Haran meaning

There are two completely different Hebrew names that have ended up as the similar name Haran in English. We'll call them Haran I (הרן) and Haran II (חרן). In Hebrew these two names are quite different but still clearly associated: in Genesis 11:31 they appear ostensibly juxtaposed.

• The name Haran I, spelled הרן (haran), belongs to the brother of Abraham, who "died" in Ur of the Chaldeans, before the arch-family famously departed. The family's tradition was continued in Mesopotamia by the third brother Nahor, who stayed behind.
• The name Haran II, spelled חרן (charan), belongs to a noted city to the far west of Ur, where the family settled, where Abraham became very wealthy and father Terah died.

The two Biblical Harans represent a crucially important phase on the historical stage, and particularly in the history of Old Europe. See further below, after a look at the etymology of both names, for a brief discussion of the historical Harans.

Meaning

Mountainous, Mountaineer

Etymology

From the noun הר (har), hill or mountain.

Related names

• Via הר (har): Aaron, Ararat, Armageddon, Beth-haram, Hara, Hararite, Hor, Horam

The name Haran I is assigned two times in the Bible:

• A son of Terah and brother of Abraham (and thus a half-brother of Sarah — Genesis 11:26). This Haran is the father of Lot.
• A Levite of the family of Gershon (1 Chronicles 23:9).

The name Haran is probably derived of the word הר (har) meaning hill or mountain:

The name Haran's post-fixed nun may serve as a personification (Hill Guy).

For a meaning of the name Haran, both BDB Theological Dictionary and Jones' Dictionary of Old Testament Proper Names propose Mountaineer. NOBSE Study Bible Name List has Mountainous.

Meaning

Freedom, Central Fire

Etymology

From the root חרר (harar), to be a central hub of heat.

Related names

• Via חרר (harar): Ammihur, Ben-hur, Beth-horon, Harhaiah, Harhur, Hiram, Hor-haggidgad, Horite, Hur, Hurai, Huram-abi, Huri, Naharai, Nahor, Pashhur, Pi-hahiroth

The name Haran II is assigned two times in the Bible:

• The city where Abram's family settled (Genesis 11:31), after which, perhaps, was named the modern town of Harran in southeastern Turkey. Stephen refers to this Haran (Χαρραν; Charran) in his sermon to the High Council in Jerusalem (Acts 7:2 and 7:4).
• A son of Caleb and Ephah (1 Chronicles 2:46).

The name Haran II probably comes from the verb חרה (hara), to burn, or חרר (harar), to be hot or even to be free:

For a meaning of the name Haran II, Jones' Dictionary of Old Testament Proper Names reads Very Dry. BDB Theological Dictionary sees a connection with an Assyrian word that means Road or Path, and suggests the name stems from Haran's location on a trade route.

Here at Abarim Publications we surmise that this name Haran identifies it as the proverbial center or apex of the world: not so much a geographic location but rather the most sophisticated and advanced culture anywhere, and means Central Fire or even Freedom — the divine phenomenon that the Greeks would later mark as the democratic ideal: ελευθερια (eleutheria), freedom-by-law.

Here at Abarim Publications we confidently reject the idea that stories can only be true when they are historical and biographical. Instead, we hold that a well-crafted metaphor can contain a great deal of useful information, and a fractal that utilizes the laws of nature may in fact contain the whole of reality (John 21:25). Said otherwise: the Bible is not historical or anecdotal but algorithmical and lawful. The Bible is true not because its stories really happened (once upon a time long ago), but because they really happen, always wherever the conditions are the same. The Bible does not speak of events but of algorithms.

The many characters of the Bible are not individual humans who lived uniquely at specified times in the past. And the story of the Bible is not the military and political history of mankind, as it unfolds under the tyranny of time (for more on why the story of the Bible certainly does not progress along the axis of time, see our article on Pyrrhus).

Instead, the Bible tells the story of consciousness: the story of how Mind makes mind as an imitation that imitates, and encourages it to likewise say "I AM" (Genesis 4:26, Exodus 3:14) and fills it with all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge so that every single mind has a unique perspective on the Whole, but joins all others in recognition of the Whole, which perfectly reflects the nature of the Creator (Romans 1:20, John 1:1-3, Colossians 2:3, Ephesians 4:3-6, Hebrews 1:3).

