Abraham: The Fateful Years
Table of Contents
In the days of Amraphel king of Shin’ar, Ariokh king of Ellasar, Khedorla’omer king of Elam, and Tidhal king of Go’im— That these made war with Bera King of Sodom, and with Birsha king of Gomorrah. Shinab king of Adman, and Shem-eber king of Zebi’im, and with the king of Bela, which is Zoar.
Chapter 14 of Genesis tells of an ancient war that pitted an alliance of four kingdoms of the East against five kings in Canaan.
It is a tale that has evoked some of the most intense debate among scholars, for it connects the story of Abraham, the first Hebrew Patriarch, with a specific non-Hebrew event, and thus affords objective substantiation of the biblical record of the birth of a nation. How wonderful it would have been, many have felt, if the various kings could be identified and the exact time of Abraham established! But even if Elam was known and Shin’ar identified as Sumer, who were the kings named, and which were the other lands of the East?
Questioning the authenticity of biblical history unless independently verified, critics of the Bible asked: Why don’t we find the names Khedorla’omer, Amraphel, Ariokh. and Tidhal mentioned in Mesopotamian inscriptions? And if they did not exist, if such a war had not taken place, how credible is the rest of the tale of Abraham?
For many decades the critics of the Old Testament seemed to prevail; then, as the nineteenth century was drawing to a close, the scholarly and religious worlds were astounded by the discovery of
Babylonian tablets naming Khedorla’omer, Ariokh, and Tidhal in a talc not unlike the biblical one.
The discovery was announced in a lecture by Theophilus Pinches to the Victoria Institute, London, in 1897. Having examined several tablets belonging to the Spartoli Collection in the British Museum, he found that they described a war of wide-ranging magnitude, in which a king of Elam, named Kudur-laghamar, led an alliance of rulers that included one called Eri-aku and another named Tud-ghula—names that easily could have been transformed into Hebrew as Khedor-la’omer, Ariokh. and Tidhal. Accompanying his published lecture with a painstaking transcript of the cuneiform writing and a translation thereof. Pinches could confidently claim that the biblical tale had indeed been supported by an independent Mesopotamian source.
With justified excitement the Assyriologists of that time agreed with Pinches’s reading of the cuneiform names. The tablets indeed spoke of “Kudur-Laghamar, king of the land of Elam”—uncannily similar to the biblical “Khedorla’omer, king of Elam”; all scholars agreed that it was a perfect Elamite royal name, the prefix Kudur (“Servant”) having been a component in the names of several Elamite kings, and Laghamar being the Elamite epithet-name for a certain deity. It was agreed that the second name, spelled Erie-a-ku in the Babylonian cuneiform script, stood for the original Sumerian ERI.AKU, meaning “Servant of the god Aku,” Aku being a variant of the name of Nannar/Sin. It is known from a number of inscriptions that Elamite rulers of Larsa bore the name “Servant of Sin,” and there was therefore little difficulty in agreeing that the biblical Ellasar, the royal city of the king Ariokh, was in fact Larsa.
There was also unanimous agreement among the scholars for accepting that the Babylonian text’s Tud-ghula was the equivalent of the biblical “Tidhal, king of Go’im”; and they agreed that by Go’im the Book of Genesis referred to the “nationhordes” whom the cuneiform tablets listed as allies of Khedorla’omer.
Here, then, was the missing proof—not only of the veracity of the Bible and of the existence of Abraham, but also of an international event in which he had been involved! But the excitement was not to last. “Unfortunately”—to use an expression of A. H. Sayce in an address to the Society of Biblical Archaeology eleven years later—a contemporary discovery, which should have upheld the one announced by Pinches, ended up sidetracking and even discrediting it.
The second discovery was announced by Vincent Scheil. who reported that he had found among the tablets in the Imperial Ottoman Museum in Constantinople a letter from the well-known Babylonian king Hammurabi, which mentions the very same Kudur-laghamar! Because the letter was addressed to a king of Larsa, Father Scheil concluded that the three were contemporaries and thus matched three of the four biblical kings of the East—Hammurabi being none other than “Amraphel. king of Shin’ar.” For a while it seemed that all the pieces of the puzzle had fallen into place: one can still find textbooks and biblical commentaries explaining that Amraphel stands for Hammurabi. The resulting conclusion that Abraham was a contemporary of this ruler seemed plausible, because it was then believed that Hammurabi reigned from 2067 to 2025 B.C., placing Abraham, the war of the kings, and the ensuing destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah at the end of the third millennium B.C.
However, when subsequent research convinced most scholars that Hammurabi reigned much later (from 1792 to 1750 B.C., according to The Cambridge Ancient History), the synchronization seemingly achieved by Scheil fell apart, and the whole bearing of the discovered inscriptions—even those reported by Pinchescame into doubt. Ignored were the pleas of Pinches that no matter with whom the three named kings were to be identified—that even if Khedorla’omer, Ariokh, and Tidhal of the cuneiform texts were not contemporaries of Hammurabi—the text’s tale with its three names was still “a remarkable historical coincidence, and deserves recognition as such.” In 1917, Alfred Jeremias (Die sogenanten Kedorlaomer-Texte) attempted to revive interest in the subject; but the scholarly community preferred to treat the Spartoli tablets with benign neglect.
They remained ignored in the basement of the British Museum for half a century, when M. C. Astour returned to the subject in a study at Brandeis University (Political and Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis 14). Agreeing that the biblical and Babylonian editors of the respective texts drew from some older, common Mesopotamian source, he identified the four Kings of the East as known rulers: 1) of Babylon in the eighth century B.C.; 2) of Assyria in the thirteenth century B.C: 3) of the Hittites in the sixteenth century B.C.; and 4) of Elam in the twelfth century B.C AS none were contemporaries of each other or of Abraham, he ingeniously suggested that the text was not a historical one but a work of religious philosophy, wherein the author used four diverse historic incidents to illustrate one moral (the fate of evil kings). The improbability of Astour’s suggestion was soon pointed out in other scholarly publications; and with that, the interest in the Khedorla ‘omer Texts died again.
Yet the scholarly consensus that the biblical tale and the Babylonian texts drew on a much earlier, common source impels us to revive the plea of Pinches and his central argument: How can cuneiform texts, affirming the biblical background of a major war and naming three of the biblical kings, be ignored? Should the evidence—crucial, as we shall show, to the understanding of fateful years—be discarded simply because Amraphel was not Hammurabi?
The answer is that the Hammurabi letter found by Scheil should not have sidetracked the discovery reported by Pinches, because Scheil misread the letter. According to his rendition, Hammurabi promised a reward to Sin-Idinna, the king of Larsa, for his “heroism on the day of Khedorla’omer.” This implied that the two were allies in a war against Khedorla’omer and thus contemporaries of that king of Elam. It was on this point that Scheil’s find was discredited, for it contradicted both the biblical assertion that the three kings were allies and known historical facts: Hammurabi treated Larsa not as an ally but as an adversary, boasting that he “overthrew Larsa in battle,” and attacked its sacred precinct “with the mighty weapon which the gods had given him.”
