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254 to leave Babylon and go into exile “in a distant region.” It is a historical fact that Nabunaid indeed left Babylon and named his son Bel-Shar-Uzur—the Belshazzar of the biblical Book of Daniel—as regent. The “distant region” to which Nabunaid went in self-exile was Arabia. As various inscriptions attest, his entourage in- cluded Jews from among the Judean exiles in the Harran re- gion. His principal base was at a place called Teima, a caravan center in what is now northwestern Saudi Arabia that is mentioned several times in the Bible. (Recent excava- tions there have uncovered cuneiform tablets attesting to Nabunaid’s stay.) He established six other settlements for his followers; five of the towns were listed—a thousand years later—by Arabian writers as Jewish towns. One of them was Medina, the town where Muhammed founded Islam. The “Jewish angle” in the Nabunaid tale has been reinforced by the fact that a fragment of the Dead Sea scrolls, found at Qumran on the shores of the Dead Sea, mentions Nabunaid and asserts that he was suffering in Teima from an “unpleas- ant skin disease” that was cured only after “a Jew told him to give honor to the God Most High.” All that has led to specula- tion that Nabunaid was contemplating Monotheism; but to him the God Most High was not the Judeans’ Yahweh, but his benefector Nannar/Sin, the Moon god, whose crescent symbol has been adopted by Islam; and there is little doubt that its roots can be traced back to Nabunaid’s stay in Arabia. Sin’s whereabouts fade out of Mesopotamian records af- ter the time of Nabunaid. Texts discovered at Ugarit, a “Ca- naanite” site on the Mediterranean coast in Syria now called Ras Shamra, describe the Moon god as retired, with his spouse, to an oasis at the confluence of two bodies of water, “near the cleft of the two seas.” Ever wondering why the Si- nai peninsula was named in honor of Sin and its main cen- tral crossroads in honor of his spouse Nikkal (the place is still called, in Arabic, Nakhl), I surmised that the aged cou- ple retired to somewhere on the shores of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Eilat. The Ugaritic texts called the Moon god EL—simply, “God,” a forerunner of Islam’s Allah; and his moon-cres- THE END OF DAYS