The story of the Bible tells of the anatomy of the human mind. Like a giant smart-swarm — like ants that build an ant-hill or bees that build a beehive, without design or leadership but simply from individuals doing their own thing in the world — humans create the human world: a continuously dynamic world whose nature and designs far exceed the understanding of any individual. The Bible tells how the Logos emerged from within the socially evolving and developing consciousness of animal kind — from the exchange of beastly howls and grunts to the first words, the first stories, the first symbols (see our article on the name YHWH).

Then arose trade, first local but then as a global web of exchange that no single human or tribe controlled, because the human smart-swarm cannot be controlled. Observations met hopes and fears that bubbled up from deep within the narrator's own subconscious. Stories began to piggy-back on goods and services and bounced between centers of production like thoughts in a global brain. These birthed narrative fashions, tropes and archetypes, all according to the converging tastes of a global audience, which congealed like mental genes and began to govern mankind's self-conscious narrative, like an unborn child within a spiritual womb (Isaiah 9:6).

The Biblical story starts with Adam, but not as some distant "individual" ancestor, but rather as the most basic definition of what it is like to be a human being. In practical terms: all of us started life as a single-cellular creature called zygote, entirely indistinguishable from any other living earthling. Every single one of us starts life "in Adam" and makes their life choices according to the pattern laid out in the Torah.

At a very early stage, we all inevitably eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. We all hit the flood of Noah, where most of "us" dies (yes, singular) and some of it survives into what we call human consciousness. All of us succumb to the temptation to build a local tower of Babel (with polytheism and a lust for centralized power as the inevitable result), but some of us enter the Abrahamic covenant (where Logos meets man, and the two begin to consciously converse: Genesis 15:1) and become global and universal in scope, with monotheism as the inevitable result: the idea that the whole universe is a unified machine that runs on laws that can be discovered, studied and utilized. These laws accumulate in Moses. A united kingdom follows, of which the beloved (albeit not yet incarnated) Logos is the eternal king.

Then, the Logos incarnates into human flesh, and like the decentralized and monotheistic Abraham who lived like a stranger in a polytheistic and centralized world, the Logos exists among us in human form (see Exodus 4:22), and increases in greatness until the entire human population and all of life on earth exists secure under the governing umbrella of wisdom, universal cooperation, freedom and peace (Isaiah 9:6).

And none of this has anything to do with anybody's religion (Revelation 21:22).

Here at Abarim Publications we strongly suspect that the first part of the story of Abraham's journey tells how the world's most sophisticated center of wisdom journeyed from prehistoric Middle East to Neolithic Eastern Europe, where from 5500 to 4500 BC the Vinča and Varna cultures were the world's first in bronze production, and most significantly, the pioneers of what would later be the alphabet, quite literally the dry-land of the human mind that produced all complex societies, and without which there would not have been a famous Greek culture or even a Roman one.

What caused the collapse of Old Europe isn't clear, but Abraham left Haran (חרן, charan) and journeyed on to Egypt first and finally settled in Canaan, which means Trade. This name has always been mostly associated with geographic Palestine, but it much rather denotes the vast network of international trade that for a time was centered in Old Europe. Much has been said about the "power" and "rule" of the ancient European kings, but their most significant achievement was rather the Pax Europaea from which could emerge the modern world. All this implies that King Melchizedek embodies the Kings of Old Europe, and that Jerusalem was named after his Salem the way New York in the US was named after the original York in Britain.

One of the oldest Greek stories we have (which originated in deep antiquity but was most famously written down by Apollonius of Rhodes in the 3rd century BC) tells of Jason (means Healer) and the Argonauts (means Men of the Silver Ship; see αργυρος, arguros, silver or money, and ναυς, naus, ship or government; see Mark 4:36), who sailed up the river Ister (now the Danube) and there encountered the magnificent world of the Sing, a Thracian tribe that appears to have been named after the Celtic word for ring or circle (akin our English word "thing", meaning assembly or council; and see our article on κυριος, kurios, lord or councilman). These Sing lent their name to Singidunum (= City of Rings, City of Councils), what later became Belgrade (= White City).

