Bible Location
Meaning: wall; ox; that beholds · 6 cross references · Modern-day map available
Shur was the wilderness region on Egypt's north-eastern edge stretching toward the land of the Philistines. It is important because it appears in the stories of Hagar, Abraham's movements, Israel's first steps after crossing the sea, and the southern campaigns of Saul and David. First appears in Gen 16:7.1
AI summary: Shur belongs to the edge-world between settled Egypt and the desert routes beyond it. In Genesis it frames Hagar's distress and the movement of patriarchal households in the south; in Exodus it is the first wilderness entered after deliverance through the sea. Later, Samuel shows the same broad region as the zone of raids and campaigns at Israel's southern limits. The cross references present Shur as a desert frontier where escape, survival, migration, and military movement repeatedly unfold.1
An enclosure; a wall, a part, probably, of the Arabian desert, on the north-eastern border of Egypt, giving its name to a wilderness extending from Egypt toward Philistia (Gen. 16:7; 20:1; 25:18; Ex. 15:22). The name was probably given to it from the wall (or shur) which the Egyptians built to defend their frontier on the north-east from the desert tribes. This wall or line of fortifications extended from Pelusium to Heliopolis. 3
AI-assisted summary prepared for ai-BIBLE and stored as page content, based on dictionary material, place metadata, and linked Bible cross references.
Alistair de Blacquiere-Clarkson, “ai-BIBLE Bible Names JSON Factsheet Aggregating Material from Smith’s Bible Dictionary & Hitcocks’s New and Complete Analysis of the Bible.” ai-BIBLE electronic edition, version 1.0.
M.G.Easton, Illustrated Bible Dictionary, ai-BIBLE electronic edition, version 1.0.
Robert Rouse, “Theographic Bible Information,” Theographic-Bible-Metadata, 2020, https://github.com/robertrouse/theographic-bible-metadata.