Justice, Myths, and Biblical Evidence: The Wealth of Information Held in the Ebla Clay Tablets

The Ebla clay tablets have provided researchers with a wealth of information regarding cultural practices and myths, judicial affairs, ancient languages, business, and foreign and domestic policies from the ancient city of Ebla between 2500 BC and the destruction of the site in 2250 BC. Moreover, these clay tablets provide some key evidence for controversial biblical accounts.

A new source of suggestive evidence for the studies of Biblical stories and the Abrahamic Traditions was found within the contents of the Ebla clay tablets. Discovered in 1975, by the University of Rome professor Paolo Matthiae and his team of archaeologists, the tablets were unearthed in the site where the ancient city of Ebla once stood. This is the current location of a village named Tell Mardikh, in northern Syria.

The findings in ancient Ebla included about 1500 intact cuneiform clay tablet and thousands of other pieces and fragments of different sizes and shapes. The tablets were found in a room containing the royal archives of Ebla, which have remained undisturbed since the destruction of the city, 4,500 years ago. According to David Noel Freedman,

“A preliminary reading of batches of tablets established beyond question that this was the archive of the royal palace of ancient Ebla. It consisted mainly of the economic accounts (covering trade and tribute) of the rulers of the city-state during a period of perhaps a hundred to a hundred and fifty years in the middle of the third millennium BC.”