Arabs and Arabic and Their Connection To The Jews-Distant Cousins

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                 

      2nd Millennium BCE--1948 BCE and Abraham's Life Story

Jews have always thought to be people of Judaism, a religion, but they are also a people from the family of Abraham who begot Isaac who begot Jacob. It was that this particular family were of the Ivrim or Hebrews-and were followers of the teachings of Moses;  thus Judaism from the name of the last of the 12 tribes that held together--Judah.   Arabs are a people, specifically from Arabia-thus the name.

Both Hebrew and Arabic are read from the right to the left.

    Hebrew Alphabet 

Both Jews and Arabs are a Semitic people-whose language were from the same root.  Arabic is a cognate of Hebrew. Arabic has borrowed many Jewish-Aramaic words, while the style of the Koran (of mid 7th century( betrays Hebrew influence.  Arabic literature had already begun in the 5th-6th century CE with pre-Islamic poets, among them a Jew, Samuel Ibn Adiya.  

In the Middle Ages, Arabic was the literary  language of a flourishing mixed Hellenistic-Persian culture which profoundly influenced Hebrew philosophy, poetry, and grammar.  from the 9th century, Jews in Moslem countries used Arabic (except for liturgy and religious poetry.)

Many works by eminent Jews who wrote in Arabic were translated into Hebrew, as were numerous writings by Moslem authors, especially those dealing with science and philosophy with most translations made from 1150 to 1350.  Arabic has been the mother-tongue of about a quarter of Israel's Jews, and is recognized as an official language for the Arab minority.  In Safed, Israel where I taught English, junior high students had the choice of learning French or Arabic.  All had to learn English. 

Edom, , Moab, Ammon, Aram-Damascus, Assyria, Israel, Judah, Nabatu tribes, Arlej tribes ???-Egypt, Aramaean tribes,  Philistine city-states; Phoenician states 

 Arabs and Arabia are said to be mentioned in Biblical and Talmudic literature. I have found the ancient names but not Arabic or Arabs.  

 

According to Gen.10, Eber was the forefather of Abraham and Joktan.  Joktan was the ancestor of the southern Arabs. Joktan was the second of the two sons of Eber (Book of Genesis 10:25; 1 Chronicles 1:19) mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. He descends from Shem, son of Noah.

Our recent study of high-resolution microsatellite haplotypes demonstrated that a substantial portion of Y chromosomes of Jews (70%) and of Palestinian Muslim Arabs (82%) belonged to the same chromosome pool (Nebel et al.  The Y haplogroup(male line) of the Jews finds J1-the Cohen gene- most common.  J1 is also found in many Arabs.  Endings attached differ to show one is of Jews and the other Arabs.  A distant relative-a Hochfeld, was J1 or J-M267....  An Arab friend,  Asher, was J1c3d.  

 Abraham also fathered several Arab tribes.  Arabs trace their origin to Ishmael, son of Abraham and Hagar the Egyptian.  Abraham's other son was Isaac by Sarah, his wife and niece.  Abraham and Sarah were family members, but Hagar was the Egyptian handmaid of Sarah.  It was when Sarah hadn't conceived and Abraham needed a son very badly, so Sarah allowed him to take Hagar.  After Ishmael was born (first) and older, Hagar and Sarah had their differences since Ishmael was jealous of Isaac.  They didn't get along, and it got to the point where Abraham had to remove Hagar and Ishmael from them, so took them back close to Egypt and dropped them off.  Thus started the problems.  All this, Moses recorded in the Torah and is a major part of our Jewish history.  

This history was told orally in Arabia by the Jews outside for by-passers to hear as was the custom.  It reached Mohammad's ears who knew Jews to be THE PEOPLE OF THE BOOK, and as we understand, he also wanted to be known this way.  The Arabs used many of the stories they heard (Mohammad was illiterate) and made them their story, too, such as sacrificing Ishmael instead of Isaac as in the Jewish story.  

Jews, freed from Egypt by Moses, were living in Canaan, but by the 1st century CE were found in Arabia as they had suffered from being attacked by the Assyrians and later the Babylonians.  Mohammad (570-632) created Islam with his book, the Koran,  and with that caused Jews to be expelled from Northern Arabia but continued to live in the South until recent times.  Evidently Jews had disappointed the Arabs by not supporting them in an attack against an opponent at a crucial time.                     

