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86 Abraham was then ninety-nine years old; having been born in 2123 B.c.E., the time had to be 2024 B.c.E. The convergence of the Mesopotamian texts with the bib- lical narrative of Genesis concerning the upheaval of Sodom and Gomorrah is at once one of the most significant confir- mations of the Bible’s veracity in general and of Abraham’s status and role in particular—and yet one of the most shunned by theologians and other scholars, because of its report of the events of the preceding day, the day three Divine Beings (“Angels” who looked like men) had paid Abraham a visit— it smacks too much of an “Ancient Astronauts” tale. Those who question the Bible or treat the Mesopotamian texts as just myths have sought to explain the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as some natural calamity, yet the biblical ver- sion confirms twice that the “upheaval” by “fire and sulfur” was not a natural calamity but a premeditated, postponable and even cancellable event: once when Abraham bargained with The Lord to spare the cities so as not to destroy the righ- teous with the unjust, and again when his nephew Lot ob- tained a postponement of the upheaval. Photographs of the Sinai Peninsula from space (Fig. 34) still show the immense cavity and the crack in the surface where the nuclear explosion had taken place. The area itself is strewn, to this day, with crushed, burnt, and blackened rocks (Fig. 35); they contain a highly unusual ratio of iso- tope uranium-235, indicating in expert opinions exposure to sudden immense heat of nuclear origin. The upheaval of the cities in the plain of the Dead Sea caused the southern shore of the sea to collapse, leading to a flooding of the once fertile area and its appearance, to this day, as an appendage separated from the sea by a barrier called “El-Lissan” (“The Tongue’) (Fig. 36). Attempts by Israeli archaeologists to explore the seabed there have re- vealed the existence of enigmatic underwater ruins, but the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, in whose half of the Dead Sea the ruins are, put a stop to further exploration. Interest- ingly, the relevant Mesopotamian texts confirm the topo- graphic change and even suggest that the sea became a Dead Sea as a result of the nuclear bombing: Erra, they tell, “Dug THE END OF DAYS