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358 it, one wonders, the enigmatic Book of the Wars of Yahweh of which the Bible spoke? In other words, could Yahweh have been Ninurta? As Foremost Son and heir apparent of Enlil, Ninurta too bore the numerical rank of fifty, and could thus qualify no less than Enlil to have been the Lord who decreed the fifty- year Jubilee and other fifty-related aspects mentioned in the Bible. He possessed a notorious Divine Black Bird that he used both for combat and on humanitarian missions; it could have been the Kabod flying vehicle that Yahweh possessed. He was active in the Zagros Mountains to the east of Mesopo- tamia, the lands of Elam, and was revered there as Ninshushi- nak, "Lord of Shushan city" (the Elamite capital). At one time he performed great dyking works in the Zagros moun- tains; at another, he diked and diverted mountain rain chan- nels in the Sinai peninsula to make its mountainous part cultivable for his mother Ninharsag; in a way he, too, was "god of mountains." His association with the Sinai peninsula and the channeling of its rainwaters, that come in winter bursts only, into an irrigation system is still recalled to this day: the largest Wadi (a river that fills up in winter and dries up in summer) in the peninsula is still called Wadi El-Arish, the wadi of the Urash—the Ploughman—a nickname of Ni- nurta from way back. An association with the Sinai peninsula, through his waterworks and his mother's residence there, also offers links to a Yahweh identification. Another interesting aspect of Ninurta that invokes a simi- larity to the Biblical Lord comes to light in an inscription by the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, who at one time invaded Elam. In it the king called him, "The mysterious god who lingers in a secret place where no one can see what his divine being is about." An unseen god! But Ninurta, as far as the earlier Sumerians were con- cerned, was not a god in hiding, and graphic depictions of him, as we have shown, were not even rare. Then, in conflict with a Yahweh-Ninurta identification, we come across a major ancient text, dealing with a major and unforgettable event, whose specifics seem to tell us that Ninurta was not Yahweh. DIVINE ENCOUNTERS One of the most decisive actions attributed in the Bible to