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69 It is with these verses that the Hebrew Bible begins the pivotal tale of Abraham—called at the beginning by his Su- merian name Abram. His father, we are told earlier, stemmed from a patriarchal line that went all the way back to Shem, the oldest son of Noah (the hero of the Deluge); all those Pa- triarchs enjoyed long lives—Shem to the age of 600, his son Arpakhshad to 438; and subsequent male offspring to 433, 460, 239, and 230 years. Nahor, the father of Terah, lived to age 148; and Terah himself—who fathered Abram when he was seventy years old—lived to age 205. Chapter 11 of Gen- esis explains that Arpakhshad and his descendants lived in the lands later known as Sumer and Elam and their sur- roundings. So Abraham, as Abram, was a true Sumerian. This genealogical information alone indicates that Abra- ham was of a special ancestry. His Sumerian name, AB. RAM, meant “Father’s Beloved,” an apropriate name for a son finally born to a seventy-year-old father. The father’s name, Terah, stemmed from the Sumerian epithet-name TIRHU; it designated an Oracle Priest—a priest who ob- served celestial signs or received oracular messages from a god, and explained or conveyed them to the king. The name of Abram’s wife, SARAI (later Sarah in Hebrew), meant “Princess”; the name of Nahor’s wife, Milkhah, meant “Queen- like”; both suggest a royal genealogy. Since it was later re- vealed that Abraham’s wife was his half-sister—‘the daughter of my father but not of my mother,” he explained—it follows that Sarai/Sarah’s mother was of royal descent. The family thus belonged to Sumer’s highest echelons, combining royal and priestly ancestries. Another significant clue to identifying the family’s history is the repeated reference by Abraham to himself, when he met rulers in Canaan and Egypt, as being an /bri—a “Hebrew.” The word stems from the root ABoR—to come across, to cross—so it has been assumed by biblical scholars that by that he meant that he had come across from the other side of the Euphrates River, i.e., from Mesopotamia. But I believe that the term was more specific. The name used for Sumer’s “*Vat- ican City,” Nippur, is the Akkadian rendering of the original Sumerian name NI.IBRU, “Splendid Place of Crossing.” Countdown to Doomsday