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292 of two major Sumerian events—and of more to come—must serve as an indication of a direct connection between them all. Abraham emerges not as the son of immigrant aliens but as the scion of a family directly involved in Sumerian affairs of state! In their search for the answer to the question of "Who Was Abraham," scholars have seized upon the similarity between his designation as a Hebrew (Ibri) and the term Hapiru (which in the Near East could transform to Habiru) by which the Assyrians and Babylonians in the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries B.C. called bands of pillaging western Semites. At the end of the fifteenth cen- tury B.C., the commander of an Egyptian garrison in Jerusalem asked his king for reinforcements against approaching Hapiru. Scholars have taken all that as evidence for the notion that Abra- ham was a western Semite. Many scholars doubt, however, whether the term denotes an ethnic group at all, wondering whether the word was not a descrip- tive noun simply meaning "marauders" or "invaders." The sug- gestion that Ibri (clearly from the verb "to cross") and Hapiru are one and the same entails substantial philological and etymological problems. There are also great chronological inconsistencies, all of which gave rise to serious objections to this suggested solution for the identity of Abraham, especially when the biblical data is com- pared with the "bandit" connotation of the term Hapiru. Thus the Bible relates incidents concerning water wells, which show that Abraham was careful to avoid conflict with local residents as he journeyed through Canaan. When Abraham became involved in the War of the Kings, he refused to share in the booty. This is not the behavior of a marauding barbarian but rather of a person of high standards of conduct. Coming to Egypt, Abraham and Sarah were taken to the Pharaoh's court; in Canaan, Abraham made treaties with the local rulers. This is not the image of a nomad pillaging others’ settlements; it is the image of a personage of high standing skilled in negotiation and diplomacy. It was out of such considerations that Alfred Jeremias, then a leading Assyriologist and professor of the history of religion at the Leipzig University, announced in the 1930 edition of his master work Das Alte Testament im Lichte des Alten Orients that "in his intellectual makeup Abraham was a Sumerian." He enlarged on this conclusion in a 1932 study entitled Der Kosmos von Sumer: "Abraham was not a Semitic Babylonian but a Sumerian." Abra- ham, he suggested, headed the Faithful whose reformation sought to raise Sumerian society to higher religious levels. THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN