Genesis 12:4: Seventy-five years old, walking out of the town his father died in

One place name, and it is the one he is leaving. Genesis 12:1 gives the call — go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you — and names nowhere at all; the land is unnamed on purpose, because the point of the call is that he is told to go before he is told where. Verse 4 is the obedience, and it puts a town and an age on it: "Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran." Haran is a caravan town on the Balikh, a shallow tributary that joins the Euphrates about sixty miles south of it, at the top of the arc of watered country that runs from Mesopotamia round to Canaan. It is where Genesis 11:31 stopped. Terah had set out from Ur for the land of Canaan, got this far, settled, and died here at two hundred and five; the previous verse of this chapter is the end of that account and the next thing that happens is his son walking out of the same gate on the same road. Abram does not begin the journey. He resumes it. So the map draws the departure and nothing else, because the verse names nothing else. The arrow leaves Haran to the south-west, down the road toward Aleppo that every caravan out of the Balikh took, and it stops in open country — open-ended, the way the corpus draws a stretch where the text has stopped saying where the traveller is. The verse does not say he arrived anywhere. It says he went, and how old he was when he did. Genesis 12:5 is the arrival, and it is the next page. What the age is doing is worth saying. Terah lived to two hundred and five and Abram is seventy-five, which in this genealogy is not old; he has a hundred years of the story left and Isaac is not born for another twenty-five of them. He is not leaving at the end of a life. He is leaving in the middle of one, from a town where he had a house and people — "the people that they had acquired in Haran", the next verse says — and the road he takes is a road he already knows the first sixty miles of.