Mitchell Dahood, S.J.
[Fr. Mitchell Dahood is professor of Ugaritic and Phoenician Languages and Literature, and Dean of Ancient Eastern Studies at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. Fr. Dahood has written many articles in scholarly journals. He is the author of “Ebla Ugarit, and the Old Testament,” which appeared in the Winter and Spring 1979 issues of Bible and Spade.]
Among the books recently published in Italy, Giovanni Pettinato’s Ebla. Un impero inciso nell’argilla (Milano: Mondadori, 1979, 328 pp. L. 7.000) is bound to cause considerable debate for years to come. Though intended for the lay reader, this volume contains some 50 texts published for the first time, so that both the large public and the specialists will be interested in this first synthesis of the culture of Ebla based on an analysis of the texts themselves. The archives brought to light by La Missione Italiana Archeologica in Siria during the
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campaigns of 1974–1976 are not disparate inscriptions but rather the organic royal archive that permits Pettinato to reconstruct the various features of this civilization that flourished in northwestern Syria around 2, 500 B.C. and rivaled the cultures of Egypt and Sumer in Lower Mesopotamia during the third millennium B.C.
The Language of Ebla
After a description of the archaeological recovery of the city of Ebla, occasionally mentioned in Mesopotamian and Egyptian records but finally destroyed and lost to history, the author examines the archive, tells how tablets were made, inscribed and arranged on shelves in various rooms according to their typology. The third chapter could be the most explosive of the book insofar as Pettinato describes the writing and language of Ebla which he classifies as Early Canaanite and hence closely related to other members of the Canaanite family such as Ugaritic, Phoenician and Biblical Hebrew.
How one classifies the new language from Ebla will have considerable bearing on its relevance for comparative research. A Canaanite affiliation, for example, will entail far-reaching consequences for biblical research; one of the acutest problems facing the Old Testament scholar is the Hebrew language itself, which is a member of the Canaanite family. About 40 percent of the Old Testament is composed in poetry, much of it archaic poetry, and hence difficult to translate and interpret. Moreover, of the 8,000 words of the Biblical Hebrew lexicon, some 1,700 are hapax legomena or words occurring only once; many of these are simply impossible to define without recourse to extrabiblical documents. If the language of Ebla belongs to the same branch as Biblical Hebrew, as Pettinato maintains, one can easily imagine the interest these epigraphic discoveries are arousing among biblical philologists and the eagerness of lexicographers to exploit this new corpus to reduce the number of uncertainties attaching to definitions of Hebrew words and phrases. It should be noted here that the Ebla archives include some 114 tablets and fragments with bilingual vocabularies in Sumerian and Eblaite totalling nearly 3,000 words.
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Paulo Matthiae, head of the Italian Archaeological Mission to Syria, stands in the city gate of Ebla. Behind him is the acropolis, with the area of the Early Bronze Age palace where the tablets were found covered with corrugated metal.
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On the other hand, there are scholars such as I. Gelb1 , and A. Archi2 who deny the “Canaanite connection” and associate Eblaite with the languages of Mesopotamia or South Arabic. To their mind biblical studies stand to profit little from these finds. Hence it will be on this terrain—the linguistic classification of Eblaite—that scholars will engage in the keenest battles. Based on limited intelligible material, Chapter 3 can trace only a preliminary outline of the structure of the language, but the features that do emerge convince Pettinato that Eblaite belongs to the Canaanite branch of Semitic languages.
Eblaite Society
From Chapter 4 describing the dynasty of Ebla and its historical documents, one is surprised to learn that the king was elected for a seven-year term; he was a charismatic leader with certain functions for a limited period. Ebla’s greatest king was Ebrium who not only managed to get reelected three times and ruled for 28 years, but also succeeded in naming his son Ibbi-Sipish as his successor, thus creating a dynasty. Pettinato surmises that this decline from democratic ideals may have led to civil strife and the premature demise of Ebla as a major political force. In any case, the period described by the tablets from the archive covers only 60-70 years so that Ebla’s early collapse may have been due to civil strife.
