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302 the hill country, settling on the highest peak near Hebron, from where he could see in all directions; and the Lord said unto him: "Go, cross the country in the length and the breadth of it, for unto thee shall I give it." Sa, ee OO | SOs: De en It was soon thereafter, "in the days of Amraphel king of Shin'ar," that the military expedition of the eastern alliance had taken place. "Twelve years they [the Canaanite kings] served Khedorla'o- mer; in the thirteenth year they rebelled; and in the fourteenth year there came Khedorla'‘omer and the kings that were with him" (At tA EN (Genesis 14:4-5). Scholars have long searched the archaeological records for the events described in the Bible; their efforts have been unsuccessful because they searched for Abraham in the wrong era. But if we are right in our chronology, a simple solution to the "Amraphel" problem becomes possible. It is a new solution, yet one that rests on scholarly suggestions made (and ignored) almost a century ago. Back in 1875, comparing the traditional reading of the name with its spelling in early biblical translations, F. Lenormant (La Langue Primitive cle la Chaldee) had suggested that the correct reading should be "Amar-pal, " as written out phonetically in the Septuagint (the third century B.C. translation of the Old Testament into Greek from the original Hebrew). Two years later D. H. Haigh, writing in the Zeitschrift fur Agyptische Sprache un Altertumskunde, also adopted the reading “Amarpal" and, stating that "the second element [of the king's name] is a name of the Moon-god [Sin]," declared: "I have long been convinced of the identity of Amar-pal as one of the kings of Ur." In 1916, Franz M. Bohl (Die Kbnige von Genesis 14) suggeste again—without success—that the name be read, as in the Septuagint, "Amar-pal," explaining that it meant "Seen by the Son"—a royal name in line with other royal names in the Near East, such as the Egyptian Thoth-mes ("Seen by Thoth"). (For some reason Bohl an others have neglected to mention the no-less-significant fact that the Septuagint spelled out the name of Khedorla'‘omer Khodologomar— almost identical to the Kudur-lagamar of the Spartoli tablets.) Pal (meaning "son") was indeed a common suffix in Mesopota- mian royal names, standing for the deity considered the favorite Divine Son. Since in Ur the god deemed to have been the Favored Son was Nannar/Sin, we suggest that Amar-Sin and Amar-pal were, in Ur, one and the same name. THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN