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293 These were audacious ideas in a Germany witnessing the rise of Nazism with its racial theories. Soon after the assumption of power by Hitler, the heretic suggestions of Jeremias were strongly put down by Nikolaus Schneider in a reply entitled War Abraham Sumerer? Abraham was neither a Sumerian nor a man of pure de- scent, he concluded: "From the time of the reign of the Akkadian king Sargon in Ur, the home-place of Abraham, there was never there a pure, unmixed Sumerian population and a homogenous Su- merian culture." The ensuing upheavals and World War II cut off further debate on the subject. Regrettably, the thread discerned by Jeremias has not been picked up. Yet all the biblical and Mesopotamian evi- dence tells us that Abraham was indeed a Sumerian. The Old Testament, in fact (Genesis 17:1-16), provides us with the time and manner in which Abraham was transformed from a Sumerian nobleman to a west Semitic potentate, under a covenant between him and his God. Amid a ritual of circumcision, his Su- merian name AB.RAM ('Father's Beloved") was changed to the Akkadian/Semitic Abraham ("Father of a Multitude of Nations' 1 and that of his wife SARAI ("Princess") was adapted to the Se- mitic Sarah. It was only when he was ninety-nine years old that Abraham be- came a "Semite." As we decipher the age-old enigma of Abraham's identity and his Mission to Canaan, it is in Sumerian history, customs, and lan- guage that we shall search for the answers. Is it not naive to assume that for the Mission to Canaan, for the birth of a nation, and for kingship over all the lands from the border of Egypt to the border of Mesopotamia, the Lord would choose someone at random, picking up anyone in the streets of Ur? The young woman whom Abraham married bore the epithet-name Prin- cess; since she was a half-sister of Abraham ("Indeed she is my sister, the daughter of my father but not the daughter of my mother"), we can take it for granted that either Abraham's father or Sarah's mother was of royal descent. Since the daughter of Harran, Abraham's brother, also bore a royal name (Milkha— "Queenly"), it follows that it was through the father of Abraham that the royal ancestry flowed. In dealing with Abraham's family we thus deal with a family of Sumer's highest echelons; people of a noble deportment and elegant dress as found depicted on various Sumerian statues (Fig. 98). Abraham: The Fateful Years