A close examination of the actual text of Hammurabi’s letter reveals that in his eagerness to prove the Hammurabi-Amraphel identification. Father Scheil reversed the letter’s meaning: Hammurabi was not offering as a reward to return certain goddesses to the sacred precinct (the Emutbal) of Larsa; rather, he was demanding their return to Babylon from Larsa: To Sin-Idinna speaks thus Hammurabi regarding the goddesses who in Emutbal have been behind doors from the days of Kudur-Laghamar, in sackcloth attired: When they ask them back from thee, to my men hand them over; The men shall grasp the hands of the goddesses; To their abode they shall bring them. The incident of the abduction of the goddesses had thus occurred in earlier times; they were held captive in the Emutbal “from the Abraham: The Fateful Years 285 days of Khedorla’omer”; and Hammurabi was now demanding their return to Babylon, from where Khedorla’omer had taken them captive. This can only mean that Khedorla’omer’s days were long before Hammurabi’s lime.
Supporting our reading of the Hammurabi letter found by Father Scheil in the Constantinople Museum is the fact that Hammurabi repeated the demand for the return of the goddesses to Babylon in yet another stiff message to Sin-Idinna. this time sending it by the hand of high military officers. This second letter is in the British Museum (No. 23,131) and its text was published by L. W. King in
The Letters and Inscriptions of Hammurabi: Unto Sin-Idinna thus sayeth Hammurabi: I am now despatching Zikir-ilishu, the Transport Officer. and Hammurabi-bani, the Frontline Officer, that they may bring the goddesses who are in Emutbal. That the goddesses were to be returned from Larsa to Babylon is made clear in the letter’s further instructions: Thou shall cause the goddesses to journey in a processional boat as in a shrine, that they may come to Babylon.
The temple-women shall accompany them. For food of the goddesses thou shalt load pure cream and cereals unto the boat; sheep and provisions thou shalt put on board for the sustenance of the temple-women. [enough] for the journey to reach Babylon. And thou shalt appoint men to tow the boat, and chosen soldiers to bring the goddesses to Babylon in safety.
Delay them not: let them speedily reach Babylon.
It is thus clear from these letters that Hammurabi—a foe, not an ally, of Larsa—was seeking restitution for events that had happened long before his time, in the days of Kudur-Laghamar, the Elamite regent of Larsa. The texts of the Hammurabi letters thus affirm the existence of Khedorla’omer and of Elamite reign in Larsa (“Ellasar”), and thus of key elements in the biblical tale. Which is the period into which these key elements fit? As historical records have established, it was Shulgi who in the 28th year of his reign (2068 B.C.) gave his daughter in marriage to an Elamite chieftain and granted him the city of Larsa as a dowry; in return the Elamites put a “foreign legion” of Elamite troops at Shulgi’s disposal. These troops were employed by Shulgi to subdue the western provinces, including Canaan.
It is thus in the last years of Shulgi’s reign and when Ur was still an imperial capital under his immediate successor Amar-Sin that we find the historical time slot into which all the biblical and Mesopotamian records seem to fit perfectly. It is in that time, we believe, that the search for the historical Abraham should be conducted; for—as we shall show—the tale of Abraham was interwoven with the tale of the fall of Ur, and his days were the last days of Sumer.
With the discrediting of the Amraphel-Hammurabi notion, the verification of the Age of Abraham became a free-for-all, some suggesting such late dates that made the first patriarch a descendant of the later kings of Israel. . . . But the exact dates of his time and events need no guessing: the information is provided by the Bible itself; all we have to do is accept its veracity.
The chronological calculations are surprisingly simple. Our starting point is 963 B.C., the year in which Solomon is believed to have assumed the kingship in Jerusalem. The Book of Kings states unequivocally that Solomon began the construction of the Temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem in the fourth year of his reign, completing it late in the eleventh year. I Kings 6:1 also states that “It came to pass in the four hundred and eightieth year after the Children of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel . . . that he began to build the House of Yahweh.” This statement is supported (with a slight difference) by the priestly tradition that there had been twelve priestly generations, of forty years each, from the Exodus to the time when Azariah “executed the priestly office in the temple that Solomon built in Jerusalem” (I Chronicles 5:36).
Both sources agree on the passage of 480 years, with this difference: one counts from the start of the temple’s construction (960 B.C.) and the other from its completion (in 953 B.C), when the priestly services could begin. This would set the Israelite Exodus from Egypt in either 1440 or 1433 B.C.; the latter date, we find, offers better synchronization with other events.
Based on the knowledge amassed by the beginning of this century, Egyptologists and biblical scholars had by then reached the conclusion that the Exodus had indeed taken place in the middle of the fifteenth century B.C. But then the weight of scholarly opinion shifted to a thirteenth-century date because it seemed to better fit the archaeological dating of various Canaanite sites, in line with the biblical record of the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites. Yet such a new dating was not unanimously agreed upon.
The most notorious city conquered was Jericho; and one of its prominent excavators (K. M. Kenyon) concluded that the pertinent destruction occurred circa 1560 B.C.—well ahead of the biblical events. On the other hand. Jericho’s principal excavator, J. Garstang (The Story of Jericho), held that the archaeological evidence points to its conquest sometime between 1400 and 1385 B.C. Adding to this the forty years of Israelite wandering in the wilderness after the departure from Egypt, he and others found archaeological support for an Exodus date sometime between 1440 and 1425 B.C.—a time frame that agrees with our suggestion of 1433 B.C.
For more than a century scholars have also searched through the extant Egyptian records for an Egyptian clue to the Exodus and its date. The only apparent references are found in the writings of Manetho. As quoted by Josephus in Against Apion, Manetho stated that “after the blasts of God’s displeasure broke upon Egypt,” a Pharaoh named Toumosis negotiated with the Shepherd People, “the people from the east, to evacuate Egypt and go whither they would, unmolested.” They then left and traversed the wilderness, “and built a city in a country now called Judaea . . . and gave it the name Jerusalem.”
Did Josephus adjust the writings of Manetho to suit the biblical tale, or did, in fact, the events concerning the sojourn, harsh treatment, and eventual Exodus of the Israelites occur in the reign of one of the well-known Pharaohs named Thothmes? Manetho referred to “the king who expelled the pastoral people from Egypt” in a section devoted to the Pharaohs of the eighteenth dynasty. Egyptologists now accept as historical fact the expulsion of the Hyksos (the Asiatic “Shepherd Kings”) in 1567 B.C. by the founder of the eighteenth dynasty, the Pharaoh Ahmosis (Amosis in Greek). This new dynasty, which established the New Kingdom in Egypt, might well have been the new dynasty of Pharaohs “who knew not Joseph” of which the Bible speaks (Exodus 1:8). Theophilus, second-century Bishop of Antioch, also referred in his writings to Manetho and stated that the Hebrews were enslaved by the king Tethmosis, for whom they “built strong cities, Peitho and Rameses and On, which is Heliopolis”; then they departed Egypt under the Pharaoh “whose name was Amasis.”
