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283 The second discovery was announced by Vincent Scheil. who reported that he had found among the tablets in the Imperial Otto- man Museum in Constantinople a letter from the well-known Babylonian king Hammurabi, which mentions the very same Kudur-laghamar! Because the letter was addressed to a king of Larsa, Father Scheil concluded that the three were contemporaries and thus matched three of the four biblical kings of the East—Ham- murabi being none other than "Amraphel. king of Shin'ar." For a while it seemed that all the pieces of the puzzle had fallen into place: one can still find textbooks and biblical commentaries explaining that Amraphel stands for Hammurabi. The resulting conclusion that Abraham was a contemporary of this ruler seemed plausible, because it was then believed that Hammurabi reigned from 2067 to 2025 B.C., placing Abraham, the war of the kings, and the ensuing destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah at the end of the third millennium B.C. However, when subsequent research convinced most scholars that Hammurabi reigned much later (from 1792 to 1750 B.C., ac- cording to The Cambridge Ancient History), the synchronization seemingly achieved by Scheil fell apart, and the whole bearing of the discovered inscriptions—even those reported by Pinches- came into doubt. Ignored were the pleas of Pinches that no matter with whom the three named kings were to be identified—that even if Khedorla'omer, Ariokh, and Tidhal of the cuneiform texts were not contemporaries of Hammurabi—the text's tale with its three names was still "a remarkable historical coincidence, and deserves recognition as such." In 1917, Alfred Jeremias (Die sogenanten Kedorlaomer-Texte) attempted to revive interest in the subject; but the scholarly community preferred to treat the Spartoli tablets with benign neglect. They remained ignored in the basement of the British Museum for half a century, when M. C. Astour returned to the subject in a study at Brandeis University (Political and Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis 14). Agreeing that the biblical and Babylonian editors of the respective texts drew from some older, common Mesopotamian source, he identified the four Kings of the East as known rulers: 1) of Babylon in the eighth century B.C.; 2) of Assyria in the thirteenth cen- tury B.c: 3) of the Hittites in the sixteenth century B.C.; and 4) of Elam in the twelfth century B.C AS none were contemporaries of each other or of Abraham, he ingeniously suggested that the text was not a historical one but a work of religious philosophy, wherein the author used four diverse historic incidents to illustrate one moral (the fate of Abraham: The Fateful Years