Are the Ebla Tablets Relevant to Biblical Research?

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At a November 1979 gathering of science writers in Palo Alto, California, sponsored by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, Robert Biggs, Professor of Assyriology at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, is reported as having said: “In my opinion, parallels with the Bible are quite out of the question at this stage … The initial proposal to associate it [Eblaite] with Hebrew should not be accepted. All the more so when you consider that the two languages are separated by more than 1,000 years. Why should they be similar?”1 More recently Biggs concluded an […]

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Footnotes

The same root no doubt lurks in Egyptian hm.t, meaning “woman” or “wife,” and in Ugaritic hmhmt, signifying “impregnation” or “pregnancy.”

Piel is the intensive or causative form of a Hebrew verb. In this case the simple form of the verb qn’ is “to be jealous.” The causative or piel form, qin^e’aµh means to cause or “to incite jealousy.”

A colon is a clause or a half-verse.

Ki is an unpronounced determinative signifying that the word to which it is attached is a geographical place such as a city or village.

A toponym is a geographical place name.

Third century B.C. Greek translation of the Old Testament.

An epithet of a god is a phrase which describes attributes characteristic of that god. Thus, for example, the epithet in Homer for “dawn” might be “dawn, with its fingers of rose.”

The raised “d” designates the determinative dingir indicating that the word to which it is attached is a deity.

Chiasmus is a figure of speech by which the order of words in one clause is inverted in the following clause. It is called a chiasmus because if we were to diagram a chiasmus sentence it would look like a Greek chi, that is, an “X.”

10.

The asterisk at the beginning of this term is a standard scholarly designation signifying that the following word is a reconstruction and is not actually documented as such.

11.

The long –a– in Eblaite becomes long –o– in Hebrew. Hebrew sû^e_’ôl is feminine; the ending –a of sûí-a-la^ki, indicates that it too is feminine. The syllabic spelling sûí-a-la^ki permits the recovery of the original vowel in the first syllable of sû^e_’ôl which was reduced to a half-vowel in Hebrew.

Endnotes

The Washington Post, December 9, 1979, pp. 18–19.

Biblical Archeologist, No. 43 (Spring 1980), pp. 76–85, especially page 85.

Ebla: Un Impero Inciso Nell’ Argilla. Milano: Mondadori, 1979, page 262.

New International Version, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Bible Publishers, 1978. An alternative reading offered in a footnote in the same NIV is just as bad: “Surely the wrath of men brings you praise, and with the remainder of your wrath you arm yourself.”

Students of Massoretic vocalization will appreciate that Eblaite qu₆-tu-ra preserves the u quality of the initial vowel that has been reduced to a vocal shewa or half vowel in the Massoretic system of pointing.

Catalogo dei testi cuneiformi di Tell Mardikh-Ebla. Napoli, Italy: Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli, 1979, page 278a.

Pettinato, Giovanni. In Orientalia, No. 47 (1978), pp. 50–73, especially 56.

The Massoretes apparently appreciated this construction since they vocalized kaµbôd, “Glory,” absolutely and not in the construct state k^ebôd, as some modern critics propose.

The Septuagint recognized God as the subject of the second half of the verse, “A man’s pride will bring him low, but the Lord will gloriously support the humble.” To effect this translation it parsed kaµbôd as the adverbial accusative “gloriously” and, without any apparent textual support in the Hebrew original, inserted kyrios, “Lord.” But the point of the proverb appears to be that Glory by definition can bestow glory on the humble. Introducing kyrios, the Greek version sacrificed the linguistic economy and syllabic balance of the original Hebrew which numbers nine syllables in each half of the verse: ga’aûwat ’aµdaµm tasûpîlennû // ûsû^epal-rûah yitmoµk kaµbôd.