It thus appears from these ancient sources that the Israelites’ troubles began under a Pharaoh named Thothmes and culminated with their departure under a successor named Amasis. What are the historical facts as they have been established by now?
After Ahmosis had expelled the Hyksos, his successors on the throne of Egypt—several of whom indeed bore the name Thothmes, as the ancient historians have stated—engaged in military campaigns in Greater Canaan, using the Way of the Sea as their invasion route. Thothmes I (1525-1512 B.C.). a professional soldier, put Egypt on a war footing and launched military expeditions into Asia as far as the Euphrates River. It is our belief that it was he who feared Israelite disloyalty—“when a war shall be called, they shall join our enemies”—and ordered therefore the killing of all newborn Israelite male babies (Exodus 1:9-16). By our calculations, Moses was bom in 1513 B.C., the year before the death of Thothmes I.
J. W. Jack (The Date of the Exodus) and others, earlier this century, had wondered whether “the Pharaoh’s daughter” who had retrieved the baby Moses from the river and then raised him in the royal palace could have been Hatshepsut, the eldest daughter of Thothmes I by his official spouse and thus the only royal princess of the time granted the high title “The King’s Daughter,” a title identical to that given in the Bible. We believe that indeed it was she; and her continued treatment of Moses as an adopted son can be explained by the fact that after she had married the succeeding Pharaoh, her half-brother Thothmes II, she could not bear him a son.
Thothmes II died after a short reign. His successor, Thothmes III—mothered by a harem girl—was Egypt’s greatest warrior-king, an ancient Napoleon in the view of some scholars. Of his seventeen campaigns against foreign lands to obtain tribute and captives for his major construction works, most were thrust into Canaan and Lebanon and as far north as the Euphrates River. We believe, as T. E. Peet (Egypt and the Old Testament) and others held earlier this century, that it was this Pharaoh, Thothmes III, who was the enslaver of the Israelites; for in his military expeditions he pushed northward as far as Naharin, the Egyptian name for the area on the upper Euphrates called in the Bible Aram-Naharim, where the kinfolk of the Hebrew Patriarchs had remained; and this could well explain the Pharaoh’s fear (Exodus 1:10) that “when there shall happen to be a war, they [the Israelites] shall join unto our enemies.” It was, we suggest, Thothmes III from whose death sentence Moses escaped to the wilderness of the Sinai after he had learned of his Hebrew origins and openly sided with his people.
Thothmes III died in 1450 B.C. and was followed on the throne by Amenophis II—the Amasis named by Theophilus quoting Manetho. It was indeed “after a long time, that the king of Egypt died,” (Exodus 2:23) that Moses dared return to Egypt to demand of the successor—Amenophis II, in our opinion—to “let my people go.” The reign of Amenophis II lasted from 1450 to 1425 B.C.; it is our conclusion that the Exodus had taken place in 1433 B.C., exactly when Moses was eighty years old (Exodus 7:7). Continuing our calculation backward, we now seek to establish the date when the Israelites arrived in Egypt. Hebrew traditions assert a stay of 400 years, in accord with the Lord’s statement to Abraham (Genesis 15:13-14); so also states the New Testament (Acts 7:6).
The Book of Exodus, however, says that “the sojourning of the Children of Israel who dwelt in Egypt was four hundred and thirty years” (Exodus 12:40-41). The qualifying of “sojourn” by the words “who dwelt in Egypt” might have been intended to distinguish between the Josephites (who had dwelt in Egypt) and the newly arrived families of Joseph’s brothers, who just came “to sojourn.” If so, then the difference of thirty years can be accounted for by the fact that Joseph was thirty years old when made Chief of Egypt. This would leave intact the 400 figure as the years of Israelite (rather than Josephite) sojourn in Egypt, and place the event in 1833 B.C. (1,433 + 400).
The next clue is found in Genesis 47:8-9: “And Joseph brought in Jacob, his father, and stood him before the Pharaoh. . . . And the Pharaoh said unto Jacob: ‘How old art thou?’ and Jacob said unto Pharaoh: ‘The days of my years are one hundred and thirty.” " Jacob, then, was born in 1963 B.C.
Now, Isaac was sixty years old when Jacob was born unto him (Genesis 6:26); and Isaac was bom unto his father Abraham when Abraham was 100 years old (Genesis 21:5). Accordingly. Abraham (who lived to be 175) was 160 years old when his grandson Jacob was born. This places the birth of Abraham in 2123 B.C.
The century of Abraham—the hundred years from his birth to the birth of his son and successor Isaac—was thus the century that witnessed the rise and fall of the Third Dynasty of Ur. Our reading of biblical chronology and tales puts Abraham right in the middle of the momentous events of that time—not as a mere observer but as an active participant. Contrary to the assertions of advocates of biblical criticism that with the tale of Abraham the Bible loses interest in the general history of mankind and the Near East, to focus on the “tribal history” of one particular nation, the Bible in fact continues to relate (as it did with the tales of the Deluge and the Tower of Babel) events of major concern to mankind and its civilization: a war of unprecedented aspects and a disaster of a unique nature; events in which the Hebrew Patriarch played an important role. It is the tale of how the legacy of Sumer was salvaged when Sumer itself was doomed.
In spite of numerous studies concerning Abraham, the fact remains that all we really know about him is what we find in the Bible. Belonging to a family that traced its ancestry to the line of Shem. Abraham—then called Abram—was the son of Terah, his brothers being Harran and Nahor. When Harran died at an early age, the family was living in “Ur of the Chaldees.” There, Abram married Sarai (later renamed Sarah). Then “did Terah take Abram his son and Lot his grandson, the son of Harran, and Sarai his daughter-in-law the wife of Abram his son: and they left and went forth from Ur of the Chaldees to go to the land of Canaan: and they went as far as Harran, and dwelt there.”
Archaeologists have found Harran (“The Caravanry”). Situated to the northwest of Mesopotamia at the foothills of the Taurus Mountains, it was a major crossroads in antiquity. As Mari controlled the southern gateway from Mesopotamia to the lands of the Mediterranean coast, so did Harran control the gateway of the northern route to the lands of Western Asia. Marking, at the time of the Third Dynasty of Ur, the limits of Nannar’s domains where they bordered on Adad’s Asia Minor. Harran was found by the archaeologists to have been a mirror image of Ur in its layout and in its worship of Nannar/Sin.
No explanation is given in the Bible for leaving Ur, and there is also no time stated, but we can guess the answers if we relate the departure to events in Mesopotamia in general and in Ur in particular. We know that Abraham was seventy-five when he proceeded later on from Harran to Canaan. The tenor of the biblical narrative suggests a long stay at Harran and depicts Abraham on his arrival there as a young man with a new bride. If Abraham, as we have concluded, was bom in 2123 B.C.. he was a child often when Ur- Nammu ascended the throne in Ur, when Nannar was favored for the first time with the trusteeship over Nippur. And he was a young man of twenty-seven when Ur-Nammu inexplicably fell from Anu’s and Enlil’s favor, slain on a distant battlefield.
