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60 These are strong words, accusing the great Enlilite gods of deceit and double-crossing! The ancient words convey the extent of the people’s disappointment. If that was so in Sumer & Akkad, one can imagine the reac- tion in the rebellious western lands. In the struggle for the hearts and minds of Mankind, the Enlilites were faltering. Nabu, the “spokesman,” intensified the campaign in behalf of his father Marduk. His own status was enhanced and changed: his own divinity was now glori- fied by a variety of venerating epithets. Inspired by Nabu— the Nabih, the Prophet—prophecies of the Future, of what is about to happen, began to sweep the contested lands. We know what they said because a number of clay tablets on which such prophecies were inscribed have been found; written in Old Babylonian cuneiform, they are grouped by scholars as Akkadian Prophecies or Akkadian Apocalypses. Common to all of them is the view that Past, Present, and Future are parts of a continuous flow of events; that within a preordained Destiny there is some room for free will and thus a variated Fate; that for Mankind, both were decreed or determined by the gods of Heaven and Earth; and that there- fore events on Earth reflect occurrences in the heavens. To grant the prophecies believability, the texts sometimes anchored the prediction of future events in a known past his- toric occurrence or entity. What is wrong in the present, why change is needed, is then recounted. The unfolding events are attributed to decisions by one or more of the great gods. A divine Emissary, a Herald, will appear; the prophetic text might be his words, written down by the scribe, or expected pronouncements; as often as not, “a son will speak for his father.” The predicted event(s) will be linked to omens—the death of a king, or heavenly signs: a celestial body will ap- pear and make a frightful sound; “a burning fire” will come from the skies; “a star shall flash from the height of the sky to the horizon as a torch;” and, most significantly, ‘a planet will appear before its time.” Bad things, Apocalypse, shall precede the final event. There would be calamitous rains, huge devastating waves— THE END OF DAYS