     3 Jewish sisters from SW Arabia's Yemen, give an idea of Safia's appearance

Mohammad, born in 570, believed in having 4 wives, and one of his was a young Jewish woman, "Safia. Ṣafīyyah bint Ḥuyayy (Arabic: صفية بنت حيي) who was the tenth wife of Muhammad. Actually, he had a harem of wives.   She was, along with all other wives of Muhammad, titled Umm-ul-Mu'mineen or the "Mother of Believers".  Safiyyah was born in Medina to Huyayy ibn Akhtab, the chief of the Jewish tribe Banu Nadir. Her mother, Barrah bint Samawal, was from the Banu Qurayza tribe. Her maternal grandfather was Samaw'al ibn 'Adiya, a celebrated pre-Islamic Arabian Jewish poet from the Banu Harith tribe.  According to a source, she was married off to Sallam ibn Mishkam, who later divorced her.

When the Banu Nadir were expelled from Medina in 625, her family settled in Khaybar, an oasis near Medina. Her father and brother went from Khaybar to join the Meccan and Bedouin forces besieging Muhammad in Medina during the Battle of the Trench. When the Meccans withdrew Muhammad besieged the Banu Qurayza. After the defeat of the Banu Qurayza in 627 Safiyya's father, a long-time opponent of Muhammad, was captured and executed by the Muslims.  In 627 or early in 628, Safiyya was married to Kenana ibn al-Rabi, treasurer of the Banu Nadir; she was about 17 years old at that time. According to Muslim sources, Safiyya is said to have informed Kenana of a dream she had in which the moon had fallen from the heavens into her lap. Kenana interpreted it as a desire to marry Muhammad and struck her in the face, leaving a mark which was still visible when she first had contact with Muhammad."From the information provided in the Hadith, it can be reasonably concluded that Safiyah did not have a choice in this marriage; rather she was war booty for Muhammad, a not uncommon practice at the time. There do exist passages in ibn Sa'd's "Tabaqat" or lives that indicate that Muhammad gave Safiyah the choice between marrying him and returning to her people:

 He tried to win the Jews over to adopt his new religion in several acts:  in Medina he copied the Jews twice a day prayers by adding a 3rd; introducing a fast day like the Day of Atonement of the Jews;  having a day of public prayer like the Jewish Sabbath;  face Jerusalem during prayer like the Jews, but when they still wouldn't change over, he became hostile.  The Jews of Medina then were either annihilated or expelled.  

We had had a Jewish-Arab symbiosis going on for many centuries. Jews were treated as 2nd class citizens (Dhimmis) but the treatment was better than in Europe, and Jews helped Arabs in some conquests. Arabs were following the Pact of Omar which was , 9th Century CE.  the body of limitations and privileges entered into by treaty between conquering Muslims and conquered non-Muslims. Arabs had reason to develop an anti-European tendency which affected their relationship with the Jews.  Arabs had a rising nationalism develop, an excuse they used to be against Zionism and the creation of Israel on May 14, 1948. 700,000 Arabs were living there in Israel by 1992 .  After the Six Day War of June 1967, another million Arabs came under Israel administration since Israel won the war, a war in which all the Arab countries had attacked Israel.  

Both Arabs and Jews have remained monotheistic, believing only in ONE (1) G-d. Their teachers/messengers are different people, though with Jews being Moses (1391-1271 BCE) son of   Amram and Jochebed of the tribe of Levi and stepgrandson of pharaoh, and Arabs being Mohammad (570-632 CE) son of Abdullah ibn Abd al-Muttalib. son of Abd al-Muttalib ibn Hashim and Fatima bint Amr of the Makhzum Clan. He was married to Āminah bint Wahb. Muhammad was their only offspring and Moshe was the only son of the princess of Egypt. with their messages being quite different.  

