A Time of Prophecy
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north; Enlil and Ninlil left to an unknown destination, as did the spinster Ninharsag. In Lagash the goddess Bau found herself alone, for Ninurta had been gone since the nuclear blasting; she "wept bitterly for her temple" and lingered on; the result was tragic, for "on that day the storm caught up with her; Bau, as if she were mortal, the storm caught up with her." The list of fleeing gods goes on and on, until it gets to Ur and its deities. There, as we have already mentioned, Nannar/ Sin refused to believe that his city's fate was sealed. In the lamentation she herself wrote later, his spouse Ningal described how, in spite of the foul smell of the dead whose bodies filled the city they stayed on "and did not flee." Nor did they flee on the night that followed me awesome day. But by morning the two deities, huddled in their ziggurat's subterranean chamber, realized that the city was doomed, and they, too, left. The nuclear cloud, shifted southward by the winds, spared Babylon; and that was taken as an omen reinforcing the grant of the fifty names to Marduk as an indication of his deserved supremacy. His first step was to carry out his father's suggestion that the Anunnaki themselves build for him his house/temple in Babylon, the E.SAG.IL ("House of Lofty Head"). To that was added in the sacred precinct another temple for the celebration of the New Year and the reading of the revised Enuma elish; its name, E.TEMEN.AN.KI ("House of the Foundation Heaven-Earth") was clearly intended to indicate that it had replaced Enlil's DUR.AN.KI ("Bond Heaven-Earth"), which had been at the heart of Nippur when it was Mission Control Center. Scholars have paid scant attentionto the issue of mathematics in the Bible, leaving untackled what should have been a puzzle: Why has the Hebrew Bible adopted completely the decimal system, although Abraham was an Ibri—a Sumerian from Nippur—and all the tales in Genesis (as echoed in the Psalms and elsewhere) were based on Sumerian texts? Why was the Sumerian sexagesimal system ("base 60") not at all