Since commerce and international trade were Ebla’s chief activity, the merchants play a major role in society and exercised political power that circumscribed the authority of the king. The tablets often mention the king and the elders together but do not specify who these elders were. I n the Phoenician city-states along the Mediterranean coast during the first millennium B.C., the elders were the wealthy merchants who counter-balanced the royal power and it would not be too hazardous to assume a similar situation in the third-millennium B.C. Canaan.
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Other instances of the tenacity of political traditions in Canaan could be cited in support of such an extrapolation.
The artisans formed the second major component of society. Whether they were organized into corporations is not yet clear, but given the enormous productivity of Ebla, such an organization appears very likely. The commercial empire was divided into 14 provinces administered by governors whose principal function seems to have been to keep the capital’s coffers filled with precious metal. Many of the tablets register the impressive amounts of gold sent to the central treasury by the provincial governors.
The year was divided into 12 months with a periodic intercalary month to fill the lacuna caused by the difference between the lunar and solar year. Two complete calendars have been preserved in numerous copies; the Old Calendar of Igrish-Khalam, the first king of Ebla recorded by the tablets, and the New Calendar introduced by Ibbi-Sipish, the last monarch reported. The Bible preserves only four month names and the Ugaritic texts only ten, and these not in order but dispersed in various tablets, so that one truly appreciates the wealth of calendaric information furnished by the Ebla archives. Virtually all the month names can be explained as Canaanite and tend to support the Canaanite classification established on purely linguistic grounds. For example, in the Old Calendar November is called gasum, “rain,” a term known from Hebrew and Ugaritic, and never found in the languages of Mesopotamia or South Arabia.
The Economy of Ebla
Having specialized in the economy of ancient Sumer as documented in the Ur III tablets (ca. 2, 000 B.C.) from Mesopotamia, Pettinato comes especially well equipped to the Ebla texts, 75 percent of which are economic and administrative in character. Hence Chapter 6 dealing with the economy is perhaps the most detailed and documented. An economic-commercial and not a military empire, Ebla favored agriculture, especially the growth of olives, vineyards, and flax for linen, and the raising of large flocks of sheep to obtain wool for the textile mills. It imported ores and precious stones for transformation and subsequent exportation. The blending of the state economy with that of the private sector enabled Ebla to extend its
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commercial hegemony over most of Syria and Palestine and beyond, to regions of Anatolia, Cyprus, Transjordan and Northern Mesopotamia. As the author notes (p. 177), the chief industry was textiles, and I would add that this predominance of textiles can be noticed in the numerous place names connected with textile terminology. One of the most frequently mentioned cities is a-ri-ga-atki from the verb arag, “to spin, weave,” heretofore witnessed only in Hebrew and Phoenician and hence to be deemed a Canaanite term that may well underlie, as one of my students has pointed out, the Greek name Arachne, a Lydian maiden who challenged the goddess Athene to a contest in weaving, and turned into a spider (Greek arachne, “a spider, spider’s web”). The Ebla city name a-ri-ga-at is formally a feminine plural participle which would literally translate “Spinning Women.” The city name badki may be identified with Hebrew bad, “linen,” while the city sheshki readily reveals its character when compared with Hebrew shesh. “byssus, whitest linen.” if the place name sa-pi-tuki is related to the hapax legomenon sapit, “rug, carpet,” in Isaiah 21:5, it indicates the existence of a carpet-making industry.
The commercial concerns did not suffocate the interest in arts and sciences, as the chapter (7) on culture clearly brings out. The academy at Ebla prepared the scribes not only for keeping commercial records but also for transmitting the cultural patrimony. They copied the myths and poems handed down by oral tradition and composed original literary and religious works; they compiled lexical lists and catalogued scientific data. As noted above, some 114 tablets and fragments preserve bilingual vocabularies in Sumerian and Eblaite, and many of the nearly 3,000 words recorded here promise to clarify obscure biblical terms that have baffled lexicographers for centuries.
