Word: abrahamisms
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Benito Mussolini, Napoleon, Louis XIV and Alexander the Great were all cat haters. Abraham Lincoln, Albert Schweitzer, Victor Hugo and Mark Twain were all cat lovers. I much prefer the company of the latter group...
Especially tantalizing was the appearance of two names which later appear in the Hebrew tradition: Abraham, the spiritual forefather of Jews, Christians and Muslims, and his biblical ancestor Eber (whose name formed the root of the term Hebrew). Even Matthiae, who now scorns such Bible links, had once suggested that Ebrium, the king during Ebla's golden age, might have evolved into the Eber of Genesis...
Pettinato was more certain. He proposed that Abraham was a native of northern Syria. An intriguing Ebla text shows a town named Ur near Haran, the biblical town in Syria from which Abraham moved into the promised land. Genesis, however, says that Abraham grew up in "Ur of the Chaldees," understood by both the biblical and Islamic traditions to be the famous Ur in lower Mesopotamia. Ebla aside, the Israelites were instructed in Deuteronomy 26: 5 to recite that Abraham was "a wandering Aramaean." In other words, the Bible labeled him a Syrian...
Pettinato's new book cannily avoids this issue and also skirts another heated dispute involving Abraham. The only part of the Abraham narrative in Genesis open to archaeological corroboration is a military story in Chapter 14. It specifies nine kings and numerous sites, including Sodom and Gomorrah and three other "Cities of the Plain" along the Dead Sea. 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...
Findings from Ebla may have an even broader impact. Many liberal Bible scholars treat Abraham not as a historical figure but as a sort of Semitic King Arthur. Their view is that the stories about Abraham and the other Patriarchs must have been written down more than 1,000 years later than the events they purport to describe. Now, in the area of the world that produced the Bible, Ebla has established that sophisticated and extensive written culture existed well before Moses and even Abraham, as early as the middle of the 3rd millennium B.C. According to the ebullient Dahood...