Was Abraham called in Ur or in Haran?

Genesis itself places a call in Ur. When Terah’s family left Ur of the Chaldees, they set out “to go into the land of Canaan” (Genesis 11:31), a goal that makes best sense if God had already spoken. Later God tells Abram, “I am the Lord that brought thee out of Ur of the Chaldees” (15:7), and the prayer in Nehemiah 9:7 says that God chose Abram and brought him out of Ur. So when Stephen says that God appeared to Abraham in Mesopotamia before he lived in Haran, he is drawing on Genesis, not contradicting it.

Genesis 12:1 gives the words of the call only after the move to Haran, but it does not say where they were first spoken. The King James translators rendered it “Now the Lord had said unto Abram”, looking back to the call in Ur, and the medieval Jewish scholar Aben Ezra read it the same way. Others, such as Rashi, take it as a fresh word given in Haran after Terah’s death. On that reading God called Abram twice: first in Ur, as Stephen says, and again in Haran. The second call adds the command to leave “thy father’s house”, which Stephen’s wording of the first call lacks (Acts 7:3). John Gill thought two calls ‘highly probable’. Either way, Genesis and Stephen agree that God first called Abram in Ur.

Two distinct calls

Adam Clarke reports the chronologer William Hales’s view that the two calls differ in their wording. In the first, as Stephen gives it, Abram is to go to ‘a land’ not yet named; in the second he is to go to ‘the land’, and now he must leave his father’s household as well. Clarke himself thought that Terah’s family left Ur because of a divine warning, and that God repeated the call at Haran.

Terah led the move, Abram had the call

Genesis 11:31 makes Terah the leader of the move from Ur, which some take to mean that the call came later. Albert Barnes answers that God had commanded Abraham, and in his providence Terah was moved to take the family towards Canaan. The head of a household led its journeys, even when the call had come to his son.

Whether Genesis 12:1 looks back to the call in Ur or records a second call in Haran cannot be settled from the grammar, and Christian commentators have held both views. Keil and Delitzsch went further and held that Abram was first called in Haran: Genesis 15:7 says only that God brought him out of Ur, which could mean guidance without a spoken call. Most commentators, with Stephen and Philo, place a call in Ur. Genesis does not say how God first appeared to Abram; Stephen speaks of “The God of glory” but gives no details.