Religion at Ebla
From the chapter on religion (8) one learns that the Eblaites honored more than 500 gods; they must have been a deeply religious people who came to realize early on that commerce and worship of the gods were not incompatible. The number 500 is arrived at from the study of cultic and ritual texts, but especially from personal and place names which often contain a divine name. Here one may direct attention to the large number of weather and fertility gods who are revered by the Canaanites.
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An actual, and reconstructed, view of the stairway leading from the audience court, where the tablets were found, to the interior of the royal palace.
The geographical situation may help explain the popularity of these gods and goddesses. Located at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, Canaan is a strip of land about 80 kilometers wide running from the Gulf of Alexandretta in southern Turkey southward to Gaza, a distance of 600 kilometers. To the east of this long strip of land, whose life and fertility depend upon the rain dropped by the clouds arriving from the Mediterranean, lies the Syrian desert. Hence the constant need to invoke and placate the deities responsible for health and well-being; a sustained drought spells disaster for Canaan where rivers and springs cannot substitute for annual rainfall.
The patron god of Ebla itself was da-bi-ir, which in Hebrew became the common noun deber, “pestilence.” Why the citizens
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would choose such a deity as their patron is not difficult to understand: the god responsible for the plague could also keep the plague far away from the city. To judge from the frequency of his occurrence, the god NI.DA.KUL must have been very popular, receiving numerous offerings and worshipped in many cities. But as Pettinato writes (p. 269), “resiste finora ogni possibile identificazione.” Identification comes easier if NI.DA.KUL is read i-da-qul (NI also has the value i) and compared with Genesis 2:14 hiddeqel, “the Tigris river.” Does the popularity of the god of the Tigris suggest that he was the “god of the forefathers” and that the Eblaites emigrated from a region watered by the Tigris?
Despite the proliferation of gods, there was a distinct movement toward henotheism, the worship of one god above the others. The hymn to the “Lord of heaven and earth” cited at the beginning of the chapter on religion is the clearest indication of this development. The fact that there were holy men not bound to a single god or shrine but who travelled from city to city announcing the divine word points in the same direction.
Significance of the Ebla Tablets to Biblical Studies
In the final chapter (9) entitled “Conclusions. Problemi e prospettive sollevati dalla scoperta di Ebla”, the author examines several of the prospective consequences of these dramatic discoveries. One of these will be the illumination of second-millennium religion and culture. To cite the author, “The chief beneficiary is the West Semitic world in which 14th century Ugarit stands out, to be followed by Phoenician culture of the first millennium, and the world of the Old Testament” (p. 295). In consequence, we should stop thinking of the Bronze Age (3,000-1, 200 B.C.) as prehistoric or primitive. Ebla and Ugarit make it reasonably clear that the world from which the Hebrew people emerged was highly urbanized, literate and cosmopolitan.
The biblical dimension and relevance of these archaeological and epigraphic discoveries underlie my opening statement that Pettinato’s Ebla will be widely discussed and debated for years to come. To be sure, the author does not dwell on the biblical consequences, but he does sporadically suggest a connection
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with the Bible, and I would take the occasion of the publication of this article to reiterate my position that both Ebla and the Bible stand to benefit from mutual elucidation. From various quarters warnings have already been sounded against hasty phenomena, and the series Studi Eblaiti3 under the direction of Paolo Matthiae was recently launched with this programmatic statement, “In view also of the speculations occasioned by the Ebla discoveries, we intend to furnish correct and rapid information about a series of aspects and problems.” The “addetti ai lavori” will immediately recognize that the “speculations” include, above all, the biblical inferences that not a few biblicists have been making on the basis of published material. Some of the biblical parallels drawn will doubtless turn out to be premature, but progress in Ebla research will eventually eliminate these aberrations. But this does not mean that the biblical avenue should be closed off, as the editors of Studi Eblaiti would apparently like to do. When the Ugaritic discoveries were made 50 years ago, the “Negebite hypothesis” which set the Keret Legend in the south of Palestine, enjoyed a brilliant but very short career, thanks to rapid advances in Ugaritic research that corrected this error occasioned by alleged biblical connections; few will argue that permanent harm was done to Ugaritic studies by this faulty judgment on the part of several savants. We have the same situation today with the Ebla tablets. Mistakes will doubtless be made because of purported biblical relationships, but modern comparative Semitic research has many more checks and balances than 50 years ago to evaluate new hypotheses and interpretations.