Resource:

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia   

www.bu.edu/mzank/Jerusalem/tx/pactofumar.htm#:~:text=Islam%20and%20the%20Jews%3A%20The%20Pact%20of%20Umar%2C%209th%20Century%20CE&text=THE%20Pact%20of%20Umar%20is,Muslims%20and%20conquered%20non-Muslims

https://www.omniglot.com/writing/arabic.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safiyya_bint_Huyayy#:~:text=%E1%B9%A2af%C4%AByyah%20bint%20%E1%B8%A4uyayy%20(Arabic%3A%20%D8%B5%D9%81%D9%8A%D8%A9,the%20%22Mother%20of%20Believers%22.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/banu-i-na-ir

Being a Semite: Who's a Semite Today? What This Means

 Nadene Goldfoot                                         

               Israeli ladies whose native language is Hebrew so they are Semites and probably can speak several other languages as well; English among them.  They could have learned Arabic or French, for starters.                                        

    An IDF soldier can even be a religious Jew, and is definitely a Semite.                                     

    Arab Israelis, also Semites,  are joining the IDF-Sgt. Salah Halil (center) with other Arab members of his unit.  David Copeland / NBC News

Israelis are Semites because they speak Hebrew.  Beautiful Israeli girls decide in 2023-no more "Miss Israel Pageant".  Linor Abargil, who was crowned in 1998 and has since become a lawyer and actress while also embracing Orthodox Judaism, which places an emphasis on modest appearance for women, said in an Instagram post last week that it was time to end the contest.  

“A woman is not a body or a face and no one in the world has the right to criticize us, or to assess our weight to see if it matches what is going on in the market!” she wrote. “People change, the world changes, it is permissible to say we were wrong and move on to a world where women will continue to run the world but only because of who they are, and not because of anything else.”

Jews are Semites.  Am I a Semite?  Semite, name given in the 19th century to a member of any people who speak one of the Semitic languages, a family of languages spoken primarily in parts of western Asia and Africa. The term therefore came to include Arabs, Akkadians, Canaanites, Hebrews, some Ethiopians (including the Amhara and the Tigrayans), and Aramaean tribes. 

        Abram had to go through Babylon.  Haran is up north above Paddan-Aram.  

I was brought up when I read that Abraham came from Ur of Chaldees.  Chaldees was a tribe of Semites, so it's possible that Terah and Abram were also  Chaldeans.    Chaldeans had  entered Ur, a city whose population was not of Semites; which means they spoke a Semitic language while these people of Ur didn't.  The Semites gained the upper hand eventually, became leaders.  By the time Abram was born and raised, things had gone to pot again and he and his father, Terah and wife Sarai left for Canaan.                       

     Caravan at Haran  

They got as far as Haran.  "Terah settled with his son Abraham (at that time called Abram), his grandson Lot, and Abram's wife Sarah (at that time known as Sarai) during their planned journey from Ur Kaśdim (Ur of the Chaldees) to the Land of Canaan".  Abram lived there until he was 75 years old before continuing on to Canaan, in response to the command of God. Although Abram's nephew Lot accompanied him to Canaan, Terah and his other descendants remained in Paddan-Aram.

The earliest written records concerning Harran suggest that the city itself was founded c. 2500–2000 BC as a merchant outpost by traders from the Sumerian city of Ur. Harran was from early on associated with the Mesopotamian moon-god Nanna (later known as Sin) and soon became regarded as a sacred city of the moon.  Do you catch your breath realizing that Abram lived here until he was 75 and yet came out feeling that there was but one g-d of the universe?  I suppose he got to live in peace with people who worshipped a pantheon of gods, Nanna being the king of them all. I still love the story of Terah being an idol maker-must have done this in Haran as well as in Ur;  and Abram accidently breaking one.  Terah asked what happened and Abram answered that the idol was in a fight with the one standing next to him.  Why not? 

 Although Mesopotamia, the western coast of the Mediterranean, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Horn of Africa have all been proposed as possible sites for the prehistoric origins of Semitic-speaking populations, there remains no archaeological or scientific evidence of a common Semitic people. 