We have described the traumatic effect of the event on the people of Mesopotamia, the shock it had given to their faith in Nannar’s omnipotence and the fidelity of Enlil’s word.
The year of Ur-Nammu’s fall was 2096 B.C. Could it not have been the year when—under the impact of the event or as a consequence thereof—Terah and his family left Ur for a faraway destination, stopping off at Harran, the Ur away from Ur? All through the following years of Ur’s decline and Shulgi’s profanities, the family stayed on in Harran. Then, suddenly, the Lord acted again:
And Yahweh said unto Abram: “Get thee out of thy country and out of thy birthplace and from thy father’s house, unto the land which I will show thee” . . . And Abram departed as Yahweh had spoken unto him, and Lot went with him. And Abram was seventy-five years old when he left Harran. Once again, no reason is given for the crucial move. But the chronological clue is most revealing. When Abraham was seventyfive years old, the year was 2048 B.C.— the very year of Shulgi’s downfall!
Because Abraham’s family (Genesis 11) directly continued the line of Shem, Abraham has been considered a Semite, one whose background, cultural heritage, and language were Semitic, as distinct (in scholars’ minds) from the non-Semitic Sumerians and the later Indo-Europeans. But in the original biblical sense, all the peoples of greater Mesopotamia were descended of Shem. “Semite” and “Sumerian” alike. There is nothing in the Bible that suggests—as some scholars have begun to hold—that Abraham and his family were Amorites (i.e., western Semites) who had come as immigrants to Sumer and then returned to their original abode. On the contrary: There is everything to support the image of a family rooted in Sumer from its earliest beginnings, hastily uprooted from its country and birthplace and told to go to an unfamiliar land.
The correspondence between two biblical events with the dates of two major Sumerian events—and of more to come—must serve as an indication of a direct connection between them all. Abraham emerges not as the son of immigrant aliens but as the scion of a family directly involved in Sumerian affairs of state! In their search for the answer to the question of “Who Was Abraham,” scholars have seized upon the similarity between his designation as a Hebrew (Ibri) and the term Hapiru (which in the Near East could transform to Habiru) by which the Assyrians and Babylonians in the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries B.C. called bands of pillaging western Semites. At the end of the fifteenth century B.C., the commander of an Egyptian garrison in Jerusalem asked his king for reinforcements against approaching Hapiru. Scholars have taken all that as evidence for the notion that Abraham was a western Semite. Many scholars doubt, however, whether the term denotes an ethnic group at all, wondering whether the word was not a descriptive noun simply meaning “marauders” or “invaders.” The suggestion that Ibri (clearly from the verb “to cross”) and Hapiru are one and the same entails substantial philological and etymological problems. There are also great chronological inconsistencies, all of which gave rise to serious objections to this suggested solution for the identity of Abraham, especially when the biblical data is compared with the “bandit” connotation of the term Hapiru. Thus the Bible relates incidents concerning water wells, which show that Abraham was careful to avoid conflict with local residents as he journeyed through Canaan. When Abraham became involved in the War of the Kings, he refused to share in the booty. This is not the behavior of a marauding barbarian but rather of a person of high standards of conduct. Coming to Egypt, Abraham and Sarah were taken to the Pharaoh’s court; in Canaan, Abraham made treaties with the local rulers. This is not the image of a nomad pillaging others’ settlements; it is the image of a personage of high standing skilled in negotiation and diplomacy.
It was out of such considerations that Alfred Jeremias, then a leading Assyriologist and professor of the history of religion at the Leipzig University, announced in the 1930 edition of his master work Das Alte Testament im Lichte des Alten Orients that “in his intellectual makeup Abraham was a Sumerian.” He enlarged on this conclusion in a 1932 study entitled Der Kosmos von Sumer: “Abraham was not a Semitic Babylonian but a Sumerian.” Abraham, he suggested, headed the Faithful whose reformation sought to raise Sumerian society to higher religious levels.
These were audacious ideas in a Germany witnessing the rise of Nazism with its racial theories. Soon after the assumption of power by Hitler, the heretic suggestions of Jeremias were strongly put down by Nikolaus Schneider in a reply entitled War Abraham Sumerer? Abraham was neither a Sumerian nor a man of pure descent, he concluded: “From the time of the reign of the Akkadian king Sargon in Ur, the home-place of Abraham, there was never there a pure, unmixed Sumerian population and a homogenous Sumerian culture.” The ensuing upheavals and World War II cut off further debate on the subject. Regrettably, the thread discerned by Jeremias has not been picked up. Yet all the biblical and Mesopotamian evidence tells us that Abraham was indeed a Sumerian. The Old Testament, in fact (Genesis 17:1-16), provides us with the time and manner in which Abraham was transformed from a Sumerian nobleman to a west Semitic potentate, under a covenant between him and his God. Amid a ritual of circumcision, his Sumerian name AB.RAM (“Father’s Beloved”) was changed to the Akkadian/Semitic Abraham (“Father of a Multitude of Nations’ 1 and that of his wife SARAI (“Princess”) was adapted to the Semitic Sarah. It was only when he was ninety-nine years old that Abraham became a “Semite.” As we decipher the age-old enigma of Abraham’s identity and his Mission to Canaan, it is in Sumerian history, customs, and language that we shall search for the answers. Is it not naive to assume that for the Mission to Canaan, for the birth of a nation, and for kingship over all the lands from the border of Egypt to the border of Mesopotamia, the Lord would choose someone at random, picking up anyone in the streets of Ur? The young woman whom Abraham married bore the epithet-name Princess; since she was a half-sister of Abraham (“Indeed she is my sister, the daughter of my father but not the daughter of my mother”), we can take it for granted that either Abraham’s father or Sarah’s mother was of royal descent. Since the daughter of Harran, Abraham’s brother, also bore a royal name (Milkha— “Queenly”), it follows that it was through the father of Abraham that the royal ancestry flowed. In dealing with Abraham’s family we thus deal with a family of Sumer’s highest echelons; people of a noble deportment and elegant dress as found depicted on various Sumerian statues (Fig. 98).
Fig. 98
It was a family that not only could claim descent from Shem but which kept family records tracing its lineage through generations of firstborn sons: Arpakhshad and Shelach and Eber; Peleg, Re’u, and Serug: Nahor and Terah and Abraham; taking the family’s recorded history back for no less than three centuries! What do the epithet-names signify? If Shelach (“Sword”) was born, as chapter 11 of Genesis states, 258 years before Abraham, he was born in 2381 B.C. That indeed was the time of the strife that brought Sargon to the throne in the new capital Agade (“United”), symbolizing the unification of the lands and a new era. Sixty-four years later the family named its firstborn descendant Peleg (“Division”), “for in his days the land divided.” It was the time, in fact, when Sumer and Akkad were torn apart after Sargon’s attempt to remove the sacred soil from Babylon and his consequent death.