At the same time, one should not forget that Ebla research will be seriously impeded if the biblical record is not given full consideration; many grammatical, lexical and religious phenomena at Ebla will be rendered comprehensible only when the rich and suggestive biblical resources are pressed into service. To disregard or reject this nonpareil source of enlightenment borders on the irresponsible. A concrete example may illustrate the point. When G. Pettinato’s Catalogo
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dei testi cuneiformi di Tell Markikh-Ebla4 was published in December, 1979, several scholars who examined the index of place names were puzzled by the toponym e-da-barki To a Hebraist the name is pellucid: it means “Temple of the Word.” In Hebrew, and only in Hebrew, does dabar serve as the ordinary term for “word;” occurring some 1440 times in the Old Testament, dabar expresses a central theological and sapiential theme.
At Ebla da-bar was already a god to whom a shrine or temple had been dedicated, just as a temple was dedicated to “Eros,” as appears from the toponym e-da-duki “Temple of Eros.” In divinized da-bar, “Word,” one glimpses the distant cultural background of the term that would open St. John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” A more compelling instance of mutual elucidation could scarcely be desired. Hebrew dabar reveals the meaning of Eblaite da-bar, “Word,” which in turn illuminates the background of divinized logos, in John’s Gospel. Hence the efforts of those who seek to negate or minimize the biblical element appear ill advised. The Sumerologists and Assyriologists who were at a loss to explain the sense of Eblaite e-da-barki now readily admit that it signifies “Temple of the Word” because of the biblical evidence.
Ebla and the Patriarchs
A. Archi concludes his recent study with these statements: “It would seem scarcely indicated to look for the origins of Israel in the tablets of Ebla, a claim that has been repeated often… The tradition of the Patriarchs with which the people of Israel always identified themselves and of which they were always proud is not the tradition of the Eblaite state.”5 Without entering into a detailed and technical discussion, it is not arduous to confute the blanket denial that the traditions of the Patriarchs are not those of Ebla. If personal names are a valid criterion for evaluating traditions, the Ebla tablets should vitally interest the biblical student. For instance, according to patriarchal tradition
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In the center of the photo is the “Library” on the east side of the audience court where some 8,000 tablets were recovered in 1975.
Nimrod was the first to become a mighty hero6 on the earth and was so famed as a hunter that the expression “like Nimrod a mighty hunter before Yahweh” became proverbial (Genesis 19:8–9); he was also celebrated for his kingdom in Mesopotamia. Current Hebrew lexica term the meaning and etymology of Nimrod wholly unknown and the attempt to relate him to Ninurta merely bespeaks the level of lexical desperation. Beyond its three biblical occurrences (Genesis 10:8–9; Micah 5:5; 1 Chronicles 1:10) the name Nimrod remained without documentation until the discovery of the Ebla tablets; in those studied thus far Nimrod occurs twice, once as simple nam-rad,
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and the second time as nam-rad, king of Bargau. This latter phrase recalls the biblical tradition that Nimrod was the founder of several kingdoms in Mesopotamia. By standard phonetic changes Eblaite nam-rad becomes nimrod in Hebrew; its meaning and etymology become clear. Signifying “Panther of Hadd,” nimrod follows a well attested pattern of personal names consisting of animal name plus name of divinity, in this case the Canaanite weather god; cf. Eblaite dub-da-ar, “Bear of the Everlasting.”
