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Endpaper 377 Bible) during the Babylonian exile, omitted the Aleph. Was it in order to avoid offending their Babylonian exilers (be- cause a claim that Yahweh had created the Anunnaki-gods would have not excluded Marduk)? But what is, we believe, not to be doubted is that at one time the first word in the first verse in the Bible did begin with the first letter of the alphabet. This certainty is based on the statements in the Book of Revelation ("The Apocalypse of St. John" in the New Testament), in which God announces thus: Iam Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, the First and the Last. The statement, repeated three times (1:8, 21:6, 22:13), ap- plies the first letter of the alphabet (by its Greek name) to the Beginning, to the divine First, and the last letter of the (Greek) alphabet to me End, to God being the Last of all as He has been the First of All. That this had been the case at the beginning of Genesis is confirmed, we believe, by the certainty that the statements in Revelation harken back to the Hebrew scriptures from which the parallel verses in Isaiah (41:6, 42:8, 44:6) were taken, the verses in which Yahweh proclaims His absoluteness and verses in \ uniqueness: I, Yahweh, was the First And the Last I will also be! and I am the Last; There are no Elohim without Me! Iam He, 1 am the First, Tam the Last as well. It is these statements that help identify the biblical God by the answer that He himself gave when asked: Who, O God, are you? It was when He called Moses out of the Burning Iam the First