The supreme discovery at Ebla was an archive of more than 1000 whole tablets, 4000 partial, and 10,000 smaller pieces. News of its discovery made headlines around the world. For although other archives have been found in Mesopotamia that are just as old, Ebla was located far from the center of literary activity in Sumer and the tablets were written in a completely unknown Semitic dialect.¹Millard 1992 It was a spectacular and completely unexpected discovery. The archive revealed an entirely new literate civilization that falls chronologically quite close to the dawn of literacy itself.

The first epigrapher to study the tablets, Giovanni Pettinato, argued that the Ebla archive must have been contemporary with the earliest known Sumerian archives found at Fara and Abu Salabikh. For not only was the style of writing the same, but identical compositions were found at all three sites. Based on these synchronisms, Pettinato dated the tablets to c. 2500 BC.²Pettinato 1981, 11-12 The director of excavations at Ebla, Paolo Matthiae, dated them later, to around 2350 BC, which was the date he assigned to the destruction of the palace and the archive by Sargon of Akkad.³Matthiae 1981, 165 ff. Matthiae originally argued for Naram-Sin. (Both Pettinato and Matthiae are using the middle chronology. Their dates must be shifted forward approximately 150 years when using the short chronology.) It seems to me that the latter date must be correct although Matthiae makes some solid arguments.

Early attempts to read the tablets were met with failure until it was discovered that, although they were written using the cuneiform script borrowed from the Sumerians, the tablets were written in two languages: Sumerian and an otherwise unknown semitic language which Pettinato referred to as “Proto-Canaanite” or “Eblaite.” Scholars debate where exactly Eblaite falls on the spectrum of semitic languages since it differs from Akkadian, an eastern dialect, and Hebrew or Ugaritic, which are western dialects.

Ebla and Job

The book of Job tells the story of a righteous man afflicted with such painful suffering that his wife recommended he curse God and die! No less helpful, his friends probed the poor man to see if they could find the sin which had resulted in such great misfortune. The story asks the question: “Why do the righteous suffer?” It is one of those perennial questions that troubles all of us who live down here.

And then there are the more mundane questions. How old is the book of Job? And what is its cultural setting? By some indications, the book belongs to the period of the Biblical patriarchs. Like Abraham, Job is given an unusually long lifespan (140 yrs), and like Abraham he offers sacrifices to God without the intervention of a priest. However, there is nothing in the book of Job by which to definitively date its composition. Many modern commentaries date the book to sometime between the 7th and 2nd centuries BC even though the language of the book is quite difficult and appears to be very ancient in many places. Those who date the book to a late period attribute the difficult and flowery language to an author who employed ‘archaizing’ language to make the narrative appear old. Other scholars have argued that the language of Job may not be ‘archaizing’ but simply ‘archaic’. One of these, Mitchell Dahood, pointed to a number of striking similarities between Eblaite and the language of Job, arguing that the former could be used to help solve difficult passages in the latter. For example, the language of Job 15:29 has always presented a problem for translators, as may be gauged by the various translations of this verse found in three major translations of the Bible.

The meaning of the word minlam here is uncertain. It only appears in this one place in the Bible (Greek, hapax legomena, “being said once”). However, with the discovery of the Ebla archive, scholars discovered an Eblaite word ‘ma-ni-lum‘ listed in a Sumerian-Eblaite dictionary next to the Sumerian word ‘ab‘, which means “cow.”⁴Dahood 1981, 303 ff If we apply this definition to the passage in Job, it would read:

This meaning fits the context since, as Dahood notes, the size of ones herd has always been an important measure of wealth. Thus the Latin word for money, pecunia, comes from pecus, which means livestock.⁵Dahood 1981, 303 ff