What significance attaches to the proposed equation nam-rad equals nimrod? Probably to assess it one should ask: “How much do we know about ancient personal and place names?” With the discovery of archives at Lagash, Abu Salabikh, Ur, Mari, Nuzi, Nineveh, Alalakh, Ugarit, Ebla—to mention just the more important sites-tens of thousands of personal and place names have been at the disposal of philologists so that in this area one may speak of reasonably abundant documentation. Thus far, among all these names none resembling biblical nimrod has been identified, so that when Ebla presents the long awaited counterpart, scholars should take due notice. Similarly in the case of the name of Israel’s first king, Saul, sha’ul in Hebrew. Though it derives from the common Semitic root sh’l, “to ask, request,” the name sha’ul, “the requested,” never appeared in extra-biblical sources until the publication of Pettinato’s Catalogo7 where in an administrative text listing metals shipped to various individuals appears the personal name sa-u-lum, whose root and passive participle form match those of Hebrew sha’ul. Though 1, 500 years separate the Tell Mardikh tablets from Israel’s first king, the similarity does tell us something of the cultural origins of the Hebrew people.
When the name Ishmael, the son of Abraham and Hagar (Genesis 16:11) was identified in the Ebla records as ish-ma-il, “El has heard,” no significant conclusions could be drawn because it belongs to a very common type and is attested in other ancient sources. But the name of Ishmael’s mother Hagar does not rank among the common types and has been found only once in a Phoenician inscription dating to the 3rd-2nd century B.C. from Nebi-Yunis near Jaffa, in Palestine. Hence when the equivalent of
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biblical hagar turns up twice at Ebla as ‘a-gar and ‘a-ga-ru, the researcher must take another look at the significance to be attached to the name ish-ma-il, since the names of both mother and son now appear at Ebla. And if the Eblaite personal name ib-ra-mu equals Hebrew ‘abraham, all three biblical names Abraham, Hagar and Ishmael were borne by citizens of Ebla as well. Elsewhere8 we had occasion to note that Adam is found as a-da-mu, the name of one of the governors of Ebla’s 14 provinces, and now the name of Adam’s wife Eve, in Hebrew hawwah, turns up in an economic text as the name of an Ebla lady ‘a-wa, the cuneiform equivalent of Hebrew hawwah. Till now the name Eva has not been identified in ancient Near Eastern records, so that the appearance of the names corresponding to Adam and Eve, Abraham, Hagar and their son Ishmael in the Ebla tablets cannot be lightly dismissed.
After Sarah’s death Abraham married Keturah who bore him six sons (Genesis 25:1–6). Her name, which probably means “the perfumed one,” makes its first appearance outside the Bible in an Ebla tablet under the form qu-tu-ra, which preserves the u quality of the vowel in the first syllable that has been reduced to a half-vowel or vocal shewa in the Masoretic spelling qeturah. Of particular interest is that five lines after the listing of qu-tu-ra there is mention of the city kha-ha-anki which may well be the biblical Haran, the city across the Euphrates and some 220 kilometers northeast of Ebla whence Abraham set out for the promised land of Canaan. To be sure, these equivalences do not of themselves justify fixing specific dates for Abraham and the patriarchs, as has been done by some students of the Bible much to the displeasure of others, since names remain popular for centuries and millennia, but they do tell us something about the cultural milieu from which the patriarchs emerged. After all, biblical tradition points to that direction, and this more than enough warrants the study of the Ebla archives for possible answers to longstanding biblical problems of linguistic and historical nature. It becomes difficult, therefore, to understand why some are attempting to discourage and even block research along these lines; in fact, I have heard and read about these attempts described as an infringement of academic freedom.9
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The Ebla Language and Biblical Hebrew
Since language is the highest expression of a culture, the chapter (III) dealing with the language of the tablets assumes especial importance, and its classification among the Semitic languages will have far-reaching consequences. As noted above, Pettinato considers Eblaite to be a Canaanite language and draws the conclusion, “The discovery of this new language will considerably facilitate the study of Ugaritic and permit a better explanation of some of its phenomena, without having recourse to distant Akkadian. The same will hold true for Phoenician and Biblical Hebrew” (p. 64).