At Singidunum, Jason and the Argonauts turned up the river Sava (whose original Celtic name meaning It Waters corresponds to the Slavic root "sav-", meaning "all" and its derivative savet, meaning "counsel/council" (sovet hence soviet in Russian) and made it all the way to the city later known as Ljubljana (= City of Love, from ljub, love), the capital of modern Slovenia.

The Hebrew equivalent of the Celtic "sav-", meaning "all", is כל (kol), meaning "all", from which comes the noun כלה (kallah), meaning bride. When Paul spoke of "foolish Galatians", "before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified" (Galatians 3:1), no informed person in his original audience would have missed the hint. And when John the Revelator spoke about the "healing of the nations" (Revelation 22:2), nobody in his original audience would have missed the obvious nod to Jason the Healer and his Economic Council, and the City of Councils and the City of Love they had encountered in Celtic Europe.

Note that the Balkans were since deep antiquity known as the Mountain Ridge, from the Thracian word "saimon" (means mountain ridge), which was adapted into the mythological king Haemus, whose name means Blood-Man, from the Greek word αιμα (haima), meaning blood; and note that the name Adam closely corresponds to the Hebrew word דם (dam), meaning blood. Like Adam, the haughty king Haemus of the Thracians misbehaved, for which the gods turned him into a mountain, namely Haemus Mons (this is obviously closely comparable to the story of Seir, the mountain of Edom). Also turned into a mountain was the wife of king Haemus, namely queen Rhodope, whose name means Rose River, which is an obvious reference to social enlightenment; see our article on Tigris and Rhoda and Rhodopis, Cindy and Cinderella).

In the time of Apollonius (and see our article on the many Hebrew roots of Greek), no informed scholar would have missed the obvious nod to the prophet Haggai (from the verb חוג, hug, to make a circle), who wrote in the 6th century BC, and through whom YHWH revealed that "the desire of all nations shall come" (Haggai 2:7). In turn, when the evangelists mentioned Akeldama, or the Field of Blood, very few would have missed the paronomastic reference to Haemus Mons. And when John the Revelator spoke of the Plain of Armageddon, likewise, few would have missed the pun.

One of the great archetypal stories that naturally formed within the global theatre of narrative is the story of the Father with the Three Sons, which tells of the basic structure of the human mind: the rational conscious, the emotive subconscious and a kind of mental bedrock where "forgotten" memories linger and exert a lasting influence upon the land of the living. The Greek version tells of Kronos and his three sons Zeus, Poseidon and Hades.

The Semitic version of this story, however, is not simply linear but forms a giant fractal, with wheels within wheels. The base story is told three times, mostly similar but with a mild broken symmetry driving the meta-narrative ever on:

• From Adam and sons Cain, Abel and Seth to
• Noah and sons Shem, Ham and Japheth to
• Terah and sons Abraham, Nahor and Haran.

In each instance, the lesser son dies or is exiled, the greater son gets all the goods and glory (and continuation), and the middle one is forgiven and is absorbed by the greater one. The temple is organized according to the same structure, with the greater son the actual building, the lesser the outer court and the middle one the inner court of the priests. Also the three great Exoduses of the Bible follow the same pattern: The glorious one from Persia, the troubled one from Egypt, and the one we rather not talk about, the one from Europe (also see Matthew 25:14-30).

The Nicene Creed mysteriously speaks of Jesus descending into the abyss or hell, which is a twist not told in the gospels and only perhaps somewhat hinted at in 1 Peter 3:18-19. The idea that someone could descend alive into the realm of the dead, have adventures there and emerge victoriously, is Greek but not at all Hebrew. Instead, the Hebrews speak of Exoduses, and the escape from death-by-bondage (Ephesians 2:1). The story of Paul as told by Luke is clearly designed to cater to the literary sensitivities of a Greco-Roman audience; with Paul's elaborate shipwreck near Malta closely corresponding to the Odyssey and Aeneid, the destruction of Jerusalem with the fall of Troy, and his journey along the "circle of Illyria" with a descent into hell (also see our article on εννεα, ennea, meaning nine).