Ebalite is named after the site of ancient Ebla, modern Tell Mardikh, located 60 kilometers south of Aleppo, in northern Syria. In the 1970’s about seventeen thousands of cuneiform texts dated to the late 3rd millennium B.C.E. were discovered at the site. But the language reflected in these texts were composed of ideographic Sumerian and syllabic Akkadian, but the characteristics of the language share with features of West-Semitic as well as East-Semitic. In this paper, I will seek to present the linguistic features, and family of the Eblaite, and apply it to Biblical Hebrew.
In phonology, Eblaite has a phenomenon of the monophthongization of the original diphthongs ay/aw to ? as opposed to the typical shifts to e/o. In the realm of morphology, Eblaite lacks an N-stem (=the Hebrew Niph?al), the 1csg personal pronoun is ?ana, the 2msg personal pronoun is ?ant?, and the 2mpl personal pronoun is ?antanu, and the passive participle is the qat?lu form. In addition, there are some important lexical features. The linguistic features allow us to see in Eblaite an early form of the Semitic language of Syria.
Eblaite helps us to illuminate understanding of the Biblical Hebrew. In Hebrew, the dophthong ay and aw remain in some words like bayit and m?wet in absolute state, but in construct state monophthongization occurs with ay>e, and with aw>o. But there are various places in the Bible where monophthongization process results in ay>? and aw>? just as occurs in Eblaite (e.g. 2 Kgs 5:25K; 1 Sam 10:14; Job 8:2 etc). In morphology, the combination of conjunctive u and enclitic ma to create the form u-ma. The recognition of this feature in Eblaite prompted scholars to locate a series of examples wm- in Hebrew (Gen 41:32; Numb 23:10;2 Sam 16:5; 1 Kgs 14:14 and so on). The Masora no longer recognized this form, and thus the mem following the conjunctive waw was reanalyzed as other elements. In comparisons between Ebalite and Hebrew lexicons, we find several words in Hebrew that have cognates only in Ebla.
In sum, Eblaite is the earliest attested Semitic language. It was used in the city-state of Ebla in northern Syria in the 3rd millennium B.C.E. It is part of the Syrian branch of West Semitic, along with Amorite and Aramaic. Remarkably, although almost two thousand years separates Eblaite and the bulk of biblical literature, the language nevertheless sheds considerable light on biblical Hebrew.