I would go one step further; as a specialist in Ugaritic and Phoenician I find, much to my surprise — not to say consternation — that the language of Ebla is structurally closer to Biblical Hebrew than to either Ugaritic and Phoenician. The origins of the Hebrew language are coming into view with the epigraphic finds at Tell Mardikh; till now lack of documentation has impeded serious discussion of this fascinating problem, but the material now in hand will facilitate a more substantial dialogue. Students of Biblical Hebrew will amply be rewarded when having recourse to these tablets for resolving lexical and theological conundrums in the Bible. For example, no convincing explanation of the name Moses has been forthcoming despite endless efforts of philologists. After citing the numerous conflicting opinions and bibliography, the latest scientific Hebrew lexicon10 must conclude its lemma on mosheh with a non-liquet. Since Moses was born in Egypt, savants naturally looked to Egyptian for an explication of his name, but now it would appear that the name is Canaanite. A frequently recurring root in Eblaite personal and place names is wshy, “to be victorious,” as in i-shi-gu, “the Voice is victorious,” and “to grant victory” in the causative conjugation; hence the Ebla place name mu-shi-lu may be interpreted as “El grants victory,” in which mu-shi is the causative participle identical with biblical moshe, an abbreviated form of moshe-’el, “El grants victory.” Or again, on p. 68 Pettinato writes, “most interesting is the interchange b/g found in the Canaanite dialects as witnessed in ‘agarakum/’abarakum ‘superintendent’.” The variant ‘abarkum may furnish the answer to the meaning of the hapax legomenon ‘abrek in the Joseph story. Genesis 41:43 reads,
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Detail from one of the Ebla tablets.
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“He had him ride in a chariot as his second-in-command, and men shouted before him ‘Superintendent’ (‘abrek).”
Since the mise en scene of the Joseph cycle is Egypt, lexicographers have, as in the case of the name of Moses, sought an Egyptian solution for ‘abrek. In the light of Eblaite ‘abarakum, ‘abrek should perhaps be repointed to ‘abarek, literally “I make bend the knee,” an accurate description of Joseph, the prefect of the royal palace. As several rare and difficult terms in these accounts are now finding satisfactory answers in the Ebla archives, one begins to suspect that while Joseph made his career in Egypt, the stories about him were composed elsewhere in Old Canaanite.
Eblaite Religion and the God of Israel
In Chapter VIII on religion, the discovery causing the widest repercussions and the liveliest debates concerns the element -ya found at the end of many personal names. According to Pettinato this component is to be identified with -yah, an element also found at the end of biblical names; many consider -yah a shortened form of yahweh, the national God of Israel.11 In Mesopotamian names the ending -ya may indicate a diminutive and need not be a divine element at all. Hence the lively disputes. If names with ya at the beginning of a name and, moreover, preceded by the determinative that marks divinity could be found, scholars agreed that the dispute would come to a happy resolution. On p. 269 Pettinato cites the oft-recurring name ya-ra-mu, “Ya is exalted,” as the fulfillment of the scholars’ desideratum, To sustain this interpretation I would cite biblical yoram, “Joram” or “Yo is exalted,” in 2 Samuel 8:10 and 1 Cronicles 26:25, and elsewhere. Eblaite long a becomes long o in Hebrew so that the equation ya-ra-mu equals yoram is exact, and if the latter signifies “Yo is exalted,” as all scholars agree, then ya-ra-mu should bear the same meaning. To this single example cited by Pettinato the following may be added. Eblaite i-a-a-khu, “Ya is brother,” answers to biblical yo’ah, “Joah” (2 Kings 18:18), “Ya is brother;” i-a-ra-bu, “Ya is Healer” or “Ya is great;” i-a-gu-lu, “Ya is joy;” i-a-be, “Ya is Master;” i-a-gu and i-a-mi-gu, “Ya is the Voice.” In all these names the name Ya is written with two vocalic syllables, i and a, so that its pronunciation is clear.
