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149 cret north place”)—what the area’s dwellers, the Canaanite- Phoenicians, also called it. (Canaanite epics deemed it to be a sacred place of the god Adad, Enlil’s youngest son.) The crossing of the Jordan River—an accomplishment at- tained with the help of several miracles—took place “oppo- site Jericho,” and the fortified city of Jericho (west of the Jordan) was the Israelites’ first target. The story of the tum- bling of its walls and its capture includes a biblical reference to Sumer (Shin’ar in Hebrew): in spite of the commandment to take no booty, one of the Israelites could not resist the temptation to “keep a valued garment of Shin’ar.” The capture of Jericho, and the town of Ai south of it, opened the way to the Israelites’ most important and imme- diate target: Jerusalem, where the Mission Control platform had been. The missions of Abraham and his descendants and God’s covenants with them never lost sight of that site’s cen- trality. As God told Moses, it is in Jerusalem that His earthly abode was to be; now the promise-prophecy could be ful- filled. The capture of the cities on the way to Jerusalem, along with the hill towns surrounding it, turned out to be a for- midable challenge, primarily because some of them, and es- pecially Hebron, were inhabited by “children of the Anakim’—descendants of the Anunnaki. Jerusalem, it will be recalled, ceased to function as Mission Control Center when the spaceport in the Sinai was wiped out more than six centuries earlier. But according to the Bible, the descendants of the Anunnaki who had been stationed there were still re- siding in that part of Canaan. And it was “Adoni-Zedek, king of Jerusalem” who formed an alliance with four other city- kings to block the Israelite advance. The battle that ensued, at Gibe’on in the Valley of Ayalon just north of Jerusalem, took place on a unique day—the day the Earth stood still. For the better part of that day, “the Sun stopped and the Moon stood still” (Joshua 10: 10- 14), enabling the Israelites to win that crucial battle. (A parallel but reverse occurrence, when nighttime lasted an extra twenty hours, took place on the other side of the world, in the Americas; we discuss the matter in The Lost Realms.) The Promised Land