Erech

• near Noah’s home of Aram

78:7.5But Noah re­ally lived; he was a wine maker of Aram, a river set­tle­ment near Erech. He kept a writ­ten rec­ord of the days of the river’s rise from year to year. He brought much ridicule upon him­self by go­ing up and down the river val­ley ad­vo­cat­ing that all houses be built of wood, boat fash­ion, and that the fam­ily an­i­mals be put on board each night as the flood sea­son ap­proached. He would go to the neigh­bor­ing river set­tle­ments ev­ery year and warn them that in so many days the floods would come. Fi­nally a year came in which the an­nual floods were greatly aug­mented by un­usu­ally heavy rain­fall so that the sud­den rise of the wa­ters wiped out the en­tire vil­lage; only Noah and his im­me­di­ate fam­ily were saved in their house­boat.

• Mesopotamia city state

78:8.9Af­ter the breakup of this Kish con­fed­er­a­tion there en­sued a long pe­riod of con­stant war­fare be­tween these val­ley cities for su­prem­acy. And the ruler­ship var­i­ously shifted be­tween Sumer, Akkad, Kish, Erech, Ur, and Susa.

78:8.10About 2500 B.C. the Sume­ri­ans suf­fered se­vere re­verses at the hands of the north­ern Suites and Gui­tes. La­gash, the Sume­rian cap­i­tal built on flood mounds, fell. Erech held out for thirty years af­ter the fall of Akkad. By the time of the es­tab­lish­ment of the rule of Ham­murabi the Sume­ri­ans had be­come ab­sorbed into the ranks of the north­ern Semites, and the Mes­o­po­ta­mian And­ites passed from the pages of his­tory.