Because Semitic-speaking peoples do not share any traits aside from language, use of the term “Semite” to refer to the broad range of Semitic-speaking peoples has fallen out of favour. For this reason, some critics even encourage the removal of the hyphen in the term anti-Semitism to help dispel any pseudoscientific notions of a "Semitic race." They advocate instead for the use of antisemitism to describe the hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious or racial group.  Israelis are again speaking Hebrew, and probably a few can also speak or read some Aramaic as well. Most all male Jews in the world that have been bar-mitzvahed can read Hebrew.  I can say that Jews are from Semitic ancestors.  Many are still Semites (Hebrew speakers).  

Jacob and his 4 wives, Leah and her young sister, Rachel and their 2 handmaids-Bilhah and Zilpah,  and the 12 children.  Here, Joseph is already in Egypt while Rachel is holding Benjamin.                                   

The Bible explains how we came from the Israelites held by the Egyptians for 500 years who were from the original family of Jacob.  DNA proves this to be correct in that the Y haplogroup of J1 is said to be the Cohen gene, descendants of Aaron, brother of Moses.  So Originally, we Israelites, who take our name of Jews from our most southern tribe of Jacob, Judah, are made up of just a few Y haplogroups (male lines of Jews).  So Semites may not have a differing physical make-up, we do share genes.  

In fact, by 2500 BCE Semitic-speaking peoples had already become widely dispersed throughout western Asia. In Phoenicia they became seafarers. In Mesopotamia they blended with the civilization of Sumer. The Hebrews settled with other Semitic-speaking peoples in Canaan or Palestine which the land became after 135 CE.

Resource:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Semite

https://www.timesofisrael.com/miss-israel-beauty-pageant-canceled-after-more-than-70-years/

Learn About Reporters: Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya of Terrorism From Muslim Majority Countries

 Nadene Goldfoot

                                                                  

      Abdel Rahman al-Rashed of Saudi Arabia's al Arabyia News 

News out of the Middle East Arabs has its competitors. Al Jazeera is the most well known with its TV programs already shown on You tube.                                                              

Children play as the old city is covered in snow, in Jerusalem. [Abir Sultan/EPA], from Al Jazeera TV.  

    Al Jazeera is a free-to-air international Arabic news channel based in Doha, Qatar that is operated by the media conglomerate Al Jazeera Media Network. The channel is a flagship of the media conglomerate and hence, is the only single offering to carry the name as simply "Al Jazeera" in its branding.  It is owned by the Qatari government, is one of the world's largest news organizations. It provides extensive news coverage through 80 bureaus on a variety of media platforms in several languages, including  Arabic and English.

Besides Al Jazeera News, there is Abel Rashed on Al Arabiya.  It is a Saudi owned free-to-air television news channel based in Dubai. It is broadcast in Modern Standard Arabic to a pan-Arab audience and also in English.    As a response to Al Jazeera's criticism of the Saudi royal family throughout the 1990s, relatives of the Saudi royal family established Al Arabiya in Dubai in 2002. According to a 2008 profile in The New York Times of Al Arabiya director Abdul Rahman Al Rashed, the channel works "to cure Arab television of its penchant for radical politics and violence". Al Arabiya is said to be the second most frequently watched channel after Al Jazeera in Saudi Arabia.

            Rashed on  Israeli and Palestinian conflict

“It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims. We cannot clear our names unless we own up to the shameful fact that terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly, implemented by Muslim men and women.”
- Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, Saudi journalist in London.

On February 18,  2021, Rashed has written that "In Tehran’s Eyes, Biden is a Pushover...."  If the current US administration wants Iran to return to the negotiating table and discuss the nuclear deal and the war in Yemen, as well as preventing the collapse of the regime in Baghdad, then President Biden needs to flex his muscles....Iranian sanctions are Trump’s greatest gift to his successor, President Biden, who now has the power to increase them and put even more pressure on Tehran’s extremists to force them to return to the negotiating table or risk the collapse of their regime."                                  

Before joining Al Arabiya, Al-Rashed was the editor-in-chief of the pan-Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat, and worked for a long time in Arab broadcasting. He lived for a time in London and was educated in the United States. When he joined the network as general manager in April 2004, he was considered by many as a pro-American choice and has also been an outspoken critic on Islamic fundamentalism. In this interview with FRONTLINE/World's Greg Barker, Al-Rashed addresses criticism that he is pushing a pro-American agenda and talks about Al Arabiya's role as the voice of moderation in the region's news wars. He also takes aim at his rival, Al Jazeera, for what he calls its selective and hypocritical coverage of the Mideast.

