Word: dahood
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...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. But Father Dahood contends that these cities, once commonly thought by experts to be mythical, "were probably doing business with Ebla around...
...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millennium B.C. According to the ebullient Dahood, "After Ebla, we've got to take the Bible much more seriously as a historical document. The people who wrote those books had a long literary tradition behind them...
...theoretical links 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 both Pettinato and Dahood 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...
Because of the difficulties, Father Dahood insists that all ancient Near Eastern languages must be studied in order to understand any one of them. He contends that "Ebla is clarified on point after point by the Bible," and vice versa. In a 48-page addendum to the Pettinato book he offers extensive technical examples from specific Bible texts. Dahood reckons that nearly a third of the poetic passages in the Old Testament still "evade precise translation and gram matical analysis." The major reason: 1,700 of the 8,000 Hebrew words in the Bible occur only once. Dahood reported last...
...here that Ebla's biblical implications are least open to skepticism. The ancient inscriptions, with their extended bilingual word lists, are almost certain to clear up numerous textual obscurities. When Dahood began his work on Ugaritic and the Old Testament many years ago, a conservative colleague in Rome said: "It's hard to believe that God would make us wait all these years for these dirty tablets to find out what the Bible means." To an extent that is what happened with the Ugarit find, and then the Dead Sea Scrolls. Now Ebla is vying to be come...