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288 smoke and a fiery torch passed between the pieces." It was on that day, the Bible states, "that Yahweh cut a covenant with Abram." (Some fifteen centuries later the Assyrian king Esarhaddon, "seeking the decision of the gods Shamash and Adad, pros- trated himself reverently." To obtain a "vision concerning Ashur, Babylon and Nineveh," the king wrote, "I laid down the portions of the sacrificial animals at both sides; the signs of the oracle were in perfect agreement, and they gave me a favorable answer." But in that case, no divine fire came down to pass between the pieces of the sacrificed animals). At age eighty-six Abram did obtain a son, by the hand- maiden Hagar but not by his wife Sarai (as she was still called, by her Sumerian name). It was thirteen years later, on the eve of momentous events concerning the affairs of gods and men, that Yahweh "appeared unto Abram" and_ prepared him for the new era: the change of names from the Sumerian Abram and Sarai to the Semitic Abraham and Sarah, and the circumcising of all the males as a sign of the everlasting Covenant. It was in 2024 B.C., by our calculations (based on synchro- nizations with Sumerian and Egyptian chronologies), — that Abraham had witnessed the upheavaling of Sodom and Go- morrah following the visit by Yahweh and the two Angels. The destruction, we have shown in The Wars of Gods and Men, was just a sideshow to the main "event"—the vaporiz- ing with nuclear weapons of the Spaceport in the center of the Sinai peninsula by Ninurta and Nergal in order to deprive Marduk of the space facility. The unintentional result of the nuclear holocaust was the blowing of a deathly nuclear cloud eastward; it caused death (but no destruction) in Sumer, bringing to a bitter end that great civilization. Now it was only Ahram/Abraham and his seed—his descen- dants—that remained to carry on the ancient traditions, to "call on the name of Yahweh," to retain a sacred link to the beginning of time. To be safe from the nuclear poison, Abraham was ordered out of the Negev (the arid district bordering on the Sinai) and to find haven near the Mediterranean coast, in the district of the Philistines. A year after the event Isaac was born to DIVINE ENCOUNTERS