Paddan Aram
early Aramean kingdom in Mesopotamia
Paddan Aram or Padan-aram (Hebrew: פַדַּן אֲרָם, romanized: Paddan ʾĂrām) was a biblical region referring to the northern plain of Aram-Naharaim. Paddan Aram in Aramaic means the field of Aram, a name that distinguishes the flatland from the mountainous regions to the north and east. In the Book of Genesis, Abraham, the patriarch of the Abrahamic religions, describes Aram as "my land" (Genesis 24:4).
In the Hebrew Bible
Paddan Aram designates the area of Harran in upper Mesopotamia. "Paddan Aram" and "Haran" may be dialectical variations regarding the same locality as paddanū and harranū are synonyms for "road" or "caravan route" in Akkadian.
Padan-aram or Padan appears in 11 verses in the Hebrew Bible, all in Genesis. Adherents of the documentary hypothesis often attribute most of these verses to the priestly source and the remainder to a later redactor.
The city of Harran, where Abraham and his father Terah settled after leaving Ur of the Chaldees, while en route to Canaan, according to the Genesis 11:31, was located in Paddan Aram, that part of Aram-Naharaim "Aram between the Rivers" that lay along the Euphrates. Abraham's brother Nahor settled in the area. Abraham's nephew Bethuel, son of Nahor and Milcah, and father of Laban and Rebecca, lived in Padan-aram.
“Paddan Aram” enters the record as early Aramean kingdom in Mesopotamia. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Paddan, Aram and early can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1257454. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Paddan Aram” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.