You are strongly recommended to add to your library the excellent revised edition of Harper's Bible Dictionary titled, The Harper Collins Bible Dictionary, Revised Edition, edited by Paul J. Achtemeier, with the Society of Biblical Literature (NY: Harper Collins, 1996). It is currently the best one-volume Bible dictionary in English, and it is available at Border's Books, Christian Science Reading Rooms, http://www.borders.com, or http://www.christianbook.com.

Shur, Wilderness of, a desert region somewhere in the Sinai Peninsula, east of the present Suez Canal. It was inhabited by Ishmaelites (Gen. 25:18) and was for a period the home of Abraham (Gen. 20:1). The Israelites during the Exodus entered it immediately after leaving the Red Sea (Exod. 15:22). ‘The way to Shur,’ where the angel met Hagar (Gen. 16:7), is probably the desert track leading southward from Beer-sheba, along which Saul, and later David, pursued the Amalekites ‘as far as Shur’ (1 Sam. 15:7; 27:8)...