the warning of Armageddon’s nearness, they spent, in 1954, a monumental 80,814,996 hours. Avail yourself of the opportunity to hear this most urgent of all messages thoroughly. Carefully investigate it by using your Bible. Your destiny is at stake. So remember Sodom’s laughing citizens and their fate. Remember Jesus’ warning comparison of that time with today. Benefit now by knowing that this present judgment day is for a certainty not a joke.

Abraham and the Hittites

THE Hittites were the descendants of the Biblical patriarch Heth, who was a grandson of Ham through Canaan. (Gen. 10:6, 15) The word Hittite(s) occurs 47 times in the Hebrew Scriptures, while the name Heth is used 14 times, thus indicating an outstanding ancient people appearing on the scenes of Biblical history all the way from early post-Flood days to the period of the Hebrew kings. (Gen. 15:20; 2 Sam. 11:3; 2 Chron. 8:7) Secular ancient history knew nothing of these ancient people until after 1871, when archaeologists began to find inscriptions mentioning the Hittites, thus confirming the Bible record of their existence.a

In 1906 in Asia Minor 90 miles east of Ankara, Turkey, excavations were begun of what proved to be the ancient Hittite capital city, Boghaz-keui, where some ten thousand clay tablets were found written in the Hittite and other dead languages of the past.b Many of these tablet-documents have now been deciphered and from them much of the language, laws and culture of the Hittites has been reconstructed. It is now commonly accepted that the Hittites operated a vast ancient empire dominating most of Asia Minor with an extension of their political control over most of Palestine from the years of about 2000 to 1200 B.C. Therefore Hittite government and law dominated much of the land of Canaan during the sojourn of Abraham in the Promised Land.

The Scriptures are clear that while Jehovah God gave Abraham the promise of Palestine as the future home for his posterity, yet Abraham himself during all the rest of his life remained a temporary resident moving about from place to place with his flocks. (Gen. 15:18-21; Heb. 11:9) This meant that for any business or legal transactions with the city organizations existing in Palestine, it became necessary for Abraham to conform to the dominating law of those cities. In 1951 there were published in London English and Hebrew translations of two hundred paragraphs of Hittite legislation, having reconstructed two hundred laws from the tablets found in 1906 and subsequently. Several of these laws shed interesting background information