Eblaite Gods and Israelite Theology and Poetry
On the basis of cultic and literary texts and the onomastica, more
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than 500 gods were honored at Ebla. What ever happened to all their names and epithets? Many of these have ironically ended up serving the needs of Israelite theology and poetry. If the Bible can speak of the Israelite despoiling of the Egyptians, modern scholarship can discuss the ransacking of the Canaanite thesaurus of divine names and appellatives by biblical writers. For example, the Eblaite personal name la-di-a-at, “Belonging to Knowledge,” reveals the existence of the Canannite goddess of knowledge. That the Hebrew name for Wisdom is the Phoenician form hokmot (Proverbs 9:1) has long been recognized, but it now appears that the Canaanites also revered a goddess of knowledge. She and her name are absorbed by Yahweh in 1 Samuel 2:3, ‘el de ot-yhwh, “the God of knowledge is Yahweh,” a statement that serves as the title of the encyclical Deus scientiarum Dominus. The existence of the goddess di-a-at, “Knowledge,” is relevant to the dispute regarding the translation of Job 36:4, temim de’ot ‘immak. Scholars divide over whether the phrase describes God, “the Perfect of knowledge is with you,” or whether it refers to man as in La Bibbia a cura di La Civilta Cattolica, “a man of perfect knowledge is here with you. When stating that “the Perfect in knowledge is with you,” Elihu regards himself as the spokesman of God and his words as inerrant. The Ebla personal name ta-mi-mu, “the Perfect One,” as a divine appellative shows that both components of Job’s phrase temim de’ot, “the Perfect of knowledge,” occur in these third millennium tablets. Is this pure coincidence or was there some cultural linkage between the sources of Job and the world of Ebla? Thirty years ago my teacher, the late Professor William F. Albright, told us in class that the language and references of Job suggested a North Syrian origin of the book, but I don’t recall that he ever spelled out his reasons. Could this be another instance of one of his brilliant intuitions rendered more plausible by subsequent discoveries?
The Canaanite dedication to culture and learning is also manifest from the toponym listed in the Geographic Atlas12 published in 1978. The city name la-di-aki means “Belonging to Knowledge,” where the singular di-a corresponds to Hebrew de’ah, “knowledge” predicated of God in Psalm 73:11, “And they say, ‘How does God know?’ and ‘Is there knowledge (de’ah) in the Most High?’.”
The adjective rahum, “compassionate,” is reserved for God in the
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Old Testament; thus Deuteronomy 4:31, “For a compassionate God (‘el rahum) is Yahweh your God.” The background of this usage appears in the Ebla personal name su-ra-um, “Lamb of the Compassionate,” another example of personal name comprised of animal plus divine name or epithet, cited above in connection with Nimrod, “Panther of Hadd.” In Moslem theology Allah is called arrahman, “the Compassionate,” from the same root, but with a different formation; the identity of the passive participle formation rahum encountered in Eblaite and Hebrew in contradistinction to the Arabic form rahman underscores the close kinship of these two members of the Canaanite family of languages.
When the psalmist sings, “The just will flourish like the palm tree and grow like the cedar of Lebanon… Still full of sap in old age, they will remain fresh and green” (Psalm 92: 13&15), the adjectives he uses to describe their old age, deshenim, “fresh,” and ra’anannim, “green,” once served as epithets of Canaanite fertility gods. The Eblaites worshipped a fertility god named dda-shi-in, “The Fresh One,” and another known by the appellative ra-an, “the Green One,” doubtless an appellative of a major fertility god such as Dagan or Baal, When in Genesis 1:30 God states that he will give to every living creature green plants (yereq) for food, he claims for himself the function of the Canaanite god worshipped in the town called e-mu-ri-igki, “Temple of the One who makes green.” The form mu-ri-iq is the causative participle of the root witnessed in biblical yereq, “green plant.” Some commentators on Psalms have appreciated the mythological background of Psalm 104:4, “Who makes the winds his messengers, Fire, Flame his ministers.” Among the deities worshipped at Ebla figure di-sa-tu “Fire,” and la-at, “Flame.” The former identifies with Hebrew ‘esh, “Fire,” masculine in form but feminine in gender like i-sa-tu while la-at, “Flame,” is a scribal approximation to Hebrew lahat, “Flame”. As the Eblaite scribe could not express the Semitic -h- sound with the cuneiform signs designed to represent the sounds of Sumerian, a non-Semitic tongue, he wrote la-at for lahat, “Flame.”
