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The Ebla Tablets and proof of the Old Testament – pushing long-debunked ideas

I came across this link on Facebook

Bible Critics Silenced Once Again As Archaeological Discoveries Prove Old Testament To Be Accurate!

For many years, the critics of the Old Testament continued to argue that Moses invented the stories found in Genesis. The critics contended that the ancient people of the Old Testament times were too primitive to record documents with precise details.

In doing so, these critics basically claimed that there was no verification that the people and cities mentioned in the oldest of Biblical accounts ever really existed.

The discovery of the Ebla archive in northern Syria in the 1970′s confirmed that the Biblical records concerning the Patriarchs are spot on. It was during the excavations in northern Syria that the excavating found a large library inside a royal archive room. This library had tablets dating from 2400 -2300 BC.

The “article” at the end of the link is from February this year.

The Ebla Tablets were discovered in 1974-1975, and already from the start, some people tried to use them as evidence for the truth of the Old Testament.

Even back then, it was considered nonsense, and the Washington Post had an article about this back in December, 1979 – Ebla Tablets: No Biblical Claims

When 11,000 clay tablets dating from 23 centuries before Christ were unearthed in northern Syria three years ago, biblical scholars around the world rejoiced that ancient proof had been found for the Old Testament.

“The tablets were being hailed as a find equal in importance to the Dead Sea Scrolls,” said Dr. Robert Biggs, professor of Assyriology at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute. “The claims being made for these tablets created a sensation in biblical circles.”

But three years of intense study and debate among scholars changed all that. No longer are biblical claims made for the 11,000 clay tablets of Ebla, the ancient Sumerian city whose palace was destroyed by fire around 2300 B.C.

“In my opinion, parallels with the Bible are quite out of the question at this stage,” Biggs told a recent gathering of science writers sponsored by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. “People who are looking to the Ebla tablets for proof of the authenticity of the Bible are going to be sorely disappointed.”

The article goes into more detail about how the tablets are being misread and misrepresented.

It is not often I come across new articles pushing so-called new evidence, that has been debunked for nearly 40 years.

Impressions from Tokyo » « Lazy linking

Comments

  3. Pierce R. Butler says

    Ebla showed a ready tolerance for deities of every variety, foreign and domestic, male and female and [paleolinguist Giovanni] Pettinato has, at the latest count, identified no less than five hundred gods and goddesses who enjoyed a following, some of whom were thought to be more godly than others, but all of whom were accepted as divine. To the western mind brought up on monotheism, a disposition to accommodate so many gods suggests almost an adherence to none and one does have the impression that Ebla, for all its gods (possibly because of them) was not overawed by them.

    – Chaim Bermant & Michael Weitzman, Ebla: A Revelation in Archaeology (1979)

  5. says

    Someone needs to tell Sunday Adelaja it’s even worse. Historians, archeologists, and others don’t believe Moses existed, or that the events connected with him even happened.

  6. Lee Rudolph says

    The quotation from Chaim Bermant & Michael Weitzman sounds like a description of Ankh-Morpork.

  7. Rich Woods says

    It is not often I come across new articles pushing so-called new evidence, that has been debunked for nearly 40 years.

    Stick around for another 40 years and you’ll be surprised just how many times the same old rubbish is lauded as the greatest new discovery. It seems to me that each generation wants to declare its ignorance and inability to do any basic research before slowly catching up. It’s like teenagers reading Ayn Rand for the first time.