They broadcast from Dubai.  Here's why.  "Dubai is just a location. It's not really a place for events. This is the easiest place to set up a TV station, you see. This was important for Al Arabiya, which was established three years ago when Dubai was just starting to grow [as a media hub]. Now they have built a media city with so many TV stations in it. Every single TV station you see around us in this neighborhood is actually beaming to Arabs outside. It doesn't matter whether you are on a boat or you are on the Empire State Building in New York; the location really doesn't matter. It's a matter of technology connecting us with the viewers. But we exist with cameras and correspondents and transmitters and so forth everywhere."

One of the criticisms against you is that you don't really cover Saudi Arabia particularly well because you receive funding from there.

Sure, it's not just funding. It's not the Saudi government only. As a matter of fact, we have difficulties with all the governments in the region. In Sudan, they closed down our office for a while, and you have to appease them to a certain point so they don't close down your office. If they close it completely, you will not be able to have news or views there. So, are you telling me I'm compromising? I am compromising, yes. But you have to understand the circumstances. And every single TV station in the region does this.

Did you interview Hezbollah?

We interviewed a lot of Hezbollah. We interviewed Nasrallah [a Hezbollah leader and Shiite cleric] before the war, obviously. During the war, he tried to take a side, and he decided to take a side against us, indirectly, I would say. We provided heavy coverage of the war, all the way from the borders where the Israeli tanks moved in, all the way to the north near the Syrian-Lebanese borders. We were literally everywhere there.

                                               

  Al Jazeera's Wadah Khanfar, former Director of Media Network

Al Jazeera did not mention anything about how the Americans decided to keep El-Adid as their biggest military base in the region. Complete silence on this -- absolutely. When Americans moved from Saudi Arabia and they went to Qatar, it was never mentioned at all. Total silence now for six years. When Qatar was built by the Israelis during the Lebanese crisis, it was total silence. It was us who brought the news. They [Al Jazeera] never mentioned it at all. All they mentioned was that Qatar gave $200 million to the Lebanese as assistance. I can give you a long list of things that Al Jazeera doesn't show on television, and I can give you also a long list of things I don't show on television about the Saudis. So we are equal in this matter, I think. They never mentioned an Israeli office, which is only probably one mile away from the station -- never, not once. They interviewed Israelis everywhere except in Qatar, you know. And they bashed Mauritanians, Jordanians, Tunisians, for having Israeli offices there. They bashed them literally -- all the time. You can see blood on the street, but they never mentioned the Israelis on Al Jazeera at all.

It's a hypocrisy. The English channel they launched yesterday or the day before yesterday, (IN ARABIC... they call the ones killed Palestine martyrs. In The English one, they call them just dead people. While they are martyrs in one language, they are just dead in the other language. That's hypocrisy.

About American Forces in Iraq

We don't call them occupiers, no. We call them American forces in Iraq, because, legally or technically speaking, the U.N. decision is that the government of Iraq invited them now. Before, we used to call them occupiers, but the U.N. decision changed that. But we allow our people on television -- I'm talking about the discussion panels -- to use whatever language they want. They call them occupiers; they call them freedom fighters -- whatever they want to call them, it's their business. In news, we should stick to the rules, one of which is to remain neutral.

On Israel-Palestine Issue                                                 

     Al Arabyia reporter in Jerusalem 

"To begin with, without resolving the Palestinian-Israeli issue, it’s not possible to address this problem substantively. I see the brunt of the issue as political and not religious: Before Jews and Israelis were our obsession, there was anti-Portuguese sentiment in the eighteenth century, anti-Turkish sentiment in the nineteenth century, and anti-British sentiment in the twentieth century. As the underlying conflicts were resolved politically, the cultural clashes subsided," said Al-Rashed.

