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Although doubters will always scoff at the truth of God's Word, fewer and fewer now doubt the Bible's historical basis.
by Mario Seiglie
"And Terah took his son Abram and his grandson Lot, . . . and they went out with them from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to the land of Canaan" (Genesis 11:31).
A century ago, German liberal critic Theodor Nöldeke questioned the historical existence of Abraham and of "Ur of the Chaldeans." He, along with others, regarded the Genesis account of Abraham and his descendants as fictional. Yet this century has brought to light an enormous amount of evidence to back the biblical record of Abraham.
In 1922 Leonard Woolley thoroughly excavated the city of Ur in southern Iraq and found it had been a thriving metropolis around 2000 B.C., precisely the time of Abraham. Based on his findings, Woolley even drew a map of the city that showed its orderly boulevards and made up blueprints of spacious dwellings with indoor baths. Classrooms were excavated that yielded schoolchildren's tablets with lessons on grammar and arithmetic still visible. In addition, variations on the name Abraham were found that dated to a century or two after his death.
The International Standard Encyclopedia, rejecting Nöldeke's theory that Abraham was a mythical figure, concludes: "From the archaeological evidence it is apparent that Abraham was the product of an advanced culture, and was typical of the upper-class patriarch of his day: His actions are set against a well-authenticated background of non-biblical material, making him a true son of his age who bore the same name and traversed the same general territory, as well as living in the same towns, as his contemporaries. He is in every sense a genuine Middle Bronze Age person, and not a retrojection of later Israelite historical thought, as used to be imagined . . ." (Vol. 1, 1979, p. 17).
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