The broad spectrum of the Mari documents provides innumerable opportunities for comparative research into Early Israel, the Bible and Biblical Hebrew. The present volume utilizes these possibilities to obtain a new perspective on Early Israelite times. In 1936, a French archaeological expedition to Mari, the capital of a kingdom on the Middle Euphrates in Syria, began uncovering a vast archive of some 25,000 cuneiform tablets. This huge corpus of Old Babylonian documents, mostly from the Mari palace - a unique royal complex of the eighteenth century BC - is slowly revealing a vivid picture of Mesopotamia at the time when the Israelites were in their earliest formative stage. One most fascinating facet of the archives is the light they shed on the early phases of Israelite socio-history. Indeed, the Mari archives now comprise the prime extra-Biblical source for this period, for they reflect a West Semitic population analogous to the so-called `Patriarchs'. 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. The present volume utilizes these possibilities to obtain a new perspective on Early Israelite times.
