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230 saw "two serpents, one on his right, one on his left." The vision was so real that when the king awoke, he was aston- ished not to find the serpents actually beside him. He called the priests and seers to interpret the dream, and they said that the two serpents represented two goddesses, representing Upper and Lower Egypt. The dream, they said, meant that he could conquer the whole of Egypt "in its length and in its breadth; there is no other to share it with you." So the king "went forth, and a hundred thousand followed him," and he conquered Egypt. So, he wrote on the stela commemorating the dream and its aftermath, "true indeed was the dream." A divine oracle given by the god Amon, though in broad daylight rather than in a dream, is reported in an inscription on a stela found in Upper Egypt near the Nubian border. It relates that when an Ethiopian king was leading his army into Egypt, he suddenly died. His commanders were "like a herd without a herdsman." They knew that the next king had to be chosen from among the king's brothers, but which one? So they went to the Temple of Amon to obtain an oracle. After the "prophets and major priests" performed the re- quired rites, the commanders presented one of the king's brothers to the god, but there was silence. They then pre- sented the second brother, born to the king's sister. This time the god spoke up, saying: "He is your king ... He is your ruler." So the commanders crowned this brother, who as- support. This tale of the selection of a successor to the Ethiopian king includes a detail that usually goes unnoticed—the fact that the divinely chosen successor was the son born to the king by his sister. We find a parallel in the biblical tale of Abraham and his beautiful wife Sarah, whom Abimelech, the Philistine king of Gerar, fancied. Once before, when they visited the Pharaoh's court in Egypt, when the Pharaoh wished to take Sarah away from Abraham, Abraham asked her to say that she was his sister (not his wife) so that his life would be spared. Wisened by the experience, Abraham again asked Sarah to say that she was only a sister of Abra- ham. But when Abimelech proceeded with his plan, the Lord intervened: DIVINE ENCOUNTERS