Mari and the Bible: Some Patterns of Tribal Organization and Institutions

Abstract

THiE MOST POSITIVE contribution derived from the comparative study of Mari and the Bible appears to be a deeper insight into the nature of the tribal societies which are documented in the two sources.' Whereas in other spheres, e. g. religion, the parallels so far suggested are still problematic, the Mari documents provide us with concrete and extremely varied material for a clearer picture of the tribal organization of the Israelites (and other tribes mentioned in the Old Testament), in both their nomadic and settled phases.2 In contrast to other source-material from the ancient Near East, in which the tribal society appears as an archaic and ossified relic, or is at best of peripheral importance, the Mari and Old Testament records reveal to us a tribal organization and its institutions in the full vigor of their functioning. Furthermore, the Mari documents present a spectrum, so to speak, of West-Semitic tribes, ranging from the fully nomadic to the newly settled tribes. These documents can, therefore, help us to understand the various stages of the Israelite settlement of Canaan. The writers of the Mari documents frequently used societal concepts foreign to contemporary Mesopotamian society. Having no linguistic equivalents for these in standard Akkadian, they were obliged to use West-Semitic loanwords directly (which are usually familiar to us from the Hebrew of the Old Testament and from other West-Semitic languages), or to resort to a loan translation. A comparison of these technical terms with their Hebrew cognates not only throws light on the meaning of individual words, but serves as well to illuminate the structures of the societies involved. This paper will be limited to a discussion of several terms which occur primarily in the more recently published documents and have not yet been studied in the light of the pertinent biblical evidence.