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218 Solomon asked only for the Lord to hear the prayers that emanate from the temple; “hear in your dwelling place, in the heavens, the prayers and supplications, and judge the peo- ple accordingly." It was then "that Yahweh appeared unto Solomon for a second time, in the manner that he was seen to him in Gib- eon. And Yahweh said to him: I have heard thy prayer and thy supplications that thou hast made before me, and have sanctified this House that thou hast built, to place my Shem in it forever, so that my eyes and my heart shall be there in perpetuity." The term Shem is traditionally translated "name," that by which someone is known or remembered. But as we have shown in The 12th Planet, quoting biblical, Mesopotamian, and Egyptian sources, the term paralleled the Sumerian MU that, though in time it came to mean "that by which one is remembered," originally referred to the Skychambers or fly- ing machines of the Mesopotamian gods. Thus, when the people of Babylon (Bab-Ili, "Gateway of the Gods") set out to build the tower so as to make a Shem for themselves, they were building a launch tower not for a "name" but for skyborne vehicles. In Mesopotamia, it was upon the temple platforms that special enclosures—some depicted as designed to withstand heavy impacts—were built specifically to serve the coming and going of these skychambers. Gudea had to provide in the sacred precinct such a special enclosure for the Divine Black Bird of Ninurta, and when the construction was done ex- pressed the hope that the new temple's "MU shall hug the lands from horizon to horizon." A hymn to Adad/Ishkur ex- tolled his "ray-emitting MU that can attain the heaven's ze- nith," and a hymn to Inanna/Ishtar described how, after putting on the pilot's garb (see Fig. 33), "over all the peopled lands she flies in her MU." In all these instances the usual translation is "name" for MU, reading for Adad a "name" that hugs the lands and attains the highest heavens, for In- anna/Ishtar that "over all the peopled lands she flies in her name." In fact, however, the reference was to the gods' flying machines and their landing pads within the sacred precincts. One depiction of such aerial vehicles, discovered by archaeol- DIVINE ENCOUNTERS