Parashat Noah, Genesis 6:9-11:32
Haftarah Isaiah 54:1-55:5
Dear TBE Community,
There exists a tension between historicity and history: On the one hand, the actual, verifiable truth and on the other hand, the narrative of a group or people that can include historical facts but might not be an entirely accurate record of past events, if at all they occurred. Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, is a prime example for this tension: Much of what is recorded can’t be verified as historic facts, and yet it stands as the Jewish people’s historic narrative.
The tension between historicity and history is mirrored in a tension between biblical geography, historical geography, and our own imagined geography. This week, in a continuation as well as emendation of my explorations of Mesopotamian paradisiacal landscapes in the previous newsletter, I’ll take another look at this geographic realm that connects the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean: The Land of the Chaldeans.
Towards the end of Parashat Noah, in the section of the generational annals that lead the narrative to Abraham, we read:
Haran died in the lifetime of his father Terah, in his native land, Ur of the Chaldeans. (Genesis 11:28)
Haran was Abraham’s brother, the father of Lot, who will join his uncle on his journey to the west. But what is Ur Kasdim, the Ur of the Chaldeans?
Ur was a great ancient city in southern Mesopotamia, near the Persian Gulf, in modern Iraq – not far from the land of Shinar, where the Tower of Babel story is located. Conventionally, it is considered the birthplace of Abraham and the hometown of his father, Terah.
The Chaldeans (whose descendants have their larger diaspora communities in Michigan and California) were originally a distinct Semitic tribe that eventually emerged as Babylonian rulers, one reason for why the terms “Chaldean” and “Babylonian” are used interchangeably for the population in the lower Euphrates and Tigris region. In the Talmud specifically, the Chaldeans are known to be astrologers, diviners, and magicians – as opposed to what would become Abraham’s new religion in the west; the religion and culture of the Talmudic rabbis living in the east – which they still called “Babylonia” long after the Babylonian Empire had ceased to exist.
The common explanation for the name Babylonia is that it is related to confusion, chaos; the name is a play on the root ב-ל-ב-ל and on God scattering the humans across the earth and confounding the speech.
But there is another etymology: Bab-Ilani, (you can hear our elyon in here) the Gate of the Gods, a gate to the highest echelons. Just like Jews and Muslims see in Jerusalem a gateway to heaven, so did the Babylonians think of their city as a gateway to divine realms: Babylon and Jerusalem, the points of departure and (ultimate) arrival – two gates of heaven as bookends of the crescent reaching from the Land of the Chaldeans to the Land of Canaan, spanning from the east to the west, illuminating the arc of Abraham’s hero’s journey.
We are used to imagining Abraham’s origins in that part of southern Mesopotamia, his and his family’s journey up the great river Euphrates and then eventually his following God’s call all the way, connecting the Persian Gulf, the rivers, and the Levantine shores of the Mediterranean Sea. It is a geographic journey that we can visualize easily on a familiar map.
But what if a place on the biblical map , or on our imagined map – isn’t where we think it is?
A minority theory claims that Ur of the Chaldeans was not in southern Mesopotamia, but rather in northern Mesopotamia, in modern-day southeastern Turkey. This theory identifies the city of Urfa as Ur of the Chaldeans, stating for example that at the time of Abraham’s journey, the Chaldeans had not yet migrated down the Euphrates (one moves down, the other moves up!). But the theory’s core argument is that Abraham’s journey as we know it takes a major detour:
Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot the son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, the wife of his son Abram, and they set out together from Ur of the Chaldeans for the land of Canaan; but when they had come as far as Haran, they settled there. (Genesis 11:31)
You look at an atlas map today, and it’s true: Why not turn to the west already from Mari, which was a major hub of trade routes? Why veer off the direct migration path and go to Haran, out of the way for seemingly no pragmatic reason?
Maybe because migration doesn’t always follow clear routes and involves detours, a stay with relatives that lasts longer than planned, recovering from mishap, cheaper lodging in the provinces off the busy centers. Yet the northern theory says that coming from the south on the way to the west, a stop in Haran makes no sense.
And there is another matter that doesn’t seem to add up: In Joshua 24:2, Joshua says: In olden times, your ancestors, Terah, father of Abraham and father of Nahor, lived beyond the Euphrates and worshiped other gods.
בְּעֵבֶר הַנָּהָר – beyond the river.
Ur in southern Mesopotamia was on the western side of the river – meaning, Terah and Abraham wouldn’t have had to cross the Euphrates as they departed their ancestral home. Thus, going to Haran seems to make even less sense, because while migration might not always follow straightforward paths, crossing a major river back into the opposite direction of where one wants to go feels like a reversal, a sign of resignation – which might be what Terah experienced, so his son had to finish the task.
In any event, what makes Abraham a Hebrew, an עברי Ivri, is that he crosses over. This is rich spiritually and symbolically — but doesn’t it need an actual point of crossing over that can be pinned on a geographic map? Doesn’t the spiritual richness illustrate a p’shat topographic reality? Or could it be the other way around?
If the origin of Terah’s and Abraham’s journey were in Urfa in Turkey, Haran would have been a reasonable station on the way before crossing the river toward the Levant.
A northern origin would also help with this ominous verse from Deuteronomy and the Haggadah: My father was a wandering Aramean – to me, none of the rabbinic interpretations of who that Aramean supposedly was (Abraham, Laban, Jacob) ever feels satisfactory. Yet if Abraham were from Urfa / Haran, then he would have been an Aramean, as that region was known as Aram.
