place
Erech
אֶ֫רֶךְ
- verses
- 2
- first named
- Genesis 10:10
- last named
- Ezra 4:9
- feature
- settlement
- coordinates
- 31.32°N · 45.64°E
Uruk (OpenBible)
The gazetteer records one identification, and no competing one.
Description
Erech in the text
Erech, also known as Uruk or Warka, was an ancient Mesopotamian city located in the southern part of modern-day Iraq. It is mentioned twice in the Bible, in Genesis 10:10 and Ezra 4:9.
In Genesis 10:10, Erech is listed as one of the cities that formed the beginning of Nimrod's kingdom in the land of Shinar (Babylonia). Nimrod, a mighty hunter and ruler, is described as establishing a powerful kingdom that included the cities of Babel, Erech, Accad, and Calneh.
Ezra 4:9 mentions the people of Erech among those who wrote a letter to King Artaxerxes of Persia, opposing the rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple and the city walls after the Babylonian exile. This suggests that inhabitants of Erech were among those deported and resettled in other parts of the Persian Empire, and they sought to hinder the Jewish returnees' efforts to reestablish their homeland.
Archaeologically, Erech is one of the oldest cities in Mesopotamia, with evidence of continuous habitation from the 5th millennium BC. It was an important center of Sumerian culture and religion, known for its impressive ziggurats and the Gilgamesh Epic, one of the earliest known works of literature.
The biblical mentions of Erech, though brief, attest to its significance as an ancient Mesopotamian city and its interaction with the history and people of Israel, both in the early stages of civilization and during the post-exilic period.
Relations
Direct connections
Every entity the graph places in a stated relation with this one, grouped by the kind of link. Each relation is authored once and its inverse derived, so both ends always agree. Rows marked “registry” come from the identity spine rather than from a verse, and a row marked “which bearer is the source’s decision” is one where the name could have meant more than one person. The last group is not a relation at all — it counts the events two entities stand in together.
The pattern
Where Erech is named
Every book of the corpus in the order it is read, each as wide as the chapters it holds. A bar is the verses of that book which write the name, and the flat stretches are as much of the answer as the bars.
2 verses across 2 of 66 books; 64 write the name nowhere. Named in Genesis (1) and Ezra (1).
Read it
Where to read it
Every verse of the text carried here that names this entity — 2, across 2 books.
Onward
Where this page goes
Nothing in the graph stands one hop from this entity yet. These are the best-connected entities of the same type, so the page still ends somewhere. Descriptions by STEPBible TIPNR.
Sources