VaultZero4Me said:
Though I won't be putting my 2 cents in here because I know very little of the Ebla Tablets, I am following your posts.
Thanks for those few words of encouragement! Part 3 follows:
The Ebla Tablets (Continued)
An important point to make is that the source for most of the evidence on the Ebla tablets that the sites that argue the tablets as confirming evidence for the Bible appears to be the same: reports and lectures in 1976 by the University of Rome’s archaeological team’s then epigrapher Professor Giovanni Pettinato on his work on translating the tablets and, to a lesser extent, remarks attributed to the head of the team, Professor Paolo Matthiae.
Professor Pettinato believed that the language of Ebla was Palaeo-Canaanite and related to Phoenician and Hebrew. Professor Pettinato suggested that a number of personal names identfied on the tablets are similar to names in the OT, as are the names of certain cities, the most touted examples being that of the cities of the plain, including Sodom and Gomorrah.
By 1981, however,
Time reported that Professor Matthiae clearly differed somewhat from the conclusions of his team’s epigrapher:
On the other hand, the theological significance of Ebla may be nil. Although the city was once a great commercial center, trading with Canaan and regions beyond, Matthiae insists that tablets from the 3rd millennium B.C. are far too old to have any important links with the much later texts of the Old Testament. Moreover, Ebla's language is problematic. "Eblaite" is a Semitic tongue written in cuneiform characters borrowed from Mesopotamia.
Time further reported that other linguistic experts disagreed with Professor Pettinato’s conclusion about the relationship between Eblaite and Phoenician and Hebrew:
The reigning cuneiform expert at the University of Chicago, Ignace J. Gelb, who classifies the Eblaite tongue as most akin to the Mesopotamian languages of Old Akkadian and Amorite, and thus distant from Hebrew, believes that the discoveries at Ebla add "nothing directly to biblical scholarship.â€Â
By the time that the
Time article was written, Professor Pettinato had been replaced as the team’s epigrapher by Alfonso Archi, whose conclusions differed markedly from Professor Pettinato’s:
All such theoretical links [to Biblical text] depend upon transliterations and translations from the tablets themselves, and here the disputes give ample reason for caution. In the hybrid Eblaite language, a single sign can have a dozen meanings. Indeed, Alfonso Archi of the University of Rome, now the Ebla epigrapher, accuses ... Pettinato ... of distorting Eblaite religion by mistranslations. Harvard's Frank Cross, an authority on the Old Testament, believes that solid application of the Ebla findings remains a generation or two away. The majority of scholars concur.
Professor Pettinato had himself also significantly modified his initial conclusions about references to the five cities of the plain in the Ebla tablets:
In 1976 Pettinato startled a convention of U.S. professors of religion by reporting that references to all five of those cities crop up at Ebla. More recently, he has modified his claim: three of the five names occur Sodom, Gomorrah and Zoar  and he explains that these might not be the same as the cities mentioned in Genesis.
All
Time quotations from:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,953100,00.html
At the end of 1983 the Center for Online Judaic Studies published an article by James D. Muhly commenting on further work on the Ebla tablets that cast doubt on the original translations by Professor Pettinato:
According to Genesis 11:28–31, Abraham was born in the city of Ur. Contrary to earlier reports, the name Ur does not appear in the mid-third millennium cuneiform tablets uncovered at the ancient city of Ebla, now in Syria. That is the latest word from Ebla’s Italian team of archaeologists and epigraphers, who toured the United States last spring. This revision is the most recent of a long series concerning the contents of the tablets, especially as they relate to the Bible.
The name Jerusalem is another withdrawn claim. There is no reference to Jerusalem in the Ebla tablets, the Italians say, nor is there any mention of Megiddo, Lachish, Shechem or the Biblical Cities of the Plain. The city of Kish does appear in the texts, but not Uruk, Nippur or Assur.
Muhly’s article again points to the difficulties inherent in achieving a correct interpretation of the tablets and the premature nature of many of the original claims:
These texts are, for the most part, written in Sumerian (that is, with Sumerian cuneiform signs) but are obviously meant to be read (pronounced) in Eblaite. The tablets are fairly easy to read but exceedingly difficult to understand. Before the texts were published, many claims were made for their contentsâ€â€for example, that they referred to Sargon of Akkad, that the name of the Egyptian Pharaoh Pepi II appeared and that all the Cities of the Plain were mentioned. Many of these claims are now simply best forgotten, said the members of the lecture tour.
The Italian team studying Ebla now believed any connection between the Ebla tablets and the text of the Bible to be illusory and misleading:
According to the Italian lecturers, the world of the Ebla tablets is the world of the mid-third millennium B.C., while the Old Testament is based in the first millennium B.C. The Italians cite the very influential recent work of such scholars as Thomas L. Thompson and John Van Seters who find nothing earlier than the first millennium B.C. in the composition of the books of the Old Testament, including the book of Genesis.
Muhly concludes with a rather cynical, but perhaps realistic assessment of the initial reactions to dramatic archaeological discoveries:
What has happened with the Ebla tablets is, unfortunately, exactly what happened with several other major textual discoveries of this century, such as the Ugaritic texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Linear B tablets in Mycenaean Greek. In each case there was a period of wild enthusiasm with everyone wanting to get into the act. Claim and counterclaim followed one bizarre reconstruction after another.
All Muhly quotations from:
http://cojs.org/cojswiki/Ur_and_Jer...lars,_James_D._Muhly,_BAR_9:06,_Nov/Dec_1983.
The Wiki article on Ebla agrees with the revisionist assessments of the Ebla tablets following the early claims of Professor Pettinato:
However, much of the initial media excitement about supposed Eblaite connections with the Bible, based on preliminary guesses and speculations by Pettinato and others, is now widely deplored as "exceptional and unsubstantiated claims" and "great amounts of disinformation that leaked to the public". Contrary to many earlier claims, the present consensus is that "Ebla has no bearing on the Minor Prophets, the historical accuracy of the biblical Patriarchs, Yahweh worship, or Sodom and Gomorra". In Ebla studies, the focus has shifted away from comparisons with the Bible, and Ebla is now studied above all as an incipient civilization in its own right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebla
In conclusion, it seems to be the case that virtually all of the sites claiming support for Biblical text in the Ebla tablets base their arguments on the material published and lectured on in 1976. with little reference to later revisions. The belief that the Ebla tablets offered significant support to biblical text appears to be illusory. Further work and perhaps more accurate and definitive translations may shift the balance in the other direction again, of course, but at present there are no articles or works referenced online through Google Scholar, for example, that indicate any appearance of such a shift. In the thirty years that have elapsed since the original claims about the Ebla tablets were made, the overwhelming consensus amongst scholars is that those claims were premature and incorrect.
The conclusion that must be drawn is that the sites continuing to suggest significant support for biblical text in the Ebla tablets are basing their arguments on outdated and erroneous information; as further work has been done by archaeologists, epigraphers and other scholars, it has become clearly understood that there is no meaningful connection between the Ebla tablets and the Old Testament.
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