HARAN. — An ancient city of northwestern Mesopotamia. Called Harranu by the Assyrians, Kāpēa by the Greeks, and Carrae or Carrhae by the Romans, it appears as H. in the Vulgate. Situated on the Balih River, it lay at the center of the great arc that the Euphrates describes toward the Mediterranean, a day’s journey southeast of Edessa, in a fertile region where Assyrian kings loved to hunt lions and elephants.
The name of H. has a special fascination, for it evokes the history of the Patriarchs. Abraham (v.), coming from Ur, lived there for many years before setting out for Canaan (Gen. 11:3 ff.; 12:4 ff.); there unfolded the tender scenes of Rebecca and Rachel at the well of H., and the flight of Jacob (Gen. 24:10; 27:43; 28:10; 29:4).
Thanks to its geographical position, it was a great emporium and a hub of important trade routes coming from Asia Minor, Assyria and Babylonia, Syria and Phoenicia. Significant is the Assyrian name Harranu, meaning “road,” which may be written with a cuneiform sign representing a crossroads. It never wielded great political influence, but owed its splendor to commerce and, no less, to its role as a major cultural center of the moon god Sin, who possessed there the magnificent temple Eḫulḫul.
Since no excavations have ever been conducted at the site of H., its history is known only from abundant literary sources. The origins of H. are unknown. In cuneiform documents, H. may already be mentioned in the tablets of Assyrian merchants in Cappadocia (early 2nd millennium B.C.). A 14th-century B.C. treaty between the king of Mitanni and the king of the Hittites shows that H. then belonged to the Kingdom of Mitanni. Later (13th–11th centuries B.C.), it came under Assyrian rule, in which it enjoyed certain privileges. As in the narratives of Genesis, so too in Assyrian documents of this period, numerous Aramaic tribes are attested grazing their flocks in the vicinity of the city. In the subsequent Aramaean period (11th–9th centuries B.C.), the sanctuary of Sin increasingly extended its influence over all Syria, so that when the fortress of H. again fell to the advance of Assyrian expansion (9th–7th centuries B.C.; cf. Is. 37:12), it became the residence of an Assyrian governor, and Assyrian emperors did not disdain to be crowned in the temple of Sin or to consult its oracle. The importance the Assyrians attached to this city is evident from the fact that, after the destruction of Nineveh (612 B.C.), the last Assyrian king chose H. as his capital and sought to restore his kingdom from there; but in 610 B.C., H. and its temple were destroyed by the Medes. Only the last Babylonian king, Nabonidus, a native of H. and probably a former priest of Sin, rebuilt the city and temple in 555 B.C., and they appear to have endured for a long time thereafter. Trade suffered no harm from these political vicissitudes, for Ezek. 27:23 describes a lively traffic between H. and the Phoenician cities.
The crushing defeat that the Roman consul Crassus suffered at the hands of the Parthians near H. in 53 B.C. made the city infamous among the Romans for many centuries. Nor was its reputation improved when, in 217 A.D., the emperor Caracalla, after visiting the temple of H., was assassinated not far from the city. In the Christian centuries, H. remained essentially a pagan city in which Christianity could barely maintain itself. The city, which had survived the conquests of the Persians, Seleucids, Romans, and Parthians, continued to exist even after the Arab conquest. Today, however, it is but a small village, still preserving the ancient name in the form Harrân.