But of greatest interest, to this very day, has been the meaning of the name Eber and the reason for bestowing it upon the firstborn in 2351 B.C. and from which has stemmed the biblical term Ibri (“Hebrew”) by which Abraham and his family identified themselves. It clearly stems from the root word meaning “to cross,” Abraham: The Fateful Years 295 and the best scholars had to offer in explanation was to seek the Habiru/Hapiru connection, which we have already mentioned (and discarded). This erroneous interpretation has stemmed from the search for the meaning of the epithet-name in Western Asia. It is our conviction that instead the answer is to be found in the Sumerian origins and the Sumerian language of Abraham and his ancestors. Such a look at the Sumerian roots of the family and the name provides an answer that startles with its simplicity. The term Ibri (“Hebrew”) by which Abraham and his family identified themselves clearly stemmed from Eber, the father of Peleg, and from the root “to cross.” Instead of seeking the meaning of the epithet-name in the Hapiru notions or in Western Asia, it is our conviction that the answer is to be found in the Sumerian origins and the Sumerian language of Abraham and his ancestors. Then, a new solution emerges with startling simplicity: The biblical suffix “i,” when applied to a person, meant “a native of; Gileadi meant a native of Gilead and so on. Likewise, Ibri meant a native of the place called “Crossing”: and that, precisely, was the Sumerian name for Nippur: NI.IB.RU—the Crossing Place, the place where the pre-Diluvial grids crisscrossed each other, the original Navel of the Earth, the olden Mission Control Center.
The dropping of the n in transposing from Sumerian to Akkadian/Hebrew was a frequent occurrence. In stating that Abraham was an Ibri, the Bible simply meant that Abraham was a Ni-ib-ri, a man of Nippurian origin!
The fact that Abraham’s family migrated to Harran from Ur has been taken by scholars to imply that Ur was also Abraham’s birthplace; but that is not stated anywhere in the Bible. On the contrary, the command to Abraham to go to Canaan and leave for good his past abodes lists three separate entities: his father’s house (which was then in Harran); his land (the city-state of Ur); and his birthplace (which the Bible does not identify). Our suggestion that Ibri means a native of Nippur solves the problem of Abraham’s true birthplace.
As the name Eber indicates, it was in his time—the middle of the twenty-fourth century B.C.—that the family’s association with Nippur had begun. Nippur was never a royal capital; rather, it was a consecrated city, Sumer’s “religious center,” as scholars put it. It was also the place where the knowledge of astronomy was entrusted to the high priests and thus the place where the calendar— 296 THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN the relationship between the Sun, Earth, and Moon in their orbits—was originated.
Scholars have recognized that our present-day calendars derive from the original Nippurian calendar. All the evidence shows that the Nippurian calendar began circa 4000 B.C, in the age of Taurus. In this we find yet another confirmation of the umbilical cord connecting the Hebrews with Nippur: The Jewish calendar still continues to count the years from an enigmatic beginning in 3760 B.C. (so that in 1983 the Jewish year was 5743).
It has been assumed that this is a count “from the beginning of the world”; but the actual statement by Jewish sages was that this is the number of years that had passed “since counting [of years) began.” We suggest that it means, since the introduction of the calendar in Nippur. In the ancestral family of Abraham we thus find a priestly family of royal blood, a family headed by a Nippurian high priest who was the only one allowed into the temple’s innermost chamber, there to receive the deity’s word and convey it to king and people. In this regard the name of Abraham’s father. Terah, is of great interest. Seeking clues only in the Semitic environment, biblical scholars regard the name, as those of Harran and Nahor, as mere toponyms (names that personify places), holding that there were cities by such names in central and northern Mesopotamia. Assyriologists searching the Akkadian terminology (being the first Semitic language) could only find that Tirhu meant “an artifact or vessel for magical purposes.”
But if we turn to the Sumerian language, we find that the cuneiform sign for Tirhu stemmed directly from that of an object called in Sumerian DUG.NAMTAR —literally, a “Fate Speaker”—a Pronouncer of Oracles! Terah, then, was an Oracle Priest, one assigned to approaching the “Stone that Whispers” to hear the deity’s words and communicate them (with or without an interpretation) to the lay hierarchy. It was a function assumed in later times by the Israelite High Priest, who alone was allowed to enter the Holy of Holies, approach the Dvir (“Speaker”), and “hear the voice [of the Lord] speak unto him from off the overlay which is upon the Ark of the Covenant, from between the two Cherubim.” During the Israelite Exodus, at Mount Sinai the Lord proclaimed that his covenant with the descendants of Abraham meant that “ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests.” It was a statement that reflected the status of Abraham’s own descent: a royal priesthood. Farfetched as these conclusions may sound, they are in full accord with the Sumerian practices whereby kings appointed their daughters and sons, and often themselves, to high-priestly positions, resulting in the commingling of the royal and priestly lineages. Votive inscriptions found at Nippur (as those by the archaeological expeditions of the University of Pennsylvania) confirm that the kings of Ur cherished the title “Pious Shepherd of Nippur” and performed there priestly functions; and the governor of Nippur (PA.TE.SI NI.IB.RU) was also the Foremost UR.ENLIL (“Enlil’s Foremost Servant”).
Some of the names borne by these royal-priestly VIPs resembled Abraham’s Sumerian name (AB.RAM), also beginning with the component AB (“Father” or “Progenitor”); such, for example, was the name AB.BA.MU of a governor of Nippur during Shulgi’s reign.
That a family of people so closely associated with Nippur that they were called “Nippurians” (i.e., “Hebrews”) were nevertheless holding high positions in Ur is a suggestion that is in complete accord with the actual circumstances prevailing in Sumer at the time indicated by us; for it was then, at the lime of the Ur III Dynasty, that for the first time in divine affairs and Sumerian history Nannar and the king of Ur were granted trusteeship over Nippur, combining the religious and secular functions. It thus could have well been that when Ur-Nammu assumed the throne in Ur. Terah moved with his family from Nippur to Ur, perhaps to serve as a liaison between the temple in Nippur and the royal palace in Ur. Their stay in Ur lasted throughout Ur-Nammu’s reign; it was in the year of his death, as we have shown, that the family left Ur for Harran. What the family did at Harran is nowhere stated, but considering the royal lineage and priestly standing, it must have belonged to the hierarchy of Harran. The ease with which Abraham dealt, later on, with various kings suggests that he was involved in Harran’s foreign affairs; his special friendship with the Hittite residents of Canaan, who were known for their military experience, may shed a light on the question of where Abraham himself had acquired the military proficiency which he employed so successfully during the War of the Kings. Ancient traditions also depict Abraham as greatly versed in astronomy—a knowledge then valuable for long journeys guided by the stars. According to Josephus, Berossus referred to Abraham, without naming him, when he wrote of the rise “among the Chaldeans, of a certain righteous and great man who was well seen in astronomy.” (If Berossus, the Babylonian historian, had indeed referred to Abraham, the significance of the inclusion of the Hebrew Patriarch in Babylonian chronicles far exceeds the mere notation of his knowledge of astronomy.)
