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Dr. Alfonso Archi of the University of Rome’s Institute of Near Eastern Studies and the new chief epigrapher of the Italian Mission to Ebla, has vigorously disputed the conclusions of his predecessor, Dr. Giovanni Pettinato, linking the Ebla tablets to the Bible.
Following a bitter personal and scholarly dispute with chief archaeologist Paolo Matthiae, Pettinato severed all connections with the Italian Ebla Mission and with the committee appointed by Matthiae to publish the tablets.
Archi was chosen to replace Pettinato and, in the course of his tenure with the Committee, has disagreed with many of Pettinato’s interpretations of the Ebla tablets. Writing in the Italian journal Biblica, Archi provides his point-by-point refutation of some of Pettinato’s claims.
Archi concludes that scholars have little reason “to look for the origins of Israel in the tablets of Ebla.”
Here are some of the points Archi makes:
Certain individuals mentioned in the Ebla tablets were accorded the title judge, which, according to Pettinato, “cannot but evoke the famous ‘judges’ of the Old Testament.” Archi points out that this title (di-ku5) appears frequently in Mesopotamian administrative texts of the third millennium B.C. Although properly translated “judge,” “before now this has never brought to mind the biblical analogy,” says Archi. Although their exact function is unknown, the judges at Ebla, he says, were surely officials of the palace organization. Ebla judges, Archi writes, “can hardly be compared to the judges of the Old Testament who were some kind of functionaries of tribal organizations preceding the institution of monarchy in Israel and the formation of a palace organization.” Pettinato, says Archi, failed to consider the different historical contexts.
Pettinato found in one of the Ebla tablets a fragment of a creation story, which, for him, “closely recalled the narrative of Genesis 1.” Pettinato translated the fragment as follows: “Lord of Heaven and Earth: There was no earth—he created it. There was no daylight—he created it. There was not yet the light of morning.” Archi agrees that the passage opens with the phrase “Lord of Heaven and Earth” (or “king of heaven and earth”), but after this, the text is “quite incomprehensible” and “very difficult to understand.” Archi notes that another Ebla tablet contains a part of this same composition but with variations in the text. Based in part on these variations, Archi tentatively proposes the following translation for the remainder of the text: “No wine,* he made the earth; no wool, he made the daylight (or he made water*).” Archi concludes, “It is really difficult to say [as Pettinato has said] that ‘The similarity with Genesis is self-evident.’”
Pettinato has observed that the kings of Ebla were anointed, as were the kings of ancient Israel. Pettinato’s conclusion is based on frequent references in the Ebla tablets to “sag oil for the king” Pettinato translates sag as “head” and derives from this the custom of anointing. According to Archi, however, “Sag does not have the value ‘head’.” Sag, he says, is derived from the Akkadian word resûtum meaning “beginning.” Later, the word sag takes on the meaning of “first quality.” In one of the lexical (or dictionary) texts found at Ebla, rustum (“first quality oil”) is listed as the equivalent of the Sumerian phrase i-gisû-sag which is the phrase used in the Ebla tablets. So the phrase in the Ebla tablets must be understood as referring to “first quality oil” not “head or anointing oil,” says Archi; “there is, then, no reference to a head which might be anointed, and it is forcing our texts to find anointing in them.”
One of the hottest scholarly debates is whether the god Ya appears in the Ebla tablets. Ya is a shortened form of the Hebrew God Yahweh. Pettinato maintains that the Ebla tablets contain references to a specific god Ya. Pettinato analyzes a number of personal names which, he 056says, contain the divine element Ya, for example, Mi-kaµ-Yaµ, En-na-Yaµ, and Isµ-ra-aµ. Each of these names also appears with a different ending, namely Il instead of Ya. Il is accepted as a divine element known widely in the ancient Near East and appearing in the Hebrew Bible as El. According to Pettinato, at Ebla Il names change during a certain period to Ya names. Thus Mi-kaµ-Il became Mi-kaµ-Yaµ; En-na-Il became En-na-Yaµ; and Isµ-ra-Il became Isµ-ra-Yaµ. Pettinato asserts that this “amply demonstrates that at Ebla at least Ya had the same value as Il and points to a specific deity.” According to Pettinato, during the reign of King Ebrum (the next to the last king of the Eblaite dynasty), there may have been a religious revolution in which Ya assumed a superior position. In any event, Pettinato contends, Ya “not merely existed, but had profound roots in the third millennium.”
