Ebla, Ugarit and the Old Testament

EBLA, UGARIT AND THE OLD TESTAMENT

MITCHELL DAHOOD Rome

In the title of this paper the name "Ugarit" is intended as a double• duty modifier or two-way middle, looking back to Ebla and ahead to the Old Testament. Dating to circa 1375-1190 B.C., the Ugaritic tablets, found on the North Syrian shore about 85 kilometers from Ebla lying inland to the northeast, furnish the chronological and geographical link that considerably facilitates discourse attempting to relate the finds at Tell Mardikh-EbIa to the text of the Old Testament. With its 27 consonants the U garitic alphabet permits a precision in writing that enables one to identify roots and words in Eblaite, whose use of the Sumerian syllabary results in a very imprecise and am• biguous representation of the Semitic sounds and roots. In recent press interviews and articles the director of the Italian archaeological mission in Syria, P. Matthiae, has been decrying the efforts of biblical scholars to find in the Ebla tablets material relevant for the interpretation of biblical data. To cite but one of his recent onslaughts, "L'engagement de la Mission italienne, tout afait etrangere aux mystifications pseudo-scientifiques concernant une signification presumee d'Ebla comme element de controle de la veracite des tradi• tions bibliques, consiste a obtenir de la continuation des fouiIles de Tell Mardikh un documentation de premiere importance ...".1 In an accompanying footnote he continues the broadside, asserting "La Mission considere deplorable la presentation populaire de l'importance des decouvertes d'Ebla protosyrienne sur cette base dans une perspec• tive anti-historique typique de l'archeologie biblique, dont on peut voir un example dans The Observer, 8 janv. 1977".2 Of course one of the principal reasons for Matthiae's (and others') refusal to see any connection between Ebla and the Bible is the chronological chasm of more than a millennium separating the two cultures, but on

1 Comptes rendus de I' Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres (Jan.-March 1977), p.l72. 2 ibidem. 82 M. J. DAHOOD

the same page of the cited article we find him writing thus about the continuity of cultures in Syria, "enfin, les aspects de continuite des cultures de la Syrie depuis cet epanouissement initial dans Ie troisieme quart du IIIe millenaire avo J.-c. jusqu'aux developpements plus tardifs des royaumes arameens a la fin du VIlle siecle avo J.-c." This cultural continuity in Syria can also be traced from the Ebla tablets through the U garitic texts straight into the Bible, and while one can sympathize with Matthiae's deploring the unjustifiable extrapolations vis-a-vis the Bible that have appeared in some press reports, he does himself no service by taking such an adamant anti-biblical stance. It is much too early to judge how much bearing these new finds will have on biblical research, but, from what little of the Ebla material has been published to date, the harvest is going to be much ampler than Matthiae suspects. Since our subject is "Ebla, Ugarit and the Old Testament", we would be well advised to discuss first the linguistic classification of Eblaite. The position taken on its classification bears considerably on the relevance of Eblaite for Ugaritic and the Old Testament. This has been true of the linguistic classification of U garitic and its consequent pertinence or less for biblical studies. Those who consider it a Canaanite dialect tend to use it for biblical research with fewer inhibitions than those who classify U garitic as an independent language whose prime cognates are Akkadian, Amorite or some other Semitic language. A similar development can be expected with regard to the language emerging from the Ebla records. On the basis of his study of the first 42 tablets and fragments discovered in 1974, G. Pettinat03 concluded in April 1975 that "the language of Ebla as it is attested in our texts is sharply distinguished both from Old Akkadian (because of the lexicon and the verbal system) and from Amorite (because of the pronominal and verbal systems). For these reasons, in addition to its very close kinship with the languages of Canaan in the first millennium, especially with Phoenician and Hebrew, I would propose to define it as Paleo• Canaanite" (translation mine). In subsequent articles and basing his position on the study of some 400 of the 15,000 tablets unearthed in October, 1975, Pettinato has continued to propound the same classi-

3 In a lecture delivered 23 April 1975 at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome and subsequently published under the title "Testi cuneiformi del 3. mil• lennio in paleo-cananeo rinvenuti nella campagna 1974 a Tell Mardikh=Ebla", in Orienta/ia, N.S. 44 (1975), pp. 361-74.