Biblion Bible Commentary
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Terah's family leaves Ur and stops at Haran
Genesis 11:27-32
27 Now this is the history of the generations of Terah. Terah became the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran. Haran became the father of Lot. · WEB
The family sets out for Canaan and settles halfway, and every fact recorded about them is an obstacle to the promise about to be made.
Now this is the history of the generations of Terah. The sixth section of the book opens, and its subject is the family that everything else will come from.
The facts are set down without emphasis and each one is a difficulty. Haran, one of the three sons, died in the land of his birth before his father — a death out of order, leaving a boy named Lot who will be attached to Abram for the next nine chapters. The family is from Ur , a substantial city in southern Mesopotamia. And then the sentence the rest of Genesis is built against: Sarai was barren. She had no child.
That is stated twice in one verse, positively and negatively, which is how Hebrew narrative marks something as final. The promise of an offspring who would bruise the serpent's head Genesis 3:15 has been narrowing for eleven chapters and has now arrived at a woman who cannot have children. Everything that follows for the next fourteen chapters is a story about that sentence.
The journey is described in a way that makes the reader look twice: They went from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan. They came to Haran and lived there. The destination is named — Canaan — and they do not reach it. Haran sits at the top of the great arc of the Euphrates, roughly halfway along the only practical route, and it was a settled city with a life of its own. They set out for the land and stopped at the last comfortable place before the hard part.
Who was leading is worth noting, because the text says Terah took his son. The initiative in this paragraph is the father's, and the destination is already Canaan, which raises the question of how he knew to go there.
The answer is supplied elsewhere in Scripture and it changes how the halt reads. The call came before the move, and it came in Mesopotamia: The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran Acts 7:2. So the family left Ur under a word given to Abram, traveled most of the way, and settled.
And then the paragraph ends with a death: The days of Terah were two hundred five years. Terah died in Haran. The section named for Terah closes with him buried in the place he stopped short of, and the next verse begins the call again, in almost the same words, to his son.
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