 

Al-Rashed also said that "Without a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian issue, prospects to do so are severely constrained. A resolution of that conflict, whether along the lines of the “Arab Peace Initiative” presented by the late King Abdullah or some other approach, will make it much easier to improve relations among Saudis, other Arabs, Jews generally, and Israelis.

 

Reflecting on how to progress relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, Al-Rashed suggested a creative, economic-based incentive that could also work to make the ties between both countries more official, through incorporating Israeli Arabs into the Arab world's work force. "If the question is specifically what can be done now—before the conflict is resolved—to increase connectivity, perhaps a new step would be for Saudi Arabia to formally lift its ban on work visas for Israel’s Arab citizens, and for Israel to welcome and foster Arab Israelis’ professional deployment to any Arab country. From a Saudi perspective, the case for doing so can be made openly in terms of the virtue of empowering all Palestinians, on either side of the Green Line. In seeking out the most qualified Arabs in Israel to work anywhere in the Gulf, moreover, we will inevitably find those who have achieved success in the mainstream of Israel’s economy and society—the tech sector, manufacturing, medicine, and so on. When they travel to the GCC states (Gulf Cooperation Council —ed.), their human networks and professional partnerships will effectively travel with them. Thus, they can serve as a human bridge, as Israel moves toward a political solution, gradually enabling partnerships between the broader populations of both sides."

 

"Normalization with Arab Israelis should be initiated by the Arab League in Cairo, which historically has been the lion’s den of resistance to normalization," continued Al-Rashed. "To them we might say that, after all, many Jewish Israelis hold dual citizenship and are free to work almost anywhere in the region with their non-Israeli passport. Meanwhile, most Arab Israelis are banned from working in Arab countries because they hold only Israeli citizenship. In a similar vein, many Israeli companies are already exporting goods to Arab markets through foreign corporate entities, while Arab farmers in Israel cannot sell their tomatoes in the Gulf market."

Algemeiner noted on November 20, 2013,  that :" Al Arabiya's Chief,      Abdel Rahman al-Rashed ,  wrote: Obama was boosting Iran's confidence to become a nuclear country. " 

We all note that Trump put a stop to that by doing everything in his power, a lot of sanctions, to halt his ability to reach their goal of making atomic weapons to use on the USA and Israel.  

My comment:  Now that Israel and 4 Muslim countries have first made peace pacts with each other, we will see what ventures will take place without raising havoc on Israel's security issues.  First things first, after all:  Israel's security.  

In 2020, The Daily Beast identified a network of false personas used to sneak opinion pieces aligned with UAE government policy to media outlets such as Al Arabiya. They're  critical about Turkey’s role in the Middle East, as well as Qatar and particularly its state media Al Jazeera.  Twitter suspended some of the fake columnists' accounts in early July 2020.

Resource:  https://www.simpletoremember.com/articles/

a/israelpalestinetruth/

https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/newswar/war_rashed.html

https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/2812686/abdulrahman-al-rashed/tehran%E2%80%99s-eyes-biden-pushover

https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4890656,00.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera

https://www.algemeiner.com/2013/11/20/al-arabiya-chief-obama-boosting-irans-confidence-to-become-nuclear-country/

The Semites: Where Did They Come From? How They Are Different From Others

Nadene Goldfoot                                               

                  Terah and Abram looking over the land at Haran, Abram's brother's Home, near the Euphrates River.  

Abraham was the youngest one of 3 important sons of Terah the Ivrite, son of Nahor I;     Nahor II, Haran, and Abram whose ancestry stretched back to Noah of the Great Flood.  He, Nahor and Terah lived in the large and ancient city of Ur of the Chaldees/Kasdim people where Terah was an idol maker and they lived near their shop.  One day Abram, for he was first named Abram, had a realization that idols  were nothing but molded clay and that there was but one god.  He had been alone in the shop as a boy, minding it, and had stumbled into one of the idols, the moon god, Nanna, breaking it.  When his father returned and saw the mess, he was angry, of course, and asked Abram what had been going on.  Quick to think, Abram blamed one of the idols for pushing over that one, relieving himself of the blame.  Terah laughed as his ingenuity and realized also that their belief was poppy-cock!  He had a whole pantheon of gods in his shop.  What would he ever do with them all.  Maybe have a sale?  He had so many that Abram couldn't walk without knocking one over!

