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124 The first two belonged to the Enki-Marduk-Nabu camp; the other two were beholden to Enlil, Ninurta, and Adad. Their national gods were called Ra-Amon and Bel/Marduk, Ashur and Teshub, and it was in the name of those gods that constant, prolonged, and cruel wars were fought. The wars, historians may explain, were caused by the usual reasons for war: resources, territory, need, or greed; but the royal annals that detailed the wars and military expeditions presented them as religious wars in which one’s god was glorified and the opposite deity humiliated. However, the looming expecta- tions of the Return turned those wars to territorial cam- paigns that had specific sites as their targets. The wars, according to the royal annals of all those lands, were launched by the king “on the command of my god” so- and-so; the campaign was carried out “in accordance with an oracle” from this or that god; and as often as not, victory was attained with the help of unopposable weapons or other di- rect help provided by the god. An Egyptian king wrote in his war records that it was “Ra who loves me, Amon who favors me,” who instructed him to march “against these enemies whom Ra abominates.” An Assyrian king, recording the de- feat of an enemy king, boasted that he replaced in the city’s temple the images of the city’s gods “with the images of my gods, and declared them to be henceforth the gods of the country.” A clear example of the religious aspect of those wars—and the deliberate choice of targets—can be found in the Hebrew Bible, in 2 Kings Chapters 18-19, in which the siege of Jeru- salem by the army of the Assyrian king Sennacherib is de- scribed. Having surrounded and cut off the city, the Assyrian commander engaged in psychological warfare in order to get the city’s defenders to surrender. Speaking in Hebrew so that all on the city’s walls could understand, he shouted to them the words of the king of Assyria: Don’t be deceived by your leaders that your god Yahweh will protect you; “Has any of the gods of the nations ever rescued their lands from the hand of the king of Ashur? Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim, Hena and Avva? Where are the gods of the land of Samaria? Which of THE END OF DAYS