It was, therefore, a city which derived its name because it lay on one of the great road junctions of the Tigro-Euphrates Valley and other roads from the north and west. Even today, from its various gateways roads branch off to Mosul, to Diarbeker, Berijik via Ofra to Balis and other places. In ancient times the roads from Carchemish and Nineveh and Babylon all met bore. He has occasion to mention it because he records his restoration of it. I do not believe that this latter view is any longer held with much conviction.
Linguistic evidence is positively against it.
But the Hebrew word for ostrich is ya'en. Similarly, the wild ox is called in Hebrew re'em which appears in Assyrian as remu. This word is also found in Arabic, but here it is applied to a quite different animal. The explanation of this is probably that the Hebrews and Assyrians shared the word for the same animals, but the Arabs, emigrating from a country such as Babylonia, carried the name with them into their new land but, finding no wild oxen there, applied it to another animal. However, this is still not the whole story.