Abram was a large boy, with big feet.  Surely he'd grow into them one day.  They had a talk and Abram told him of his dreams about a singular G-d.  They decided to leave Ur and all the pantheon of gods and goddesses and move out West where there were no large cities so that Abram could bring up a family that believed in only one powerful all-inclusive G-d.  They made plans for their future.  By the time they left, Abram had married his niece, Sarai, daughter of his brother, Haran II, who was so beautiful.  

By following the Euphrates River northward, they could reach Haran where Abram's brother had lived.  From there they could take Haran's son, Lot with them, since Haran had recently died in Ur on a visit.  It was Terah's job to take over Haran's fatherly responsibilities now as grandfather.  The trail from there went westward and then south to Canaan, their goal.  It was a good  month's journey to Haran.

After reaching Haran, Terah found a woman to his liking and remarried and had many more children, girls as well as boys, and died in Haran.  So did Nahor, who had married Milcah and had 8 children. Abram and Sarah had Isaac.  Terah died there in the year 2083 BCE., having lived there 205 years,  when Isaac was 35.    Terah had been born in 1883 BCE, by Akkadian math, which would have been about 70 years old by our time.  This caused Abram and Sarah to decide that now was the time to push on and follow Abram's dream of living alone, away from idol-worshippers and their pantheon of gods, for he felt that he must tell others who would listen about his thoughts of how the world was created and how it revolved.  Abram was 75 years old when he left Haran.                                               

Life had been good to Abram as he accumulated much wealth by living in Haran.  He left with all of it.  

By 24 years from their time of leaving Haran, their names would be changed from Abram to Abraham, and Sarai to Sarah because of events that would happen.  

We get to verse 14 in Genesis where Abram is like a general, fighting against Kings like Amraphel of Shinar,  living there.  A fugitive told Abram, the Ivri/  which meant "THE OTHER SIDE"  In other words, the other side of the Euphrates River.  ...that Lot had been taken captive, and Abram took his 318 men with him to rescue Lot. We see that Abram was brave in battle. 

 Figuratively, at this point he was on the other side of a moral and spiritual divide from the people of the world at that point, as all were practicing polytheism of some type or other.  

The name meant that he was a descendant of EBER.  Only Abraham's descendants are called THE IVRIM in the Bible, as they spoke Hebrew, distinguishing them from other people.  

 Eber was the grandson of SHEM, one of 3 sons of Noah.  His descendants form a group of Semitic peoples and tribes, including the Israelites who are therefore, called HEBREWS.  Peoples speaking languages akin to Hebrew are accordingly called Semitic peoples and their languages are Semitic languages.  Being a Semite is language based, not racist-based.  According to the Bible, the nations of Elam, Asshur, Arpachshad and Aram were from Shem.  Eber's father was Arpachshad, one of the sons of Shem.                                                  

In tracing where this Hebrew-speaking clan came from, I find that Arpachshad, ancestor of the Hebrews, is applied as a name to a region- perhaps a province in the vicinity of Mosul, Iraq. 

The area in which Mosul lies was an integral part of Assyria from as early as the 25th century BCE. After the Akkadian Empire (2335–2154 BC), which united all of the peoples of Mesopotamia under one rule, Mosul again became a continuous part of Assyria proper from circa 2050 BCE through to the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire between 612 and 599 BCE. 

Mosul remained within the geopolitical province of Assyria for a further thirteen centuries (as a part of Achaemenid Assyria, Seleucid Syria, Roman Assyria and Sasanian Asōristān) until the early Muslim conquests of the mid-7th century. After the Muslim conquests, the region saw a gradual influx of Muslim Arab, Kurdish and Turkic peoples, although the indigenous Assyrians continue to use the name Athura for the ecclesiastical province.

                                                                      

      Read right to left:  

  Hebrew belongs to the Canaanite group of languages. Canaanite languages are a branch of the Northwest Semitic family of languages.  Today we have more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Malta, in small pockets in the Caucasus as well as in often large immigrant and expatriate communities in North America, Europe and Australasia speaking the Semitic languages, previously also named Syro-Arabian languages, which are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family originating in the Middle East. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen School of History, who derived the name from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis.