All during the ignominious years of Shulgi’s reign, the family of Terah stayed at Harran. Then, on Shulgi’s demise, the divine order came to proceed to Canaan. Terah was already quite old, and Nahor, his son, was to stay on with him in Harran. The one chosen for the mission was Abraham—himself a mature man of seventyfive. The year was 2048 B.C.; it marked the beginning of twentyfour fateful years—eighteen years encompassing the war-filled reigns of the two immediate successors of Shulgi (Amar-Sin and Shu-Sin) and six years of Ibbi-Sin. the last sovereign king of Ur. It is undoubtedly more than mere coincidence that Shulgi’s death was the signal not only for a move by Abraham, but also for a realignment among the Near Eastern gods. It was exactly when Abraham, accompanied (as we learn later) by an elite military corps, left Harran—the gateway to the Hittite lands—that the exiled and wandering Marduk appeared in “Haiti land.” Moreover, the remarkable coincidence is that Marduk stayed there through the same twenty-four Fateful Years, the years that culminated with the great Disaster.
The evidence for Marduk’s movements is a tablet (Fig. 99) found in the library of Ashurbanipal, in which an aging Marduk tells of his erstwhile wanderings and eventual return to Babylon: O great gods, learn my secrets. As I girdle my belt, my memories remember: I am the divine Marduk, a great god. I was cast off for my sins. to the mountains I have gone. In many lands I have been a wanderer: From where the sun rises to where it sets I went. To the heights of Hatti-land I went. In Hatti-land I asked an oracle [about] my throne and my Lordship: In its midst [I asked]: “Until when?” 24 years, in its midst. I nested. The appearance of Marduk in Asia Minor—implying an unexpected alliance with Adad—was thus the other side of the coin of Abraham’s rush to Canaan. We learn from the balance of the text
Fig. 99
that Marduk sent from his new place of exile emissaries and supplies (via Harran) to his followers in Babylon, and trading agents into Mari, thereby making inroads into both gateways—the one beholden to Nannar/Sin and the other to Inanna/Ishtar. As on a signal, with the death of Shulgi, the whole ancient world came astir. The House of Nannar had been discredited, and the House of Marduk saw its final prevailing hour approaching. While Marduk himself was still excluded from Mesopotamia, his firstborn son, Nabu, was making converts to his father’s cause. His base of operations was his own “cult center,” Borsippa; but his efforts encompassed all the lands, including Greater Canaan.
It was against this background of fast developments that Abraham was ordered to go to Canaan. Though silent concerning Abraham’s mission, the Old Testament is clear regarding his destination: Moving expeditiously to Canaan, Abraham and his wife, his nephew Lot, and their entourage continued swiftly southward. There was a stopover at Shechem, where the Lord spoke to Abraham. “Then he removed from there to the Mount, and encamped east of Beth-El; and he built there an altar to Yahweh and called the name of Yahweh.” Beth-El, whose name meant “God’s House”—a site to which Abraham kept coming back—was in the vicinity of Jerusalem and its hallowed Mount, Mount Moriah (“Mount of Directing”), upon whose Sacred Rock the Ark of the Covenant was placed when Solomon built the Temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem.
From there “Abram journeyed farther, still going toward the Negev.” The Negev—the dry region where Canaan and the Sinai peninsula merge—was clearly Abraham’s destination. Several divine pronouncements designated the Brook of Egypt (nowadays called Wadi El-Arish) as the southern boundary of Abraham’s domain, and the oasis of Kadesh-Barnea as his southernmost outpost (see map). What was Abraham to do in the Negev, whose very name (“The Dryness”) bespoke its aridity? What was there that required the patriarch’s hurried, long journey from Harran and impelled his presence among the miles upon miles of barren land? The significance of Mount Moriah—Abraham’s first focus of interest—was that in those days it served, together with its sister mounts Mount Zophim (“Mount of Observers”) and Mount Zion (“Mount of Signal”), as the site of Mission Control Center of the Anunnaki. The significance of the Negev, its only significance, was that it was the gateway to the Spaceport in the Sinai. Subsequent narrative informs us that Abraham had military allies in the region and that his entourage included an elite corps of several hundred fighting men. The biblical term for them—Naar— has been variously translated as “retainer” or simply “young man”; but studies have shown that in Human the word denoted riders or cavalrymen. In fact, recent studies of Mesopotamian texts dealing with military movements list among the men of the chariots and the cavalry LU.NAR (“Nar-men”) who served as fast riders. We find an identical term in the Bible (I Samuel 30:17): after King David attacked an Amalekite camp, the only ones to escape were “fourhundred Ish-Naar”—literally, ‘War-men” or LU.NAR— “who were riding the camels.”
In describing Abraham’s fighting men as Naar men, the Old Testament thus informs us that he had with him a corps of cavalrymen, in all probability camel riders rather than horsemen. He may have picked up the idea of such a fast-riding fighting force from the Hittites on whose boundary Harran was located, but for the arid areas of the Negev and the Sinai, camels rather than horses were better suited.
The emerging image of Abraham not as a sheepherding nomad but as an innovative military commander of royal descent may not fit the customary image of this Hebrew patriarch, but it is in accord with ancient recollections of Abraham. Thus, quoting earlier sources concerning Abraham, Josephus (first century A.D.) wrote of him: “Abraham reigned at Damascus, where he was a foreigner, having come with an army out of the land above Babylon” from which, “after a long time, the Lord got him up and removed from that country together with his men and he went to the land then called the land of Canaan but now the land of Judaea.” The mission of Abraham was a military one: to protect the space facilities of the Anunnaki—the Mission Control Center and the Spaceport!
After a short stay in the Negev Abraham traversed the Sinai peninsula and came to Egypt. Evidently no ordinary nomads, Abraham and Sarah were at once taken to the royal palace. By our reckoning the time was circa 2047 B.C., when the Pharaohs then ruling in Lower (northern) Egypt—who were not followers of Amen (“The Hiding God” Ra/Marduk)—were facing a strong challenge from the princes of Thebes in the south, where Amen was deemed supreme. We can only guess what matters of state— alliances, joint defenses, divine commands—were discussed between the beleaguered Pharaoh and the Ibri, the Nippurian general. The Bible is silent on this as well as on the length of stay. (The Book of Jubilees states that the sojourn lasted five years). When the time came for Abraham to return to the Negev, he was accompanied by a large retinue of the Pharaoh’s men. “And Abraham went from Egypt, he and his wife and Lot with him, up onto the Negev.” He was “heavy with flocks” of sheep and cattle for food and clothing, as well as with asses and camels for his fast riders. Again he went to Beth-El to “call the name of Yahweh,” seeking instructions. A separation from Lot followed, the nephew choosing to reside with his own flocks in the Plain of the Jordan, “which was watered as the Garden of the Lord, before Yahweh destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.”
