Pettinato, in a meeting of the
Society of Biblical Literature in St. Louis on October 29, 1976, said that he had identified the names of
Sodom, Gomorrah, and
Zoar/Bela in the Ebla tablets, locations which are known from of the
Hebrew Bible. He repeated this claim in a speech in December and a survey article in 1977. scholars attempted to translate some of them. When tablet
TM 75.G.2231 was published, it was described as the "Eblaite Geographical Atlas" (EGA) because it contained 289 locations including place names, geographical constructs like
forest,
valley, and
river, and travel directions, like
circuit. The tablet was essentially a duplicate of a text found at
Abu Salabikh in
Iraq, and therefore assisted in the reconstruction of the fragmented one there. For example, in 1983,
William H. Shea published a study of about 80 of these place names to try to identify the ones in
Palestine.
Hebrew names and rituals Many
ancient Hebraic names that have not been found in other Near Eastern languages have been reported to occur in similar forms in Eblaite (
Adamu,
H'à-wa,
Jabal,
Abarama,
Bilhah,
Ishma-el,
Isûra-el,
Esau,
Mika-el,
Saul,
David). Also among Pettinato's claims,
rituals like the release of a
scape goat laden with impurities in
purification rites connected with a wedding and enthronement were immediately recognized as
ancient Near Eastern parallels to Hebrew practice in the first millennium, recorded in
Leviticus 16. Other claims included the election of local kings, claimed to be uniquely reminiscent of practices in early Israel. However, Ebla was a hereditary monarchy, and contrary to many earlier claims, the present consensus is that "Ebla has no bearing on the
Minor Prophets, the historical accuracy of the
biblical Patriarchs, Yahweh worship, or Sodom and Gomorrha". indicated in the example of the transition from Mika'
il to Mika
ya. This change is represented by the
cuneiform sign
NI (), which Pettinato read as
ya, however, Pettinato does not conclude that this is the same as the
Israelite God
Yahweh (
YHWH).
Jean Bottéro has suggested that this shift may instead indicate the Akkadian god
Ea (Ia). On the other hand, both Archi (at first) and
Anson Rainey, have suggested that the
-ya is actually a diminutive ending used in shortened forms of personal names, while
Hans-Peter Müller has argued that the cuneiform sign
NI should be interpreted in this case as an abbreviation for
NI-NI () and read as
í-lí which mean
My God, No list of gods or offerings mentions a deity by the name of Ya, and the connection with Yahweh is largely rejected today by scholars.
Creation myth Three tablets containing almost the same text have been found. According to Pettinato, they describe an Eblaite
creation hymn, and they have been translated by him as
: :
Lord of heaven and earth: :
the earth was not, you created it, :
the light of day was not, you created it, :
the morning light you had not [yet] made exist. These lines seem to have points in common both with known Sumerian creation stories and with the biblical account. Nevertheless, Archi objected that the original text is unclear to the point of being incomprehensible leading him to conclude that "there is no Genesis creation story" in the documents. ==End of the controversy==