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153 Anunnaki counted from the outside in) and of Enlil as Earth’s Commander; the forty as Ea/Enki’s numerical rank. The number fifty is also present. Fifty, as the reader knows, was a number with “sensitive” aspects—it was the original rank number of Enlil and the stand-in rank of his heir appar- ent, Ninurta; and more significantly, in the days of the Exo- dus, it connoted symbolism to Marduk and his Fifty Names. Extra attention is therefore called for when we find that “fifty” was granted extraordinary importance—it was used to create anew Unit of Time, the fifty-year Jubilee. While the calendar of Nippur was clearly adopted as the calendar by which the festivals and other Israelite religious rites were to be observed, special regulations were dictated for the fiftieth year; it was given a special name, that of a Jubilee Year: “A hallowed Jubilee year it shall be unto you” (Leviticus Chapter 25). In such a year, unprecedented free- doms were to take place. The count was to be done by count- ing the New Year’s Day of Atonements for seven years sevenfold, forty-nine times; then on the Day of Atonement on the year thereafter, the fiftieth year, the trumpet call of a ram’s horn was to be sounded throughout the land, and free- dom was to be proclaimed for the land and all who dwelled in it: people should return to their families; property should return to its original owners—all land and house sales shall be redeemable and undone; slaves (who had to be treated at all times as hired help!) shall be set free, and liberty shall be given the land itself by leaving it fallow that year. As much as the concept of a “Year of Freedom” is novel and unique, the choice of fifty as a calendrical unit seems odd (we have adopted 100—a century—as a convenient unit of time). Then the name given to such a once-in-fifty year is even more intriguing. The word that is translated “Jubilee” is Yovel in the Hebrew Bible, and it means “a ram.” So one can say that what was decreed was a “Year of the Ram,” to repeat itself every fifty years, and to be announced by sounding the ram’s horn. Both the choice of fifty for the new time unit and its name raise the unavoidable question: Was there a hidden aspect here, related to Marduk and his Age of the Ram? The Promised Land