The Nuzi or Nuzu Tablets

The Nuzu or Nuzi Tablets, found in Nuzi (near Kirkuk , Iraq ) on the Tigris in 1925, date to the fifteenth century BC. This small collection of clay tablets confirms the historicity of many customs practiced by Abraham and other patriarchs of that time: [1]

• Abraham’s reference to his servant Eliezer as “son of his house” in Genesis 15:2 (prior to the birth of Ishmael and Isaac) suggested that he had adopted him as his legal heir. God’s rejection of this arrangement (Genesis 15:4) might have caused Abraham embarrassment had it not been customary (as Nuzi texts show) to set aside the claims of an adopted son if a natural heir was subsequently born into the family.
• Several Nuzi texts describe occasions when a barren woman asked her husband to take her slave as a sort of surrogate wife to produce an heir; much as Abraham did with Hagar (Genesis 16:1-16).[2]
• The legitimacy of selling one’s birthright (as Esau sold his in Genesis 25:33) was established at Nuzi, for in one case an older brother received a payment of three sheep for selling his younger brother the rights of his inheritance.[3]
• The binding character of a deathbed will (as when Jacob tricked his aged father Isaac) is attested by a case where a man named Tarmiya established his right to a woman he had married by proving that his father on his deathbed had verbally bestowed her to him. This was sufficient to win the lawsuit brought against him by his brothers.
• A plausible motive for Rachel’s theft of her father’s household gods (Genesis 31:19) is supplied by a Nuzi case where a man was able, in court, to claim the estate of his father-in-law because he possessed the family teraphim (or household gods).[4]

As summarized by H. H. Rowley: “Their [the Biblical accounts of the patriachs] accurate reflection of social conditions in the patriarchal age and in some parts of the Mesopotamia from which the patriarchs are said to have come, many centuries before the present documents were composed, is striking.”[5]

And in another conclusion from J.A. Thompson: “The fact that there are so many links with the world of the first part of the second millennium BC is inexplicable if the stories of the Patriarchs are only the inventions of later days. It would seem impossible for the Israelites of those centuries to have access to such information as we now find beneath the earth on thousands of baked clay tablets. The fact that the Bible customs are so close to the contemporary customs is a strong argument either for written records, or for reliable oral traditions. We are compelled to conclude that the narratives of Genesis 12–50 have a solid historical basis.”[6]