 According to Avraham Ben-Yosef, Hebrew flourished as a spoken language in the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah during the period from about 1200 to 586 BCE. Scholars debate the degree to which Hebrew was a spoken vernacular in ancient times following the Babylonian exile when the predominant international language in the region was Old Aramaic.   Hebrew has been used by all Jews in their synagogues, but was almost lost to us as a spoken language until Jews who were returning in the 1880s to Palestine took up the mantle of speaking this almost dead language.  

Hebrew has been revived several times as a literary language, most significantly by the Haskalah (Enlightenment) movement of early and mid-19th-century Germany. In the early 19th century, a form of spoken Hebrew had emerged in the markets of Jerusalem between Jews of different linguistic backgrounds to communicate for commercial purposes. This Hebrew dialect was to a certain extent a pidgin.                                  

 Near the end of that century the Jewish activist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, owing to the ideology of the national revival (שיבת ציון, Shivat Tziyon, later Zionism), began reviving Hebrew as a modern spoken language. Eventually, as a result of the local movement he created, but more significantly as a result of the new groups of immigrants known under the name of the Second Aliyah, it replaced a score of languages spoken by Jews at that time. Those languages were Jewish dialects of local languages, including Judaeo-Spanish (also called "Judezmo" and "Ladino"), Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic and Bukhori (Tajiki), or local languages spoken in the Jewish diaspora such as Russian, Persian and Arabic.  Yiddish, spoken by Eliezer, was a mixture of Hebrew, German and possibly a little Russian/Eastern European.  

Abraham spoke Hebrew.  His neighbors and customers spoke Sumerian.   His family was most likely distinguishable from others in Ur by his accent. He must have been bi-lingual if not tri-lingual.   Sumerian (𒅴𒂠 EME.G̃IR₁₅ "native tongue") is the language of ancient Sumer and a language isolate that was spoken in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq). During the 3rd millennium BC, an intimate cultural symbiosis developed between the Sumerians and the Semitic-speaking Akkadians, which included widespread bilingualism. The influence of Sumerian and the East Semitic language Akkadian on each other is evident in all areas, from lexical borrowing on a substantial scale to syntactic, morphological, and phonological convergence. This has prompted scholars to refer to Sumerian and Akkadian in the third millennium BC as a Sprachbund.  Abraham was born in 1948 BCE.                      

          Left: Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform syllabary, used by early Akkadian rulers.          Right:Seal of Akkadian Empire ruler Naram-Sin (reversed for readability), c. 2250 BC. The name of Naram-Sin (Akkadian: 𒀭𒈾𒊏𒄠𒀭𒂗𒍪: ^DNa-ra-am ^DSîn, Sîn being written 𒂗𒍪 EN.ZU), appears vertically in the right column. British Museum.

Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian as a spoken language around 2000 BC (the exact dating being subject to debate),but Sumerian continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary and scientific language in Akkadian-speaking Mesopotamian states such as Assyria and Babylonia until the 1st century AD. Thereafter it was likely forgotten until the 19th century, when Assyriologists began deciphering the cuneiform inscriptions and excavated tablets left by these speakers.

                                                    

       Hebrew, Arabic and English signs throughout Israel

 Arabic is a Semitic language and therefore shares similarities with other Semitic languages, such as Aramaic and Hebrew. In terms of writing, several languages use the Arabic alphabet, such as Persian/Farsi, Urdu, Pashto and Kurdish.  This happens to vet the Torah, that tells us that Abram first took Sarai's Egyptian hand-maiden, Hagar as wife to produce his first child, since Sarai had been barren.  At that time they were living in a tent, so must have been on the outskirts of Ur.  Ishmael was born. 

 The goal of this story was to stress the relationship between the Israelites and Ishmaelites and to account for the nomadic nature of the Ishmaelites.  Today, Israel's occupants know both languages, and many can include English as well.  It's nothing for many to be mult-lingual, Hebrew Arabic, French, English, etc.  

Resource:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_language