Nahor (Old Testament)

• Abraham’s lukewarm brother

93:5.4Terah and his whole fam­ily were half­hearted con­verts to the Salem re­li­gion, which had been preached in Chaldea; they learned of Mel­chiz­e­dek through the preach­ing of Ovid, a Phoeni­cian teacher who pro­claimed the Salem doc­trines in Ur. They left Ur in­tend­ing to go di­rectly through to Salem, but Na­hor, Abra­ham’s brother, not hav­ing seen Mel­chiz­e­dek, was luke­warm and per­suaded them to tarry at Ha­ran. And it was a long time af­ter they ar­rived in Pales­tine be­fore they were will­ing to de­stroy all of the house­hold gods they had brought with them; they were slow to give up the many gods of Mes­o­po­ta­mia for the one God of Salem.

93:5.5A few weeks af­ter the death of Abra­ham’s fa­ther, Terah, Mel­chiz­e­dek sent one of his stu­dents, Jaram the Hit­tite, to ex­tend this in­vi­ta­tion to both Abra­ham and Na­hor: “Come to Salem, where you shall hear our teach­ings of the truth of the eter­nal Cre­ator, and in the en­light­ened off­spring of you two broth­ers shall all the world be blessed.” Now Na­hor had not wholly ac­cepted the Mel­chiz­e­dek gospel; he re­mained be­hind and built up a strong city-state which bore his name; but Lot, Abra­ham’s nephew, de­cided to go with his un­cle to Salem.

• Abraham’s lukewarm brother

93:9.4But Abra­ham was not long to be de­terred in his mis­sion as the suc­ces­sor of Mel­chiz­e­dek. Soon he made con­verts among the Phil­is­tines and of Abim­elech’s peo­ple, made a treaty with them, and, in turn, be­came con­tam­i­nated with many of their su­per­sti­tions, par­tic­u­larly with their prac­tice of sac­ri­fic­ing first-born sons. Thus did Abra­ham again be­come a great leader in Pales­tine. He was held in rev­er­ence by all groups and hon­ored by all kings. He was the spir­i­tual leader of all the sur­round­ing tribes, and his in­flu­ence con­tin­ued for some time af­ter his death. Dur­ing the clos­ing years of his life he once more re­turned to He­bron, the scene of his ear­lier ac­tiv­i­ties and the place where he had worked in as­so­ci­a­tion with Mel­chiz­e­dek. Abra­ham’s last act was to send trusty ser­vants to the city of his brother, Na­hor, on the bor­der of Mes­o­po­ta­mia, to se­cure a woman of his own peo­ple as a wife for his son Isaac. It had long been the cus­tom of Abra­ham’s peo­ple to marry their cousins. And Abra­ham died con­fi­dent in that faith in God which he had learned from Mel­chiz­e­dek in the van­ished schools of Salem.

• Moses gathered descendants of

96:5.9When Moses turned over the com­mand of the He­brews to Joshua, he had al­ready gath­ered up thou­sands of the col­lat­eral de­scen­dants of Abra­ham, Na­hor, Lot, and other of the re­lated tribes and had whipped them into a self-sus­tain­ing and par­tially self-reg­u­lat­ing na­tion of pas­toral war­riors.