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362 the deity who had instructed Abram the Sumerian to pick up and leave? Having brought peace and prosperity to Sumer when Ur was its capital, he was venerated in Ur's great ziggurat (whose remains rise awesomely to this day) with his beloved wife NIN.GAL ("Great Lady"). At the time of the new moon, the hymns sung to this divine couple expressed the people's gratitude to them; and the dark of the moon was considered a time of "the mystery of the great gods, a time of Nannar's oracle," when he would send "Zaqar, the god of dreams during the night" to give commands as well as to forgive sins. He was described in the hymns as "decider of destinies in Heaven and on Earth, leader of living creatures ... who causes truth and justice to be." It all sounds not unlike some of the praises of Yahweh sung by the Psalmist ... The Akkadian/Semitic name for Nannar was Sin, and there can be no doubt that it was in honor of Nannar as Sin that the part of the Sinai peninsula called in the Bible the "Wil- derness of Sin" and, for that matter, the whole peninsula, were so named. It was in that part of the world that Yahweh appeared to Moses for the first time, where the "Mount of the gods" was located, where the greatest Theophany ever had taken place. Furthermore, the principal habitat in the Sinai's central plain, in the vicinity of what we believe is the true Mount Sinai, is still called Nakhl in Arabic after the goddess Ningal whose Semitic name was pronounced Nikal. Was it all indicative of a Yahweh = Nannar/Sin identifica- tion? The discovery several decades ago of extensive Canaanite literature ("myths" to scholars) dealing with their pantheon revealed that while a god they called Ba'al (the generic word for "Lord" used as a personal name) was running things, he was in fact not entirely independent of his father El (a generic term meaning "god" used as a personal name). In these texts El is depicted as a retired god, living with his spouse Asherah away from the populated areas, at a quiet place where "the two waters meet"—a place that we have identified in The Stairway To Heaven as the southern tip of the Sinai penin- sula, where the two gulfs extending from the Red Sea meet. DIVINE ENCOUNTERS