Between Ur and Canaan lies the Syrian Desert. A 200,000 square mile barrier of arid rocky wasteland, gravel steppe, and mountain ranges.
Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot (Haran's son), and his daughter-in-law Sarai, his son Abram's wife, and they set out together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to the land of Canaan.
— Genesis 11:31a CSB
Taking the direct route from Ur in the east (located in what is now southern Iraq) to the land of Canaan in the west (which corresponds roughly to south Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine) was akin to suicide. The only way for Terah and his family to navigate safely through the unforgiving landscape was to travel around the desert's edges.
Five major rivers—the Tigris, Euphrates, Orontes, Jordan, and the Nile (in anti-clockwise order)—hem in the Syrian desert to the east, north, and west, creating a region historians call the Fertile Crescent. This region stretches from modern-day Kuwait and the Persian Gulf all the way up and round and down to Egypt’s Nile delta.
Attempting to reach the land of Canaan simply meant following the Euphrates upstream. Just doing that would have taken Terah's family almost three-quarters of the way around the desert towards the land of Canaan—a distance of around 600 miles—before they would have had to leave its banks.
But when they came to Haran, they settled there.
— Genesis 11:31b CSB
An abandoned dream
As Terah, Abram, Sarai, and Lot near the point where they would have needed to walk away from the Euphrates to the west or southwest to reach the land of Canaan, Terah instead turns them north. He leads them to Haran, a town whose modern-day equivalent, Harran, sits close to the southern border of Turkey.
If you remember, Haran was the name of Terah's youngest son, who died in Ur.
Surely that's not a coincidence?
I can imagine the conversations this family of four had after hearing about a town with the same name as their dead son/brother/father.
Shall we visit?
It's not far.
If we don't, we might not get another chance.
We can afford to take a quick detour.
I wonder what it's like?
Haran would have been insufferable after visiting a town named after him.
The author of this part of Genesis doesn’t give us Terah’s reasoning for abandoning his original destination. But, in the last verse of chapter 11, he does share with us that Terah never moved on from Haran.
Terah lived 205 years and died in Haran.
— Genesis 11:32 CSB
Terah lived as long as his grandfather, Serug, had. Life was obviously easier in Haran than it had become in Ur, but he died in Haran. He never makes it to the land of Canaan.
