Archaeology - Proving the Truth of Scripture - Part 10

The Ebla tablets prove the reliability of Genesis!

In 1974 Italian archaeologists excavating Tell Mardikh in northern Syria, the ancient city of Ebla, discovered something that changed the terms of the argument about the historical reliability of Genesis. They found 17,000 cuneiform clay tablets inside the ruins of the royal palace. The tablets had been stored on wooden shelves that collapsed when the palace burned around 2300 BC, baking the tablets hard in the fire and preserving them in the exact positions they had occupied on the shelves, an accidental library preserved by its own destruction.

These tablets were the administrative, commercial and diplomatic records of the ancient Eblaite kingdom, a major Bronze Age trading empire whose very existence had been unknown before the excavation. They recorded trade routes, diplomatic correspondence, lists of cities and their commodities, population records and commercial transactions.

Among the cities listed in the Ebla tablets were the names of the five cities of the plain described in Genesis 14:2, Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim and Zoar. These were listed in a geographical and commercial context consistent with their location in the Jordan valley region as Genesis describes.

For over a century critical scholarship had treated these five cities as literary fiction. The argument was simple, they appeared in no external source, no archaeological record, no ancient text outside Genesis. Therefore, they had probably been invented. The Ebla royal archive was written before the Book of Genesis reached its final form.

In addition, many scholars have doubted the accounts in the Torah because it was believed that writing did not exist in Moses’ time; and therefore, he could not have written those books. On that notion, they dated the Torah to a much later time and did not credit Moses as the author. The discovery of the Ebla tablets has proven all those unbelieving scholars wrong. The Bible tells us that the exodus occurred 480 years prior to Solomon taking the throne as King of Israel which was 970 BCE (1 Kings 6:1), the math is easy. 480 years added to 970 BCE would be 1450 BCE. This is 850 years before Moses that the tablets of Elba are writing down all their commercial transactions proving that writing existed, and Moses was correct on the placement of these 5 cities of the plain.