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321 asked for guidance and reassurance from his gods; but all he was hearing were oracles of destruction and doom. In the fourth year of his reign he was told that "The Son in the west will arise . . . it is an omen for Ibbi-Sin: Ur shall be judged." In the fifth year, Ibbi-Sin sought further strength by becoming High Priest of Inanna at her shrine at Ur. But that, too, was of no help: that year, the other cities of Sumer itself ceased sending the messages of allegiance. It was also the last year in which those cities delivered the traditional sacrificial animals for Nannar's tem- ple in Ur. The central authority of Ur, her gods, and her great ziggurat-temple were no longer recognized. As the sixth year began, the omens "concerning destruction" became more urgent and more specific. "When the sixth year comes, the inhabitants of Ur will be trapped," one omen stated. The prophesied calamity shall come, another omen said, "When, or the second time, he who calls himself Supreme, like one whose chest has been anointed, shall come from the west." That very year, as messages from the borders reveal, “hostile Westerners had entered the plain" of Mesopotamia; without resistance, they quickly "entered the interior of the country, taking one by one all the great fortresses." All Ibbi-Sin held on to was the enclave of Ur and Nippur; but before the fateful sixth year was out, the inscriptions honoring the king of Ur stopped abruptly also in Nippur. The enemy of Ur and her gods, the "One who calls himself Supreme," had reached the heart of Sumer. Marduk, as the omens had predicted, returned to Babylon for the second time. The twenty-four fateful years—since Abraham left Harran, since Shulgi was replaced on the throne, since Marduk's exile among the Hittites had begun—have all converged in that Year of Doom, 2024 B.C. Having followed the separate, but interconnected, bibli- cal tale of Abraham and the fortunes of Ur and its last three kings, nes | ee oe | eee or vee kW eee ee we will now follow in the footsteps of Marduk. The tablet on which Marduk's autobiography is inscribed (from which we have already partly quoted) continues to relate his return to Babylon after the twenty-four years of sojourn in the Land of Hatti: In Hatti-land I asked an oracle [about] my throne and my Lordship; The Nuclear Holocaust