“You are the LORD God, who chose Abram and brought him out of Ur of the Chaldeans and named him Abraham.” (NIV, Nehemiah 9:7)
In 2003, just after the US-led attack on Iraq, we traveled as a medical relief team to southern Iraq around the Basra area. As we knew Ur was nearby, we took a day off and went on a search for the proposed site just out of Nasiriya. We located it and got close enough for a photo.
The ziggurat of Ur is barely seen in the middle of the photo on top of the hill. We got no closer. The area was guarded by our soldiers.
How peculiar our boys were sent around the world to fight a war and ended up protecting Abraham’s birth place and the preserved monument to the moon god, Nanna. We surrendered to the superior force and retreated.
A short way out of Ur we encountered a man and a woman herding camels. The man was walking and his beautiful, much younger wife (or daughter) rode their camel. When they saw us as we stopped to gawk, the woman dismounted, and they both motioned for us to come over for a camel ride, for a price of course.
But two interesting things struck me. First, the man allowed the young woman to ride while he walked. Second, the man was severely disabled. A close-up of his lower legs revealed marked muscle atrophy and foot drops.
As a neurologist, I can firmly state he was afflicted by severe sensorimotor neuropathy. Yet he insisted the young woman ride. I considered this a noble act on his part.
More than 4000 years have passed since Abraham departed Ur at the Lord’s command. Yet we know that man, that is, every man and woman, is created in the image of God. Perhaps of some Abraham’s DNA still roams the area around Ur.