Abraham went on to the hill country, settling on the highest peak near Hebron, from where he could see in all directions; and the Lord said unto him: “Go, cross the country in the length and the breadth of it, for unto thee shall I give it.”
It was soon thereafter, “in the days of Amraphel king of Shin’ar,” that the military expedition of the eastern alliance had taken place.
“Twelve years they [the Canaanite kings] served Khedorla’omer; in the thirteenth year they rebelled; and in the fourteenth year there came Khedorla’omer and the kings that were with him” (Genesis 14:4-5).
Scholars have long searched the archaeological records for the events described in the Bible; their efforts have been unsuccessful because they searched for Abraham in the wrong era. But if we are right in our chronology, a simple solution to the “Amraphel” problem becomes possible. It is a new solution, yet one that rests on scholarly suggestions made (and ignored) almost a century ago. Back in 1875, comparing the traditional reading of the name with its spelling in early biblical translations, F. Lenormant (La Langue Primitive cle la Chaldee) had suggested that the correct reading should be “Amar-pal, " as written out phonetically in the Septuagint (the third century B.C. translation of the Old Testament into Greek from the original Hebrew). Two years later D. H. Haigh, writing in the Zeitschrift fur Agyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde, also adopted the reading “Amarpal” and, stating that “the second element [of the king’s name] is a name of the Moon-god [Sin],” declared: “I have long been convinced of the identity of Amar-pal as one of the kings of Ur.”
In 1916, Franz M. Bohl (Die Kbnige von Genesis 14) suggested again—without success—that the name be read, as in the Septuagint, “Amar-pal,” explaining that it meant “Seen by the Son”—a royal name in line with other royal names in the Near East, such as the Egyptian Thoth-mes (“Seen by Thoth”). (For some reason Bohl and others have neglected to mention the no-less-significant fact that the Septuagint spelled out the name of Khedorla’omer Khodologomar— almost identical to the Kudur-lagamar of the Spartoli tablets.) Pal (meaning “son”) was indeed a common suffix in Mesopotamian royal names, standing for the deity considered the favorite Divine Son. Since in Ur the god deemed to have been the Favored Son was Nannar/Sin, we suggest that Amar-Sin and Amar-pal were, in Ur, one and the same name.
Our identification of “Amarphal” of Genesis 14 as Amar-Sin, third king of Ur’s Third Dynasty, meshes perfectly the biblical and the Sumerian chronologies. The biblical tale of the War of the Kings places the event soon after Abraham’s return to the Negev from Egypt but before the tenth anniversary of his arrival in Canaan; i.e., between 2042 and 2039 B.C. The reign of AmarSin/Amar-Pal lasted from 2047 to 2039 B.C.; accordingly, the war had taken place in the latter part of his reign.
The year formulas for Amar-Sin’s reign pinpoint his seventh year—2041 B.C.—as the year of the major military expedition to the western provinces. The biblical data (Genesis 14:4-5) asserts that this took place in the fourteenth year after the Elamites under Khedorla’omer had subjugated the Canaanite kings: and the year 2041 was indeed fourteen years after Shulgi, having received Nannar’s oracles, had launched in 2055 B.C. the military expedition led by Elamites into Canaan. Our synchronization of biblical and Sumerian events and dates unfolds the following sequence and upholds every time factor reported in the Bible:
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2123 B.C. | Abraham born in Nippur to his father Terah. |
| 2113 B.C. | Ur-Nammu enthroned in Ur, given guardianship of Nippur. Terah and his family move to Ur. |
| 2095 B.C. | Shulgi ascends throne after death of Ur-Nammu. Terah and his family leave Ur for Harran. |
| 2055 B.C. | Shulgi receives Nannar’s oracles, sends Elamite troops to Canaan |
| 2048 B.C. | Shulgi’s death ordered by Anu and Enlil. Abraham, seventy-five years old, ordered to leave Harran for Canaan. |
| 2047 B.C. | Amar-Sin (“Amarpal”) ascends the throne of Ur. Abraham leaves the Negev for Egypt. |
| 2042 B.C. | Canaanite kings switch allegiance to “other gods.” Abraham returns from Egypt with elite corps. |
| 2041 B.C. | Amar-Sin launches the War of the Kings. |
Who were the “other gods” that were winning the allegiance of Canaanite cities? They were Marduk, scheming from nearby exile, and his son, Nabu, who was roaming eastern Canaan, gaining supremacy and adherents. As biblical place names indicate, the whole land of Moab had come under Nabu’s influence: the land was also known as the Land of Nabu and many sites there were named in his honor; the highest peak retained its name—Mount Nebo—through the millennia that followed.
This is the historical frame into which the Old Testament has fitted the invasion from the east. But even seen from the biblical viewpoint, which compressed the Mesopotamian tales of the gods into a monotheistic mold, it was an unusual war: the ostensible purpose—the suppression of a rebellion—turns out to have been a secondary aspect of the war; the real target—a crossroads oasis in a wilderness—was never reached.
Taking the southern route from Mesopotamia to Canaan, the invaders proceeded southward in Transjordan, along the King’s Highway, attacking in succession key outposts guarding crossing points on the Jordan River: Ashterot-Karnayim in the north; Ham in the center; and Shaveh-Kiryatayim in the south.
According to the biblical tale, a place called El-Paran was the real target of the invaders, but it was never reached by them. Coming down Transjordan and circling the Dead Sea, the invaders passed by Mount Se’ir and advanced “toward El-Paran, which is upon the Wilderness.” But they were forced to “swing back by Ein-Mishpat, which is Kadesh.” El-Paran (“God’s Gloried Place”?) was never reached; somehow the invaders were beaten back at Ein-Mishpat, also known as Kadesh or Kadesh-Barnea.
It was only then, as they turned back toward Canaan, that “Thereupon the king of Sodom and the king of Gomorrah and the king of Adman and the king of Zebi’im and the king of Bela, which is Zoar, marched forth and engaged them in battle in the Vale of Siddim.” (See map.)
The battle with these Canaanite kings was thus a late phase of the war and not its first purpose. Almost a century ago, in a thorough study titled Kadesh-Bamea, H. C. Trumbull had concluded that the true target of the invaders was El-Paran. which he correctly identified as the fortified oasis of Nakhl in Sinai’s central plain.
But neither he nor others could explain why a great alliance would launch an army to a destination a thousand miles away and fight gods and men to reach an isolated oasis in a great, desolate plain.
But why had they gone there, and who was it that blocked their way at Kadesh-Barnea, forcing the invaders to turn back? There have been no answers; and no answers can make sense except the ones offered by us: The only significance of the destination was its Spaceport, and the one who blocked the advance at Kadesh-Barnea was Abraham.
