Word: testament
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Enthusiasts claim that Ebla could revise theories on the origins of Judaism, Christianity and Islam; alter many scriptural interpretations; make all current Bible translations obsolete; and require scholars to credit the Old Testament with greater historical accuracy. These and related matters are, of course, vital to millions of believers...
...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...
...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...
...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 month that 70 of those perplexing words have already been found at Ebla. Thus, he says, "not a single...
...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...