ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK EXODUS DR. DAVID ADAMS #9 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> When did Abraham leave Ur to go to the land that God would show him? >> There's a fascinating bit of Mesopotamian history tied up with this question, Josh. I don't want to spend too much time on the history of Mesopotamia. There have been any number of entire books written on this subject. And we could spend a lot of time on it. But it really doesn't come into the biblical story very much, at least not our story of the book of Exodus. So we'll spend just a quick minute on the history of Mesopotamia up until the time of Abraham. And if we go back to some of the earlier periods we were talking about, we might think of first sort of the preliterary period. What was -- what was history like before there was writing? And as we've already said, we know something because of archaeological artifacts. We know something about dating because pottery had already been invented then. But it's really very difficult for us to know much about the history when we don't have the names of very many people. We don't really know that much about how events develop. But we do know generally what happened. And that is generally in this period before writing, we began with small agricultural settlements. Perhaps one or two farming families. Probably an extended family living in a very confined area where there was water year-round probably so that they could pasture animals and where the ground was good enough to support farming. And eventually as happens everywhere, families sort of come together. And you end up with a small village. And somewhere -- you know, we said already, you know, before 4000 BC certainly these villages or very small agricultural communities were beginning to develop. And they developed very slowly. This did not happen rapidly. It's hard to know when what we might call today cities came to be founded. You know, or when does something stop being a town and start being a city? In biblical -- sort of in archaeological terms, it's often a case of whether it has a wall or not. You know, once a community gathers enough wealth that it starts needing to be defended, they build a wall around it and we start calling it a city instead of a village. But that's somewhat an arbitrary assessment. But cities at least in that sense came into being somewhere between 3500 and 3000 BC. So that 3000 BC we have a number of cities beginning to develop. And we mentioned some of those already in connection with an earlier question. And we mentioned some of those sites that you should be aware of. And by about, again, 3500 BC or shortly after that, we have the invention of writing, as well. And so we now move into the period that we might call history. Although, most of our early writing consists primarily of receipts and agricultural lists in storehouses and so forth. So they don't tell us a great deal about the history. But history as we tend to think of it begins somewhere around 3000 BC with what we call the early dynastic period in Mesopotamia from about 3000 BC down to maybe 2200, 2300 BC. We have a number of small city states beginning to develop. Most of them I haven't mentioned. Places like Kish or Uruk or Lagash whose names are important to scholars but they are not mentioned in the Bible. And they don't have that much importance for the biblical story. Ur I mentioned and Uruk I mentioned already as cities that were also very important that continue to be important over a long period of time. It was during this time that the famous legendary King Gilgamesh ruled the city of Uruk somewhere perhaps a little before 2500 BC. There was a real King Gilgamesh. And legends grew up about him and are preserved. Those legends as we have them come from something like 1,000 years after his life. And so they probably aren't very historical. But still, there was actually a King Gilgamesh. And in some ways, this period somewhere around between 3000 and 2500 BC or a little more was sort of the golden age of the Sumerian culture. And it came to an end with the rise of a great king whose name is fairly well known today, Sargon the Great. Sargon, the legend about him is actually similar to Moses. That he was placed in a basket by his mother and floated down the Euphrates River. And he was found by a farmer who was drawing water to irrigate his field and raised by this farmer as his own child and eventually went on to become the cup bearer of the king and eventually overthrew the king and became king himself and took the name Sargon. And Sargon extended the empire to its greatest extent. And under Sargon this Sumerian empire stretched all the way to the Mediterranean Sea, at least in theory. At least that's what they claim. And ships sailed to Tarsus, to Cyprus, to ***Creek. And the Sumerians were trading with places really throughout the gnome world at this point. Unfortunately, after Sargon's death, the empire that he built up didn't last all that long. And so it began to decline. And eventually we come to a period that we call archaeologically today the third dynasty of Ur. And this was the last of the Sumerian dynasties. And I mention it for this reason: Because the third dynasty of Ur comes to an end right around 2000 BC, which is exactly the time that the Bible places Abraham on the scene. Abraham, of course, was from Ur. And this time right around 2000 BC was one of these periods in the history of the world when a large number of people groups or tribes or nations, whatever you want to call them, began to move around all together. And so there was dislocation of a large number of people groups. And really the collapse of the Sumerian empire, the destruction of the city of Ur and many of the other Sumerian cities about this time were something akin to the fall of the Roman Empire later on. We have people groups from outside moving into the area and destroying the civilization that was in place there. And it's tempting, historically speaking, to see the conjunction of these events. The destruction of the Sumerian empire, the destruction of the city of Ur and the fact that just about this time God called Abraham and his family to leave Ur and to relocate to farther up the Euphrates, up in a city called Haran way up to the northwest. And we don't know actually whether the -- you know, whether humanly speaking the movement of Abraham and his family has anything to do with all this dislocation of people and destruction of the civilization that was taking place right about the same time. You know, God sometimes uses all sorts of things to affect his will in the lives of people. And whether God used this event or not, you know, this political event to affect the move of Abraham, it's undoubtedly the case that Abraham lived right about that time, within a few years, 25 years or so, one way or the other. That's certainly within our margin of error of being able to date things at this time. So it's hard to say. But I wanted to mention it because sometimes when we hear the stories of the saints in the Bible, we have a tendency to think of them as Bible class stories, almost like Aesop's Fables. As if they -- they are not true stories that happened to real people. In the case of Abraham and the destruction of the city in which he lived and the relocation of his family, once you see it in the setting of what was happening politically in Mesopotamia, it makes you realize that, you know, these were not fairytale stories. That the events recorded in the Bible are connected to what we think of as secular history, also. And the story of Abraham illustrates that. And so Abraham would have moved to answer your question from Ur to Haran and then from Haran onto the Levant to Canaan or Palestine some time around 2000 BC or shortly thereafter. Right about the same time that everyone else in the ancient areas were moving around and resettling in different areas. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***