Catacomb Resident Blog

AILCC: Chapter 2B

04 February 2025

Walton's explanation of the Nuzi Archives starts off with the inevitable: Early reviews of the archives were broadly mixed with some quite irresponsible scholarship. He divides the mistakes into four categories.

1. Chronology: Most of the archives come from the Mittani Empire (1480-1355 BC) quite long after the biblical Patriarchs, and closer to the Exodus.
2. Ethnic: The people who produced the Nuzi Archives were Hurrians, of Indo-European stock, not Semites like the Hebrews. We know almost nothing about Hurrian culture, so cannot assess how much cultural transfer we should expect between the two.
3. Geography: The Hurrians were also distant in space from the Hebrews (far to the north), with only some scant chance of regular encounter between them.
4. Methodology: As noted, this is an archive of contracts, etc. There is simply not enough cultural material available to assess whether a contract stipulation was customary or weird. The archives are an isolated glimpse.

Walton explains at length that, even when there are obvious parallels between the Nuzi Archives and Bible narratives, we still run into problems with just how far we can push these things in responsible scholarship. It's still a lot of shooting in the dark because we are missing too much context for the archives.

As previously noted, his explanations can be long even as a summary, and it's challenging for me to summarize it again. Walton offers several pages of items that have been debated over the years among biblical scholars and points out names you are unlikely to recognize, but he regards them as major figures in this material. There are several examples:

• The practice of giving a handmaiden with a bride -- not actually a Hurrian practice, yet is mentioned in the Nuzi Archives.
• Marriage contracts forbidding the taking of other wives (Laban and Jacob) -- was a Hurrian practice in that area but for entirely different reasons than in the Bible.
• Legally binding death bed pronouncements (Isaac) -- the parallels are not clear cut between the Bible and Nuzi.
• Selling/trading a birthright (Jacob and Esau) -- the apparent parallels fall apart on close inspection of the details.

These examples are pretty much the same through a long list of other presumed parallels between Nuzi and the Bible that Walton cites. If we broaden the scope to include Old Babylonian materials, it gets much more interesting. A key issue that I see, never mind Walton's comments, is that conservatives keep trying to appeal to outside material for support, as if they want secular scholars to take the Bible testimony more seriously. The liberal scholars want to show that the Bible is not unique in ancient literature, and that borrowing is likely.

Using the outside material to help reconstruct practices that are not fully explained in the Bible is another major emphasis. For example, Rachel's theft of her father's teraphim cannot be explained by the Nuzi Archive, despite efforts to do so. There are too many known customs and laws that would make it impossible to claim Jacob could use them to claim inheritance from Laban. Or with Abraham and Eliezer as his initial heir, the Nuzi texts offer no support because the biblical case appears quite unique when you look at the details. Nor could we claim that Laban somehow adopted Jacob as his heir. Finally, the claims that wives were sisters is also without a valid parallel in the Nuzi texts.

The net result up to this point is that the most we can hope for from the Nuzi Archive is that it broadly indicates that the Bible narrative reflects real life in that time and region.

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