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325 These are indeed verses that must have had a common source with the biblical description of how "brimstone and fire" rained from the skies "upheavaled those cities and the whole plain"! As biblical statements (e.g.. Deuteronomy 29:22-27) attested. the "wickedness" of the cities of the Jordan Plain was that "they had forsaken the covenant of the Lord . . . and they went and served other gods." As we now learn from the Babylonian text, the "outcry" (accusation) against them was their rallying to the side of Marduk and Nabu in that last clash between the contending gods. But whereas the biblical text left it at that, the Babylonian text adds another important detail: The attack on the Canaanite cities was in- tended not only to destroy the centers of support for Marduk. but also to destroy Nabu. who had sought asylum there. However, that second aim was not achieved, for Nabu managed to slip out in time and escaped to an island in the Mediterranean, where the people accepted him although he was not their god: He [Nabu] the great sea entered. Sat upon a throne which was not his [Because] Ezida, the legitimate abode, was overrun. The picture that can be gathered from the biblical and Babylo- nian texts of the cataclysm that engulfed the ancient Near East in the time of Abraham is much more fully detailed in The Erra Epic (to which we have already referred earlier). First pieced together from fragments found in the library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, the Assyrian text began to take shape and meaning as more frag- mented versions were unearthed at other archaeological sites. By now it is definitely established that the text was inscribed on five tablets: and in spite of breaks, missing or incomplete lines, and even some disagreement among the scholars where some frag- ments belong, two extensive translations have been compiled: Das Era-Epos by P. F. Gossmann, and L'Epopea di Erra by L. Cagni. The Erra Epic not only explains the nature and causes of the con- flict that had led to the unleashing of the Ultimate Weapon against inhabited cities and the attempt to annihilate a god (Nabu) believed hiding therein. It also makes clear that such an extreme measure was not taken lightly. We know from several other texts that the great gods, at that time of acute crisis, were sitting in a continuous Council of War, keeping constant communication with Anu: "Anu to Earth the words was speaking, Earth to Anu the words pronounced." The The Nuclear Holocaust