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361 Endpaper plain, "as with fire he scorched the animals, burned its grains to become as dust." As was the clear-cut case of the divine actors in the Deluge tale, so we find in this one concerning the upheavaling of Sodom, Gomorrah, and the other cities of that plain astride the Sinai peninsula, whom does and whom does not Yahweh match when the biblical and Sumerian texts are compared. The Mesopotamian text clearly associates Nergal and not Ni- nurta as the one who had upheavaled the sinning cities. Since the Bible asserts that it was not the two Angels who had gone to verify the situation, but Yahweh himself who had rained destruction on the cities, Yahweh could not have been Ninurta. (The reference in Genesis chapter 10 to Nimrod as the one credited with starting Kingship in Mesopotamia, which we have discussed earlier, is interpreted by some as a reference not to a human king but to a god, and thus to Ninurta to whom the task of setting up the first Kingships was assigned. If so, the biblical statement that Nimrod "was a _ mighty hunter before Yahweh" also nullifies the possibility that Ni- nurta/Nimrod could have been Yahweh). But Nergal too was not Yahweh. He is mentioned by name as the deity of the Cutheans who were among the foreigners brought over by the Assyrians to replace the Israelites who were exiled. He is listed among the "other gods" that the newcomers worshiped and for whom they set up idols. He could not have been "Yahweh" and Yahweh's abomination at one and the same time. If Enlil and two of his sons, Adad and Ninurta, are not finalists in the lineup to identify Yahweh, what about Enlil's third son, Nannar/Sin (the "Moon god")? His "cult center" (as scholars call it) in Sumer was Ur, the very city from which the migration of Terah and his family began. From Ur, where Terah performed priestly ser- vices, they went to Harran on the Upper Euphrates—a city that was a duplicate (even if on a smaller scale) of Ur as a cult center of Nannar. The migration at that particular time was connected, we believe, with religious and royal changes that might have affected the worship of Nannar. Was he then