Prophecy, Treaty-Making and Tribes in the Mari Documents

We learn about the lifestyles in biblical times from the Bible and external sources. One of the foremost sources for the study of the Bible and the history of the biblical period is the archive of the city of Mari, located on the upper River Euphrates, from the 18th century BCE. Today, it is impossible to discuss biblical prophecy, biblical covenants or the tribal society described in the Bible without the rich material immersed in Mari, which are the subject of this book.

Biblical nerratives are not historical documents, but they are woven from threads of reality taken from the world of ancient writers, and there is hardly a field of life in which we can not place things as they seemed 'real', based on the Mari evidence, compared to the literary material in the Bible.

Despite a distance of more than a thousand years between biblical nerratives and documents in the Mari archives, this comparison allows us to better understand the two ancient cultures, which sow light on each other.

Updates and additions to this book can be found on Prof. Inbar's website at Tel Aviv University at the following address: http://humanities.tau.ac.il/segel/manbar.html