No 11

(The Nuzi Tablets)

The present site of Nuzi is Yoghlan-Tepe 150 miles north of Baghdad near the foothills of Kurdistan. It was excavated from 1925 to 1931 by the American School of Oriental Research in Baghdad and by Harvard University. The Nuzi tablets have brought to light what was hidden for millennia. Modern archaeology has resurrected information about a people thought to be cave dwellers – the Horites. They are mentioned three times in Genesis and twice in Deuteronomy but not as Horites but as Horims. Almost nothing was known of this Canaanite people who inhabited part of the land along with the Amorites, the Hittites and all the others. The writings on these tablets have put to rest the idea that they were an uncivilized group of cave dwellers; in fact they played a very important role in Near-Eastern culture.

The main interest of the Nuzi tablets which places them around 1500 BC, lies in the information they contain about the Biblical patriarchs and their customs. When Abram left Ur, he sojourned in Haran and mingled in Hurrian society. In Genesis 15:2, we read “And Abram said, LORD God, what will you give me, seeing I go childless, and the steward of my house is this Eliezer of Damascus?” Abram lamented his childless condition and the fact that his servant, Eliezer would become his heir in the absence of a legimate son; the Nuzi tablets describe this situation in detail. The Lord miraculously provided a son to Abram, Isaac and nullified the status of Eliesar as heir.

Another Horite custom that was found in the Nuzi tablets was the marriage contract in which a slave girl was provided to a new bride; exactly what happened to Leah in Genesis 29:24 (Zilpah) and Rachel in Genesis 29:29 (Bilhah). Any offspring of these slave girls were to be considered legitimate children of the master; in the case of Leah and Rachel, their master was Jacob/Israel and the male children that they bore him became the 12 tribes of Israel. The truths in the Bible were once-again proven or confirmed by extra-Biblical material. God’s word is perfect in all that is said in it and history merely catches up to it.