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Endpaper 363 This fact and other considerations have led us to the conclu- sion that the Canaanite El was the retired Nannar/Sin; in- cluded in the reasons upon which we had expounded is the fact that a "cult center" to Nannar/Sin has existed at a vital crossroads in the ancient Near East and even nowadays, the city known to us as Jericho but whose biblical/Semitic name is Yeriho, meaning "City of the Moon God"; and the adop- tion by tribes to the south thereof of Allah—"El" in Ara- bic—as the God of Islam represented by the Moon's crescent. Described in the Canaanite texts as a retired deity, El as Nannar/Sin would indeed have been forced into retirement: Sumerian texts dealing with the effects of the nuclear cloud as it wafted eastward and reached Sumer and its capital Ur, reveal that Nannar/Sin—refusing to leave his beloved city— was afflicted by the deathly cloud and was partly paralyzed. The image of Yahweh, especially in the period of the Exo- dus and the settlement of Canaan, i.e. after—not prior to— the demise of Ur, does not sound right for a retired, afflicted, and tired deity as Nannar/Sin had become by then. The Bible paints a picture of an active deity, insistent and persistent, fully in command, defying the gods of Egypt, inflicting plagues, dispatching Angels, roaming the skies; omnipresent, performing wonders, a magical healer, a Divine Architect. We find none of that in the descriptions of Nannar/Sin. Both his veneration and fear of him stemmed from _ his association with his celestial counterpart, the Moon; and _ this celestial aspect serves as a decisive argument against identi- fying him with Yahweh: In the biblical divine order, it was Yahweh who ordered the Sun and the Moon to serve as luminaries; "the Sun and the Moon praise Yahweh," the Psalmist (148:3) declared. And on Earth, the crumbling of the walls of Jericho before the trumpeters of Yahweh symbol- ized the supremacy of Yahweh over the Moon god Sin. There was also the matter of Ba'al, the Canaanite deity whose worship was a constant thorn in the side of Yahweh's faithful. The discovered texts reveal that Ba'al was a son of El. His abode in the mountains of Lebanon is still known as Baalbek, "The valley of Ba'al"—the place that was the first destination of Gilgamesh in his search for immortality. The biblical name for it was Beit-Shemesh—the "House/abode of