Against this view, Archi quotes from Queries & Comments, BAR 03:01, in which Professor Anson F. Rainey of Tel Aviv University states, “The supposed evidence for Yahweh names at Ebla is highly questionable … The Ya endings on personal names are simply shortened forms (hypocoristic), usually used for endearment and then becoming common usage.” A close English parallel with precisely the same element is Michael turning into Mickey as a form of endearment or diminutive.
Archi cites several tablets in which the same person is referred to both with an Il ending and with a Ya ending. “This can hardly mean the change of one divine element in the name for the other, for at Ebla El was a live deity, not a deus otiosus whose name could function as a cipher, a generic noun behind which could lurk the name of a truly living, worshipped god. This being the case, if –ya were the divine element, it would mean that one person had two names, each invoking a different deity, and that the two names were used indiscriminately. This [would be] quite abnormal in the Semitic onomasticon, when ordinary people are in question. Therefore, –ya does not represent ‘a specific deity,’ but is simply an element to form diminutives.”
Moreover, Archi points out, il names remain quite common—perhaps even in the majority—throughout Ebrum’s long reign and that of his son. “In other words, –ya never supplanted El even during the reigns of [Ebrum] and his son, under which the ‘religious revolution’ is supposed to have occurred—and the length of the reigns was long enough to allow this, if it were the case.”
Archi also notes that in the Ebla tablets Ya or Yahweh nowhere appears by itself as the name of a god, not even on the offering lists for the gods of Ebla.
Somewhat surprisingly, Archi makes no reference to the appearance of the name Ya-Ra-Mu in which the Ya element is preceded by the determinative for a deity (see “The Politics of Ebla,” BAR 04:03). This is the strongest evidence that Ya does indicate a deity at Ebla.
Archi also discusses the Five Cities of the Plain (Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, Bela = Zoar) which, according to early reports by Pettinato, appeared in a single Ebla tablet in the same order as the names appear in Genesis 14. Archi tweaks Pettinato for writing an entire article on the geography reflected in the Ebla tablets without mentioning the Cities of the Plain. “Worse,” says Archi, “a check of the evidence indicates that the Ebla place names cannot, compatibly with phonetic laws, be identified with the Cities of the Plain.” In short, Archi can’t find any of the names Pettinato says he found. In one tablet (TM 75. G. 1992), Archi found the name Sa-du-maki. Ki is the determinative for city and the remainder of the name could be the equivalent of Sodom. However, the tablet records the delivery of a number of agricultural and farm products including oil, barley, sheep, and cattle. Deliveries to several cities of an unidentifiable agricultural product, probably a plant, are recorded. The form of the words is as follows: 1000 X to A city; 2000 X to B city. One of the cities is Sa-du-ma. Since this tablet concerns the agricultural administration of Ebla, Sa-du-ma is probably a small local village rather than one of the Cities of the Plain, says Archi.
Professor Archi’s overall conclusion is that Ebla’s urban society can hardly be a source for Israel’s semi-nomadic Patriarchal traditions. The Ebla tablets are for the most part administrative documents, the expression of an urban society. Accordingly, “A well-developed palace organization at Ebla which held political hegemony over at least northern Syria is opposed to the Patriarchal tradition of semi-nomad shepherds organized on a tribal basis. The tradition of the Patriarchs with which the people of Israel always identified themselves and of which they were always proud is not the tradition of the Eblaite state.”
