01_VanSeters_copiaaaa_01_25 28/04/15 11:15 Pagina 16 16 JOHN VAN SETERS position, so typical of literary works in antiquity 24. The migration, however, does not begin from Babylon itself but from the more southern city of Ur, the heartland of the Chaldeans. The larger fam- ily group of Terah, with his sons and their wives, including Abra- ham and Sarah, were not Chaldean but Aramean, and they moved first of all to Harran. It was only subsequent to Terah’s death that Abraham and his nephew Lot, and their families, migrated in turn from Harran to Canaan, i.e. Palestine. The rest of Abraham’s Aramean relatives remained behind in Harran, and the following patriarchal stories maintain this important Aramean connection to Harran. Now the reason for dwelling on this migration account is the striking parallel that it has with another famous Babylonian mi- gration of the mid-6th century. I refer to the time during the reign of Nabonidus when he departed from Babylonia and made his sojourn for several years in Teima in Arabia. This action of Nabonidus has often been misunderstood and misrepresented both in antiquity, as in the Book of Daniel (chap. 4, where Nebuchadnezzar is substituted for Nabonidus), and in modern scholarship. However, the detailed critical examination of the reign of Nabonidus by Paul-Alain Beaulieu has given us a much clearer understanding of this period of history, and this will be our guide for the remarks that follow 25. 3. The Reign of Nabonidus and the Historical Context of the Yahwist Nabonidus rose to power as king of Babylon in 556 BCE, not as a member of the royal family or as a native Babylonian or Chaldean, but as an Aramean whose family roots were probably in the northern Aramean city of Harran, where his mother was a great devotee and perhaps a priestess of the god Sîn, and to this god Nabonidus was also strongly devoted. It was one of the great passions of Nabo- nidus’s reign to restore the temple of Sîn in Harran, which had been destroyed by the Medes, and also to restore the ancient ziggurat of Sîn in Ur, which had lain in ruins for many years. Both of these ob- jectives were accomplished in the latter part of his reign. 24 VAN SETERS, Prologue to History, 24-42, 86-99. 25 P.-A. BEAULIEU, The Reign of Nabonidus King of Babylon 556-539 B.C. (New Haven, CT – London 1989).