Word: ebla
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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." But Pettinato, who first deciphered Eblaite, considers it an early Canaanite language closest to the northwestern Semitic languages of Hebrew and Ugaritic (the latter was discovered in 1929 at an earlier dig in Ugarit, Syria). One specialist in Ugaritic and Hebrew, American Jesuit Mitchell Dahood of Rome's Pontifical Biblical Institute, goes further...
Some of the earliest controversy over the Ebla findings was sparked when famous names in the Bible-Adam, Eve, Jonah and David among them-turned up on the Ebla tablets. This did not mean the same persons were being written about, but indicated that Ebla and the Bible could have come from similar cultural milieus...
...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...