From earlier times Kadesh-Bamea was the closest place where men could approach in the region of the Spaceport without special permission. Shulgi had gone there to pray and make offerings to the God Who Judges, and nearly a thousand years before him the Sumerian king Gilgamesh stopped there to obtain the special permission. It was the place the Sumerians called BAD.GAL.DINGIR and Sargon of Akkad Dur-Mah-Ilani, clearly listing it in his inscriptions as a place in Tilmun (the Sinai peninsula).
It was the place, we suggest, which the Bible called KadeshBarnea; and there Abraham stood with his elite troops, blocking the invaders’ advance to the Spaceport proper.
The hints in the Old Testament become a detailed tale in the Khedorlaomer Texts, which make clear that the war was intended to prevent the return of Marduk and thwart the efforts of Nabu to gain access to the Spaceport. These texts not only name the very same kings who are mentioned in the Bible but even repeat the biblical detail of the switch of allegiance “‘in the thirteenth year”! As we return to the Khedorlaomer Texts to obtain the details for the biblical frame, we should bear in mind that they were written by a Babylonian historian who favored Marduk’s desire to make Babylon “the heavenward navel in the four regions.” It was to thwart this that the gods opposing Marduk ordered Khedorla’omer to seize and defile Babylon: The gods . . . to Kudur-Laghamar, king of the land Elam, they decreed: “Descend there!” That which to the city was bad he performed: In Babylon, the precious city of Marduk, sovereignty he seized; In Babylon, the city of the king of the gods. Marduk. kingship he overthrew; To herds of dogs its temple he made a den; Flying ravens, loud shrieking, their dung dropped there. The despoiling of Babylon was only the beginning. After the “bad deeds” were done there, Utu/Shamash sought action against Nabu, who (he said in accusation) had subverted the allegiance of a certain king to his father, Nannar/Sin. It happened, the Khedorla’- omer Text states, in the thirteenth year (just as Genesis 14 states): Before the gods the son of his father [came]; On that day Shamash, the Bright One. against the lord of lords, Marduk [he said]: “The faithfulness of his heart [the king] betrayed— in the time of the thirteenth year Abraham: The Fateful Years 307 a falling-out against my father [he had]; to his faith-keeping the king ceased to attend; all this Nabu has caused to happen.”
The assembled gods, thus alerted to the role of Nabu in the spreading rebellions, put together a coalition of loyal kings and appointed the Elamite Kudur-Laghamar as its military commander.
Their first order was that “Borsippa, the stronghold [of Nabuj. with weapons be despoiled.” Carrying out the order, “KudurLaghamar, with wicked thoughts against Marduk, the shrine of Borsippa with fire he destroyed and its sons with a sword he slew.”
Then, the military expedition against the rebellious kings was ordered. The Babylonian text lists the targets to be attacked and the names of their attackers; we easily recognize the biblical names among them: Eriaku (Ariokh) was to attack Shebu (Beer-Sheba) and Tud-Ghula (Tidhal) was to “smite with a sword the sons of Gaza.”
Acting in accordance with an oracle of Ishtar, the army put together by the Kings of the East arrived in Transjordan. First to be attacked was a stronghold in “the high land,” then Rabattum. The route was the same as the one described in the Bible: from the highland in the north through the district of Rabat-Amon in the center, southward around the Dead Sea. Thereafter, Dur-Mah-Ilani was to be captured, and the Canaanite cities (including Gaza and Beer-Sheba in the Negev) were to be punished. But at Dur-Mah-Ilani, according to the Babylonian text, “the son of the priest, whom the gods in their true counsel had anointed,” stood in the invaders’ way and “the despoiling prevented.”
Could the Babylonian text indeed refer to Abraham, the son of Terah the priest, and spell out his role in turning back the invaders? The possibility is strengthened by the fact that the Mesopotamian and biblical texts relate the same event in the same locality with the same outcome.
But there is more to it than just a possibility, for we have come upon one highly intriguing clue.
This is the unnoticed fact that the date formulas for the reign of Amar-Sin call his seventh year—the crucial year 2041 B.C., the year of the military expedition—also MU NE IB.RU.UM BA.HUL (Fig. 100), “Year [in which] the Shepherding-abode of IB.RU.UM was attacked.”
Fig. 100
Can this reference, in the exact crucial year, be other than to Abraham and his shepherding abode?
There is also a possible pictorial commemoration of the invasion. This is a scene carved on a Sumerian cylinder seal (Fig. 101). It has been regarded as depicting the journey of Etana, an early king of Kish, to the Winged Gateway, where an “Eagle” took him aloft so high that the Earth disappeared from view. But the seal depicts the crowned hero on horseback—too early for Etana’s time— and standing between the site of the Winged Gateway and two distinct groups.
One of four armed Mighty Men whose leader is also on horseback moves toward a cultivated area in the Sinai peninsula (indicated by the symbol of Sin’s crescent with wheat growing in it). The other is of five kings, facing in the opposite direction. The depiction thus has all the elements of an ancient illustration of the War of the Kings and the role of the “Priest’s Son” in it, rather than that of Etana’s journey to the Spaceport. The hero, depicted in the center atop an animal, could thus be Abraham rather than Etana. Fig. 101
Having carried out his mission to protect the Spaceport, Abraham returned to his base near Hebron. Encouraged by his feat, the Canaanite kings marched their forces to intercept the retreating Abraham: The Fateful Years 309 army from the East. But the invaders beat them and “seized all the possessions of Sodom and Gomorrah” as well as one prize hostage: “They took with them Lot, the nephew of Abraham, who was residing at Sodom.”
On hearing the news, Abraham called up his best cavalrymen and pursued the retreating invaders. Catching up with them near Damascus, he succeeded in releasing Lot and retrieving all the booty. Upon his return he was greeted as a victor in the Valley of Shalem (Jerusalem):
And Malkizedek, the king of Shalem, brought forth bread and wine, for he was a priest unto the God Most High. And he blessed him, saying: “Blessed be Abram unto the God Most High, Possessor of Heaven and Earth; And blessed be the God Most High who hath delivered thine foes into thine hand.”
Soon the Canaanite kings also arrived to thank Abraham, and offered him all the seized possessions as a reward. But Abraham, saying that his local allies could share in that, refused to take “even a shoe lace” for himself or his warriors. He had acted neither out of friendship for the Canaanite kings nor out of enmity for the Eastern Alliance; in the war between the House of Nannar and the House of Marduk, he was neutral. It was for “Yahweh, the God Most High, Possessor of Heaven and Earth, that I have raised my hands,” he stated.
The failed invasion did not arrest the rush of momentous events in the ancient world. A year later, in 2040 B.C., Menluhotep II, leader of the Theban princes, defeated the northern Pharaohs and extended the rule of Thebes (and of its god) up to the western approaches to the Sinai peninsula. In the following year Amar-Sin attempted to reach the Sinai peninsula by sea, only to find his death by a poisonous bite.
The attacks on the Spaceport were thwarted, but the danger to it was not removed; and the efforts of Marduk to gain the supremacy intensified ever more. Fifteen years later Sodom and Gomorrah went up in flames when Ninurta and Nergal unleashed the Doomsday Weapons.