Nahor

Two men in Genesis carry the name Nahor: the grandfather of Abraham, son of Serug, and the brother of Abraham, son of Terah. Both stand in the Aramean line that flows through Terah's house and reaches into the world of the Aramaean kin from whom Isaac and Jacob would later take their wives. Joshua remembers the family as one that "served other gods" before Yahweh's call of Abraham (Jos 24:2), and Luke locates the elder Nahor inside the genealogy that runs to the Christ.

The Elder Nahor, Son of Serug

The first Nahor belongs to the post-flood genealogy that narrows from Shem toward Abraham. Serug fathers him at thirty and lives two hundred years after his birth (Ge 11:22-23). Nahor himself fathers Terah at twenty-nine and lives a further hundred and nineteen years, "and begot sons and daughters" (Ge 11:24-25). The Chronicler preserves the same sequence in compact form: "Serug, Nahor, Terah" (1Ch 1:26). Luke's genealogy carries the name forward into the line of Jesus: "the [son] of Terah, the [son] of Nahor" (Lu 3:34).

The Younger Nahor, Brother of Abraham

The second Nahor is a son of Terah, named alongside Abram and Haran: "Terah begot Abram, Nahor, and Haran" (Ge 11:26-27). When Terah's sons take wives, "the name of Nahor's wife [is] Milcah, the daughter of Haran" — making her Nahor's niece as well as his bride (Ge 11:29). This Nahor is the Abraham-era figure whom Joshua includes when he reminds Israel that "your⁺ fathers dwelt of old time beyond the River, even Terah, the father of Abraham, and the father of Nahor: and they served other gods" (Jos 24:2). Nahor remains in that ancestral region while Abraham is summoned westward.

Marriage and Descendants

Nahor's house is unusually well documented. By Milcah he fathers eight sons, named in order in the report brought to Abraham: "Uz his firstborn, and Buz his brother, and Kemuel the father of Aram. And Chesed, and Hazo, and Pildash, and Jidlaph, and Bethuel" (Ge 22:20-22). The narrator caps the list with a summary line — "These eight did Milcah bear to Nahor, Abraham's brother" — and then adds four more by his concubine: "Reumah, she also bore Tebah, and Gaham, and Tahash, and Maacah" (Ge 22:23-24). Twelve sons in all stand to Nahor, paralleling the twelvefold structure that will later mark Ishmael and Israel.

The line through Bethuel is the one that re-enters the Abrahamic story. When Abraham's servant meets Rebekah at the well, she is introduced as one "who was born to Bethuel the son of Milcah, the wife of Nahor, Abraham's brother" (Ge 24:15). Her own self-identification echoes the same chain: "I am the daughter of Bethuel the son of Milcah, whom she bore to Nahor" (Ge 24:24). Through this granddaughter, Nahor's house supplies the matriarch of Isaac.

The God of Nahor

A generation later, when Jacob and Laban part at the Gilead heap, the oath formula invokes the deity of both branches of Terah's family: "May the God of Abraham and the God of Nahor judge between us. And Jacob swore by the Fear of his father Isaac" (Ge 31:53). The verse holds the two names side by side without collapsing them — Jacob himself swears only by the God of Isaac. The wording preserves the memory that Nahor's branch had its own religious life, distinct from the worship of Yahweh that came to Abraham's line by call and covenant.