02.03. Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia The early stories in the Bible are set in the region commonly called Mesopotamia, the fertile valley of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. According to the biblical accounts, this is the region where the Garden of Eden was located and where civilization developed.¹ But Mesopotamia was also the location for early human rebellions, and these in turn brought about God’s judgment. In the judgment where God destroyed the people in a great flood, he preserved Noah in an ark that eventually came to rest in the mountainous region of the rivers’ headwaters. In another judgment, God destroyed a tower that rebels had built in the plains of lower Mesopotamia.²

Among the peoples of lower Mesopotamia were the Akkadians, the Sumerians and a smaller group, the Chaldeans. Ur, chief city of the Chaldeans, was the hometown of Abraham, a man God chose to be his channel of blessing to the world.³ This would take time, because Abraham had to migrate to a land God would show him, then he had to start a family, and only when this family became a nation would God use it to implement his plan of salvation for people everywhere. The land Abraham came from, ancient Babylonia, is in present-day Iraq. Most Iraqis, being both Muslim and Arab, honour Abraham as a religious figure and as an ancestor. In their religion they follow Islam, a diversion from Christianity started by Muhammad in the seventh century AD; in their ethnicity they hold to a tradition that claims descent from Abraham through Ishmael (in distinction to the Israelite claim of descent from Abraham through Isaac).⁴

Iraq even has a minority who can claim descent from Abraham through Christ. Christians are Abraham’s descendants in a spiritual sense, because they are saved on the basis of faith as he was.⁵ In Iraq, the Christian minority is larger and has more freedom than in some other Middle Eastern countries.

1. Genesis 2:10-14. For maps of Bible lands see pages 38-39 2. Genesis 8:4; Genesis 10:10; Genesis 11:3-9 3. Genesis 12:1-3. Abraham lived during the 20th and 19th Centuries BC.

4. Genesis 16:15; Genesis 17:20-21 5. Galatians 3:6-7; Galatians 3:28-29

Mount Ararat