'Aram of the Two Rivers' — upper Mesopotamia, the region around Haran where Abraham's kindred stayed when he went on to Canaan (24:10, 'the city of Nahor'). It is the ancestral homeland the family keeps returning to: Abraham came out of it by call, the servant goes back to it for Isaac's bride, and Jacob flees to it to find his own wives among Laban's daughters (28:2-7). Genesis's own name for its heartland is PADDAN-ARAM ('the field/plain of Aram'), the Haran district of the far upper Euphrates — where Jacob will spend twenty years; the 'two rivers' are the Euphrates and either the Tigris or the Habur. ⚠ Deuteronomy 23:5 (already on these pages) makes it Balaam's home too — from Pethor of Aram-naharaim — which is what puts the seer four hundred miles from Moab and keeps the question of where Pethor really was open; the name stands in five verses of the Hebrew Bible, this one, Genesis 24:10, Judges 3:8, 1 Chronicles 19:6 and the heading of Psalm 60.