Not to be confused with Charan (חרן - with a first-letter chet), the city of Padan Aram to which Av-Ram's family moved in Genesis 11:31, though actually it is very much confusing. Assyrian Kharran = "road" was an important mercantile city on the highway linking Ninveh and Carchemish at the junction of the Damasek (Damascus) route. It stands on the Balikh river, sixty miles west of Tel Halaf, and is still in existence today. It was, in the most ancient times, one of the major shrines of moon-worship, along with Ur and Yericho (Jericho).
But we are dealing with Genesis 11:26, where the name is Haran (הרן - with a first letter Hey), the youngest brother of Av-Ram and Nachor, the sons of Terach; Haran died in Ur Kasdim (Ur of the Chaldees) before Terach took the family to Charan; interestingly the text says he took Av-Ram and Lot but does not mention taking Nachor; and though Nachor's offspring are mentioned in the later stories as being in Padan-Aram, Nachor himself is not. Did he then remain behind? Or did he too die young?
Genesis 11:29 is confusing. It reads "the name of Nachor's wife, Milkah (מִלְכָּה), the daughter of Haran, the father of Milkah and of Yiskah (יִסְכָּה)" which suggests that Nachor married his own niece; clearly there are two different men named Nachor, the one the uncle of the other, which also explains how he was both left behind in Ur and fathered a family in Charan. Haran in this verse is the father of Milkah and Yiskah, but verse 31 says he was also the father of Lot.
The Book of Jubilees 12:9 names Haran as the father of Sarai as well, stating quite specifically that she and Av-Ram were half-brother and half-sister - children of the same father, but different mothers.
1 Chronicles 23:9 has a Haran who was one of the three sons of Shim'i (שִׁמְעִ֗י) of the Beney Gershon, in King David's division of the Beney Levi.
The name possibly means "mountaineer" or "mountain-dweller", from Har (הר) = "a mountain"; etymologically it connects to the mountain shrine of the Egyptian sun-god Hor (Horus), husband of the moon-goddess Eshet (Isis), one of whose titles was Milkah (מלכה), the "Queen of Heaven". Terach likewise has sacred connections, it having been the name of one of the shrines at which the Beney Yisra-El stopped in their desert wanderings (Numbers 33:27). All of which adds plausibility to the argument that the tales of Av-Ram and his family were originally god-tales, and the family not sheikhs but the pantheon itself, later reduced by the needs of monotheism to mere human beings.
Joshua 24:2 makes it abundantly clear that Terach and Nachor and Av-Ram "worshipped other gods" before YHVH took them "ever ha nahar - over the river" (עבר הנהר), a phrase taken as a key signifier of the meaning of the word Hebrew (עברי). The link of Nahar (נהר) to Nachor (נחר) is precisely the same as that from Haran (הרן) to Charan (חרן) - the changing of a single letter where the sound in spoken Yehudit is almost identical, and a phonetic error, or a dialect variation, easily made: think of the variations in English of a simple word like "you": "yow" in Birmingham, "thee" in Somerset, "thou" four hundred years earlier. And then there is the fact that Nachor was originally the river-god, in which capacity he became Inachus or Nakhos to the Greeks of the Peloponnese; where the river in question for Biblical Nachor was the Euphrates, to these latter it became the Inakhos River of Argolis.
Joshua 24:2 makes it abundantly clear that Terach and Nachor and Av-Ram "worshipped other gods" before YHVH took them "ever ha nahar - over the river" (עבר הנהר), a phrase taken as a key signifier of the meaning of the word Hebrew (עברי). The link of Nahar (נהר) to Nachor (נחר) is precisely the same as that from Haran (הרן) to Charan (חרן) - the changing of a single letter where the sound in spoken Yehudit is almost identical, and a phonetic error, or a dialect variation, easily made: think of the variations in English of a simple word like "you": "yow" in Birmingham, "thee" in Somerset, "thou" four hundred years earlier. And then there is the fact that Nachor was originally the river-god, in which capacity he became Inachus or Nakhos to the Greeks of the Peloponnese; where the river in question for Biblical Nachor was the Euphrates, to these latter it became the Inakhos River of Argolis.
From zodiacal references we know that Av-Ram/Av-Raham came to signify the sun-god as the equivalent of Zeus/Jupiter, and Sarai the moon-goddess as the equivalent of Juno/Hera. YHVH as the divinity of the seventh day is similarly identifiable as Saturn/Cronos. Can we therefore read a Semitic family-tree of Terach/Ouranos to YHVH/Cronos to Av-Ram/Zeus?
Which leaves just one last question: who on Earth was Yiskah (יסכה), who never appears again in the entire Tanach? The Hey (ה) ending suggests a daughter rather than a son anyway.
Which leaves just one last question: who on Earth was Yiskah (יסכה), who never appears again in the entire Tanach? The Hey (ה) ending suggests a daughter rather than a son anyway.
The root is either Nasach (נסך) = "to pour out", or Soch (סך), meaning "a booth" from which comes the word Sukah (סכה), the tabernacle inhabited at the festival of Sukkot, but also the place, Sukot, where Mosheh gathered the people before his death to read the law for a second time and bid farewell - the latter of course adding yet one more sacred place connected with the pantheon.
There is in fact one other occurrence of the root, though not as a name: Yisach (יִיסָךְ) in Exodus 30:32, and even that is probably a misreading for Yusach (יִוסָךְ). More likely what we have here is another error of phonetics. As Av-Ram becomes Av-Raham and Sarai Sarah, as Nahar and Nachor and Haran and Charan become confused, so Yiskah was probably the daughter of Haran (i.e. priestess of the mountain shrine of Hor, the sun-god, one of whose epithets was Av-Ram, "exalted father"), but later came to be masculinised into, or simply varied by regional dialect into, Yitschak (יצחק); the same possibly of Esek as well.
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