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291 the first time with the trusteeship over Nippur. And he was a young man of twenty-seven when Ur-Nammu inexplicably fell from Anu's and Enlil's favor, slain on a distant battlefield. We have de- scribed the traumatic effect of the event on the people of Mesopota- mia, the shock it had given to their faith in Nannar's omnipotence and the fidelity of Enlil's word. The year of Ur-Nammu's fall was 2096 B.C. Could it not have been the year when—under the impact of the event or as a conse- quence thereof—Terah and his family left Ur for a faraway destina- tion, stopping off at Harran, the Ur away from Ur? All through the following years of Ur's decline and Shulgi's pro- fanities, the family stayed on in Harran. Then, suddenly, the Lord acted again: And Yahweh said unto Abram: "Get thee out of thy country and out of thy birthplace and from thy father's house, unto the land which I will show thee" . . . And Abram departed as Yahweh had spoken unto him, and Lot went with him. And Abram was seventy-five years old when he left Harran. Once again, no reason is given for the crucial move. But the chronological clue is most revealing. When Abraham was seventy- five years old, the year was 2048 B.C.— the very year of Shulgi's downfall! Because Abraham's family (Genesis 11) directly continued the line of Shem, Abraham has been considered a Semite, one whose background, cultural heritage, and language were Semitic, as dis- tinct (in scholars' minds) from the non-Semitic Sumerians and the later Indo-Europeans. But in the original biblical sense, all the peo- ples of greater Mesopotamia were descended of Shem. "Semite" and "Sumerian" alike. There is nothing in the Bible that sug- gests—as some scholars have begun to hold—that Abraham and_ his family were Amorites (i.e., western Semites) who had come as im- migrants to Sumer and then returned to their original abode. On the contrary: There is everything to support the image of a family rooted in Sumer from its earliest beginnings, hastily uprooted from its country and birthplace and told to go to an unfamiliar land. The correspondence between two biblical events with the dates Abraham: The Fateful Years Nammu ascended the throne in Ur, when Nannar was favored for