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286 twenty-eighth year of his reign (2068 B.C.) gave his daughter in marriage to an Elamite chieftain and granted him the city of Larsa as a dowry; in return the Elamites put a "foreign legion" of Elam- ite troops at Shulgi's disposal. These troops were employed by Shulgi to subdue the western provinces, including Canaan. It is thus in the last years of Shulgi's reign and when Ur was still an im- perial capital under his immediate successor Amar-Sin that we find the historical time slot into which all the biblical and Mesopota- nr ee ae wee ede a. mian records seem to fit perfectly. It is in that time, we believe, that the search for the historical Abraham should be conducted; for—as we shall show—the tale of Abraham was interwoven with the tale of the fall of Ur, and his With the discrediting of the Amraphel-Hammurabi notion, the verification of the Age of Abraham became a free-for-all, some suggesting such late dates that made the first patriarch a descendant of the later kings of Israel. . . . But the exact dates of his time and events need no guessing: the information is provided by the Bible itself; all we have to do is accept its veracity. The chronological calculations are surprisingly simple. Our starting point is 963 B.C., the year in which Solomon is believed to have assumed the kingship in Jerusalem. The Book of Kings states unequivocally that Solomon began the construction of the Temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem in the fourth year of his reign, completing it late in the eleventh year. I Kings 6:1 also states that "It came to pass in the four hundred and eightieth year after the Children of Is- rael were come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solo- mon's reign over Israel . . . that he began to build the House of Yahweh." This statement is supported (with a slight difference) by the priestly tradition that there had been twelve priestly genera- tions, of forty years each, from the Exodus to the time when Azariah "executed the priestly office in the temple that Solomon built in Jerusalem" (I Chronicles 5:36). Both sources agree on the passage of 480 years, with this differ- ence: one counts from the start of the temple's construction (960 B.C.) and the other from its completion (in 953 B.C), when the priestly services could begin. This would set the Israelite Exodus from Egypt in either 1440 or 1433 B.C.; the latter date, we find, of- fers better synchronization with other events. Based on the knowledge amassed by the beginning of this cen- tury, Egyptologists and biblical scholars had by then reached the THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN days were the last days of Sumer.