In a list of equivalences of Sumerian and Eblaite deities, the Sumerian goddess of wine is equated with te-ri-ish-tu, which Hebraists will recognize as the feminine form of tirosh, “must, new wine.” When Isaac pronounces the blessing, “May God give you of heaven’s dew and earth’s fatness, an abundance of grain and new wine” (Genesis 27:28), he employs terms prominent in Canaanite
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mythology. Hebrew dagan, “grain,” is formally identical with Dagan, the head of the Ebla pantheon (cf. Ceres, the ancient Italian goddess of agriculture, and “cereal”), who is also termed ti-lu ma-tim, “Dew of the land,” a phrase evoking tal, “dew,” and ‘eres, “earth,” of the biblical promise, while tirosh, “new wine,” is associated with te-ri-ish-tu, “goddess of new wine.” The God of Israel can provide all the blessings that the predecessors of Israel attributed to several Canaanite gods. This process of Yahweh’s assimilating the prerogatives of Canaanite gods runs through biblical poetry and its recognition will illuminate the exegesis of numberless passages.
Conclusions
In the brief final chapter entitled “Conclusion Problems and prospective solutions from the discoveries of Ebla,” Pettinato concludes this first organic account of Eblaite civilization based on a first-hand study of the texts. The truism that each new discovery raises more problems than it solves certainly applies here. The comparison of Ebla’s society with other ancient Near Eastern societies will be among the principal topics on the agenda. The latter would have led us to expect a social fabric at Ebla of the absolutist monarchical type prevailing in Egypt and Mesopotamia where the monarch received his investiture from on high in keeping with a religious conception permeating these societies. The social structure of Ebla was lay, not in the sense of anti-religious, but in that the organization of power was neither absolute nor personalized. In a panorama dominated by the king-god or the priest-functionary, Ebla stands apart.
On the linguistic level, the tablets pose some serious new problems for comparative Semitists. The fact that an early form of Canaanite was spoken and written in the third millennium in northwestern Syria upsets many reconstructions of Proto-Semitic based almost exclusively on Arabic.
The recovery of so many tablets at Tell Mardikh should stimulate the resumption of excavations suspended at a number of tells and encourage new expeditions to the scores of mounds in the environs of Ebla still untouched by the archaeologist’s spade. For every tablet uncovered at Ebla there should be a matching tablet at another site; the scribes doubtless made two copies of every shipment, one of which accompanied the goods to be delivered, and the other stored in the archive until payment had been made. If for reasons of space these records were periodically destroyed, the excavator’s chances
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of striking tablets are obviously lessened.
As a Sumerologist Pettinato does not examine biblical consequences, and for this reason I have tried to map out some paths that biblical research may follow in the decades ahead. This naturally puts me in direct opposition to numerous savants who foresee no fallout reaching biblical territory. At a November, 1979, gathering of science writers sponsored by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing at Palo Alto, California, Professor Robert Biggs of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago is reported as stating, “In my opinion, parallels with the Bible are quite out of the question at this stage… The initial proposal to associate it [Eblaite] with Hebrew should not be accepted. All the more so when you consider that the two languages are separated by more than 1, 000 years. Why should they be similar?”13 The single place name e-da-barki, “Temple of the Word,” should suffice to confute Biggs’ contention. The divinization of da-bar, “Word,” a term known only from Biblical Hebrew, reveals to theologians the Canaanite background of a concept central of both Old and New Testament theology or again, the place names ba-ra-guki, “the Voice has created,” e-ba-ri-umki, “Temple of the Creator,” gu-ba-ri-umki, “‘the Voice is the Creator,” ib-ta-ra-guki, “the Voice has created for himself,” all evoke the opening verses of Genesis which ascribe creation to the word spoken by God, “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Genesis 1:3) and Psalm 33:6, “By Yahweh’s word (dabar) were the heavens made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host.”
The ancient adage ex oriente lux (“from the east, light”) is confirmed anew; this time the light comes from the Canaanite underground, radiated by clay tablets incised with wedges, which by divine irony are illuminating the obscurities of the Bible
(This article first appeared in Italian under the title “Le scoperte archeologiche di Ebla e richerche bibliche,” in Civilta Cattolica Quaderno 3118 [17 maggio 1980], pp. 319-333.)
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