[samatman]

The motive behind ORM is in the name: it is to Map Objects to Relations.

The promise is that a Java (then Ruby) developer, could simply design the objects needed for the program, and the fields which need to be persistent could be automatically mapped to the database using ORM.

The reality is quite different of course, there's a reason ORM is so widely derided. But ORM is more about skipping the bookkeeping involved in setting up persistence for application code, rather than testability or opacity of SQL.