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The Prophet Ezekiel had already prophesied the Last Battle, "in the latter days," involving Gog and Magog, in which the Lord himself shall "smite thy bow out of thy left hand, and will cause thine arrows to fall out of thine right hand." But the Dead Sea scroll went further, foreseeing the actual participation of many gods in the battles, engaged in combat side by side with mortal men: On that day, the Company of the Divine and the Congregation of the Mortals shall engage side by side in combat and carnage. The Sons of Light shall battle against the Sons of Darkness with a show of godlike might, amid uproarious tumult, amid the war cries of gods and men. Though Crusaders. Saracens, and countless others in historical times have gone to war "in the name of God," the belief that in a war to come the Lord himself shall be actually present on the bat- tlefield, and that gods and men would fight side by side, sounds as fantasy, to be treated allegorically at best. Yet it is not as extraordi- nary a notion as it may appear to be, for in earlier times, it was in- deed believed that the Wars of Men were not only decreed by the gods but were also fought with the gods' active participation. One of the most romanticized wars, when "love had launched a thousand ships," was the War of Troy, between the Achaean Greeks and the Trojans, ft was, know we not, launched by the Greeks to force the Trojans to return the beautiful Helen to her law- ful spouse. Yet an epic Greek tale, the Kypria, represented the war as a premeditated scheme by the great god Zeus: There was a time when thousands upon thousands of men en- cumbered the broad bosom of the Earth. And having pity on them, Zeus in his great wisdom resolved to lighten Earth's bur- an den. So he caused the strife at Ilion (Troy) to that end; that through death he might make a void in the race of men. Homer, the Greek storyteller who related the war's events in the Iliad, blamed the whim of the gods for instigating the conflict and for turning and twisting it to its ultimate major proportions. Acting directly and indirectly, sometimes seen and sometimes unseen, the various gods nudged the principal actors of this human drama to their fates. And behind it all was Jove (Jupiter/Zeus): "While the THE WARS OFGODS AND MEN