I don’t pretend to be an expert; I am only sharing with you what I came across as I was thinking about Parashat Noah and found fascinating. I will say that the arguments of the northern theory sounded compelling to me, even though they destroy the beautiful flawless half-moon shaped journey from rising to setting sun, the arc of ancestral migration along the Fertile Crescent. And it would deconstruct my own spiritual narrative that has my Jewish soul hailing from the marshy lowlands of southern Mesopotamia.
From a young age on, I was fascinated by Babylon, its “hanging gardens” (which might not even have been in Babylon but that’s another story!). When I moved to Berlin for work, feeling uprooted and unhappy, the first place I visited on a cold winter day, my first full day in the city, was the Pergamon Museum. The museum houses a reconstruction of Babylon’s Ishtar Gate. And even though Jews don’t believe in astrology and divination, like the rabbis of old living in the land of the Chaldeans, I couldn’t resist the pull and had a reading in New Orleans, in which the reader stated that I had a special connection to the Ishtar Gate!
Whatever one might think about that, suffice it to say that it was a welcome addition to my spiritual toledot and that as a migrant myself, I always resonated with Abraham’s crescent shaped journey – the first Jew whose origins were in Babylon!
Geography, memory, mythology, and migration shape our understanding of origins. Places can have immense power over our self-image, our perception of self. It certainly is true for me. But what happens when a new theory challenges the geography we have carried in our imaginations? What happens when a story is dependent on a specific place and becomes moot when the place changes? Are we attached to the geographical truth of a story, or also to the geography through which we have learned to understand the story?
But it’s all good, since the northern theory is not widely accepted — not because it interferes with my private toledot narrative but for lack of tangible archaeological evidence, though many scholars view the southern Ur tradition merely as a product of the narrative of Judahite exiles in Babylonia who tucked – or mapped – the ancient city of Ur onto their ancestral story of Abraham.
The remaining geographical uncertainty becomes almost poetic, and the topography of origins and wanderings is never as simple as the maps we draw, or the maps we consult. But the role of the river Euphrates – one of the rivers of paradise – is always important: As a pathfinder, as a border, as a bridge; as the river of exile and the river of a flourishing diaspora, of home. The river one had to cross to get from one realm to another, from the land in the west to the land of Babylon and back, from reality to utopia, from this world to the garden of Eden.
Much as we don’t know for sure the actual route of Abraham, whoever he was, we do know the story of another migrant, a historically verifiable migration story from that same realm connecting Turkey, Persian Gulf, Mesopotamia, the Mediterranean, and beyond.
Calouste Gulbenkian was born into a wealthy Armenian family whose roots lay in what is today eastern Turkey, in a region that, on a biblical map, could be described as somewhere between Mount Ararat and Haran. Which was the hook for this last segment of this essay: Both places appear in Parashat Noah. I just explored the latter at length; the former is the name of the mountain range on which Noah’s ark came to rest, and a sacred symbol for the Armenian nation, which knows its own painful history of persecution, exile, diaspora, and reclaiming.
As did the Gulbenkian family. I won’t retell the family’s history at length, but what makes this so bashert for this newsletter and for an exploration of geography, migration, and the stories we tell about our origins is not simply that the family came from somewhere within this biblically rich region. That’s more of a nice segue than anything else. Rather, the story of Calouste is also the story of the region and of its major blessings, and curses: Oil. And it catapults us into our times:
From Turkish oil to Iraqi oil, from the Baghdad Railway to the Armenian Genocide, from the partitioning of the Middle East among European powers to the destruction and loss of what once was home, from the vital trade routes connecting the Levant with the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz—everything touched the life of this migrant and oil magnat, Calouste Gulbenkian.
I did not learn about him through Bible study at all. I learned about him because I spent significant time in Lisbon while writing my thesis on Portuguese cinema and literature. When you do research in Lisbon, when you need a grant, when you want to see great art, when you need some sophisticated quiet away from the noisy, tourist-filled Alfama and Baixa streets, you seek refuge in the Gulbenkian Foundation and its lavish garden.
It was established in 1956 according to Gulbenkian’s last will and carries on the legacy of this wandering Armenian, who spent the final thirteen years of his life in Lisbon.
During my Portuguese studies, I also heard about the Strait of Hormuz for the first time: In the 1500s, when the Portuguese built their maritime empire, they took control of Hormuz because they understood its strategic importance for trade. And as we bitterly learn from war to war, whoever controls the Strait of Hormuz controls a vital passage for global trade, whether in spices or oil.
If you’ve come to know me a bit you might say – of course, all roads for her lead back to Portugal. And maybe they do. Or maybe, all roads lead back to Babylon.
And so, I want to end this missive not by standing at the riverbanks in Lisbon, but by standing at the shore in Muscat, Oman more than twenty years ago.
We were researching for a potential documentary in that country, and, standing by the sea, I was mesmerized by something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Back then, I was not as versed in the Bible as I am today, but I did already cherish my imagined Babylon connection. And I was fascinated to be standing relatively close to that famous place, Hormuz, that I had dreamed of while pouring over books and maps in the Gulbenkian Foundation. Somewhere beyond the pointed, ragged cliffs, beyond the waters of the Gulf lay the shores of ancient Mesopotamia, the land of Shinar, the land of the Chaldeans – and it pained me that travelling there wouldn’t be a viable option for the time being, especially not in December 2004.
I did not yet know that one day, I would connect stations of my life’s learnings with places mentioned in Parashat Noah, nor that I would one day write a newsletter connecting Lisbon with Mount Ararat for a California congregation I’d serve as a rabbi. That I would continue to yearn to visit that land between two rivers, the legendary places beyond the rainbow, as it were, places that to this day I have only read about – or heard of.
Or maybe I did sense all that. I believe I did, though it’s not historically verifiable.
Shabbat Shalom!