01_VanSeters_copiaaaa_01_25 28/04/15 11:15 Pagina 18 18 JOHN VAN SETERS haviour must have been regarded as a migration for religious rea- sons, although the state as a whole certainly benefited from the goods and income that it produced. After this long sojourn in Teima, urgent matters of the realm called him back to the home base, par- ticularly as it had to do with the growing threat of Cyrus after his successful campaign against the Lydian Kingdom of Croesus, ca. 547-546. For a few years Cyrus was preoccupied with consolidat- ing his rule in his homeland in the east, and it was during this respite that Nabonidus had time to rebuild the temple to Sîn in Harran and the ziggurat in Ur 28. It is not my purpose to engage in a detailed discussion of Nabo- nidus’s career, which may be found in Beaulieu’s book mentioned above 29. The point I want to make is simply that J’s representation of the migration of Abraham’s Aramean family from Ur to Harran, as a first stage, and then the move from Harran to Canaan and even- tually to the southern city of Hebron, was patterned after the mi- gration of Nabonidus to Teima. The similarities are too striking to be coincidental. Whether or not Nabonidus visited Harran on his trip to Teima at least to begin the restoration of this most important northern city remains uncertain, but Harran rapidly experiences a renaissance as the major Aramean city of Syria. Moreover, this identification of Ur and Harran with the Arameans in J’s version of the patriarchal stories could not have been done at a later date be- cause the memory of Nabonidus was soon vilified and his actions obscured, and Ur also went into decline soon after the death of Nabonidus and the establishment of the Persian empire of Cyrus 30. Furthermore, it is clear that J has taken great liberties with the Jacob tradition in which the traditional homeland of Laban the Aramean, the father-in-law of Jacob, lay in Aram just north of Bashan, in the shadow of Mount Hermon, and not in the very distant Harran. Such 28 BEAULIEU, Nabonidus, 109-112. 29 I am much indebted to Beaulieu for reviewing an earlier draft of this essay and offering some helpful suggestions and corrections, as well as in- forming me of some more recent publications. However, he is not responsible for the particular use and interpretation that I have given to the evidence con- cerning Nabonidus’s reign. 30 For the archaeological record of Ur in this period see P.R.S. MOOREY, Ur ‘of the Chaldeans’. A Revised and Updated Edition of Sir Leonard Woolley’s Excavations at Ur (Ithaca, NY 1982) 233-263.