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289 Abraham by his wife and half sister Sarah, as Yahweh had foretold. Thirty-seven years later Sarah died, and the old Patriarch Abraham was concerned about the succession. Fearing that he would die before seeing his son Isaac married, he made his head-servant swear "by Yahweh, the God of Heaven and the God of Earth," that on no account would he arrange for Isaac to marry a local Canaanite. To be sure, he sent him to get for Isaac a bride from among the daughters of the relatives who had stayed behind in Harran on the Upper Euphrates. At age forty, Isaac married his imported bride Rebecca; and she bore him two sons, the twins Esau and Jacob, twenty years later. The year, by our calculations, was 1963 B.C. Some time later, when the boys grew up, "there was a famine in the land, other than the first famine that occurred in the time of Abraham." Isaac thought of emulating his father by going to Egypt, whose agriculture did not depend on rains (but on the annual rise of the Nile's waters). But to do that he had to cross the Sinai, and that apparently was still dangerous even decades after the nuclear blast. So "Yah- weh was seen to him" and instructed him not to go to Egypt; instead he was to move in Canaan to a district where wells could be dug for water. There Isaac and his family remained for many years, long enough for Esau to marry locally and for Jacob to go to Harran, where he married Leah and Rachel. In time Jacob had twelve sons: six by Leah, four by concu- bines, and two by Rachel: Joseph, and the youngest, Benja- min (at whose birth Rachel died). Of them all Joseph was his favorite; and it was therefore that the older brothers, envi- ous of Joseph, sold him to caravaners going to Egypt. And thus the Divine Prophecy, of a sojourn of Abraham's descen- dants in a foreign land, began to be fulfilled. Through a series of successful dream-solving, Joseph be- came Overseer of Egypt, charged with the task of preparing the land during seven plentiful years for a predicted seven- year famine thereafter. (It is our belief that in his ingenuity Joseph used a natural depression to create an artificial lake, and fill it up with water when the Nile was still rising high annually; then use the stored water to irrigate the parched The Greatest Theophany