicinity.4
The places referred to in the Ebla, Alalakh and Nuzi tablets were all probably villages within the immediate environs of their respective urban centers.
(2) In the 13th century B.C., merchants from a place called Ura had problems in Ugarit that were adjudicated by the Hittite overlord. This Ura figures prominently in Cyrus Gordon's case against Abraham's origin in the Babylonian Ur.5 The Ura in question is now identified as a port on the coast of Cilicia, perhaps modern Gilindere.6 Another Ura lay within the kingdom of Ugarit.7 Still another Ura existed at the same time, according to Hittite texts, and may be located near modern Amasya in north central Turkey.8 In addition, Tiglath-pileser III of Assyria lists Ura among his eighth-century B.C. conquests in the Turkish foothills, perhaps northwest of Diyarbekir.9
Neither the Cilician port nor the sites in northern Turkey are likely candidates for Abraham's Ur. They are too far out of the way, and they are not known to have had a West Semitic populace.
(3) The...