Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Peter Kirk"<peter_kirk AT sil.org>]

Dear John,

You wrote (in part):

     29:4 Jacob asked the shepherds, "My brothers, where are you
     from?" "We're from Haran," they replied. He said to them,
     "Do you know Laban, Nahor's grandson? "Yes we know him."
     
     A reasonable person would conclude that Genesis placed
     Abraham's homeland ("my country" "the country I came from")
     near Haran.

You seem to be equating Abraham's homeland, Ur Kasdim with the place 
where Laban lives in Genesis 29:4. That verse strongly suggests that 
Laban lives in Haran or its immediate vicinity, so close that 
shepherds from Haran knew him and watered their sheep in the same 
place. Unfortunately for your theory, any suggestion that Ur was close 
to Haran makes a complete nonsense of 11:31. No, we are forced to 
conclude that Laban and his family had also moved from Ur to Haran or 
its neighbourhood, though maybe not at the same time as Terah, Abraham 
and their party. That leaves us with no way of telling where they had 
come from, to contradict the understanding of later readers that Ur 
Kasdim was in southern Mesopotamia.

Peter Kirk