Rabbi Yaakov Yosef Reinman: Episode #12 – The Chosen People
In this episode, Rabbi Reinman describes Ur Kasdim, the city in which Abraham grew up, and follows him on his journey to Harran.
Deep in antiquity, the Imperial Quadrant was in the process of emerging in the region of the world known as the Middle East. Villages and towns formed small states for economic cooperation and common defense. Governments in these ministates collected taxes, built irrigation systems and promoted local industries such as textiles, metalwork, pottery and construction projects. They also built walled central cities to serve as administrative centers and places of refuge in case of war. The heads of the governments of the city-states ruled as hereditary kings.
Eventually, one of the city-states among a group emerged as the most powerful among them and organized the rest of the city-states into a single empire under its own leadership. The king of that city-state became the emperor. Empires arose in the fertile Nile valley of Egypt and in Mesopotamia in the land between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. The Egyptian empire was fairly stable for thousands of years, but the Mesopotamian empires were constantly in flux. Imperial power passed from Sumerians to Akkadian to Babylonians to Assyrians to Persians.
The important Sumerian city of Ur, where Abraham grew up, was a port on the Persian Gulf and a center of industry and commerce. It was also the site of the greatest pagan temple in the Sumerian empire, known as the Ziggurat of Ur. The Ziggurat was a huge rectangular pyramid made of mud bricks with a flat top. A staircase led to the terrace atop the pyramid and to a smaller pyramid that sat there. Another staircase led to a higher terrace on which there stood the temple to the pagan god. The structure was two hundred feet by one hundred and fifty feet at the base and rose to a height of one hundred feet, a ten-story building…
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