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144 the ultimate target—the Khabur River area, which the Bible called Aram-Naharayim (“The Western Land of the Two Rivers’); its principal urban center was Harran! It was there, Bible students will recall, that Abraham’s brother Nahor stayed on when Abraham proceeeded to Ca- naan; it was from there that Rebecca, the bride of Abraham’s son Isaac, came—she was in fact the granddaughter of Na- hor. And it was to Harran that Isaac’s son Jacob (renamed Israel) went to find a bride—ending up marrying his cous- ins, the two daughters (Le’ah and Rachel) of Laban, the brother of his mother Rebecca. These direct family ties between the “Children of Israel” (i.e., of Jacob) who were in Egypt and those who stayed on in Naharin-Naharayim are highlighted in the very first verses in Exodus: the list of the sons of Jacob who had come to Egypt with him includes the youngest, Ben-Yamin (Benja- min), the only full brother of Joseph because both were Ja- cob’s sons by Rachel (the others were sons of Jacob by his wife Le’ah and two concubines). We now know from Mitan- nian tablets that the most important tribe in the Khabur River area were called Ben-Yamins! The name of Joseph’s full brother was thus a Mitannian tribal name; no wonder, then, that the Egyptians considered the “Children of Israel” in Egypt and the “Children of Israel” in Mitanni as one com- bined nation “greater and mightier than us.” That was the war the Egyptians were preoccupied with and that was the reason for the Egyptian military concern— not the small number of Israelites in Egypt if they stayed, but a threat if they “left the land” and occupied territory to the north of Egypt. Indeed, preventing the Israelites from leav- ing appears to have been the central theme of the developing drama of the Exodus—there were the repeated appeals by Moses to the reigning Pharaoh to “let my people go,” and the Pharaoh’s repeated refusals to grant that request—in spite of ten consecutive divine punishments. Why? For a plausible answer we need to insert the space connection into the unfolding drama. In their northward thrusts, the Egyptians marched through the Sinai peninsula via the Way of the Sea, a route (later THE END OF DAYS