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285 in which the memorable Michael Rennie was the Extraterres- trial who stepped out in Washington, D.C., and spoke his reassuring words in English . .. In truth, the above scenario need not be the summary of a science fiction movie; for what we have described—in es- sence if not in detail—has really happened. Not in modern times but in antiquity; not in the United States but in the ancient Near East; and in the actual sequence, the Earth stood still some time after rather than before the spacecraft appeared. It was, indeed, the greatest Divine Encounter in human memory—the greatest Theophany on record, witnessed by no less than a multitude of 600,000 people. The site of the Theophany was Mount Sinai, the "Mountain of the Elohim" in the Sinai peninsula; the occasion was the granting of the Laws of the Covenant to the Children of Israel, the high point of an eventful and miracle-filled Exodus from Egypt. A brief review of the chain of events that culminated in the Exodus would be helpful; it was a path whose milestones were Divine Encounters. Abraham—still called by his Sumerian name Abram in the Bible—moved with his father Terah (an oracle priest to judge by the meaning of his name) from Ur in Sumer to Harran on the Upper Euphrates. By our calculations this took place in 2096 B.C., when the great Sumerian king Ur-Nammu died unexpectedly and the people complained that the death oc- curred because "Enlil changed his word" to Ur-Nammu. Against a background of a growing preoccupation in Sumer with "sinning" cities in the west, along the Mediterranean coast, Abram/Abraham was ordered by Yahweh to move southward with his family, retainers, and flocks and take a position in the Negev, the dry area bordering on the Sinai. The move took place upon the death in Sumer of Ur-Nam- mu's successor (Shulgi) in 2048 B.C., when the Hebrew Patri- arch was seventy-five years old. It was the very same year when Marduk, in preparation for his seizing of the supremacy among the gods, arrived in the Land of the Hittites, north of Mesopotamia. Encountering a famine caused by a drought, Abram contin- the the The Greatest Theophany