Mari and the Early Israelite Experience (Schweich Lectures of the British Academy 1984)

the long version

In 1936 a French archaeological expedition to Mari, the capital of a kingdom on the Middle Euphrates in Syria, uncovered a vast archive of some 25,000 cuneiform tablets. Examining this huge corpus of Old Babylonian documents, mostly from the Mari palace, Malamat provides evidence of how the tablets reveal a vivid picture of Mesopotamia at a time when the Israelites were in their earliest formative stage. The broad spectrum of the Mari documents, from exotic prophecies to political intrigue, provides innumerable opportunities for comparative research into early Israel, the Bible, and Biblical Hebrew.