Deuteronomy 28 and Tell Tayinat

Abstract

The discovery of Esarhaddon�s Succession Treaty (EST) at Tell Tayinat confirms the Assyrian�application of this text on western vassals and suggests that the oath tablet was given to�Manasseh of Judah in 672 BC, the year in which the king of Assyria had all his empire and�vassals swear an oath or treaty promising to adhere to the regulations set for his succession,�and that this cuneiform tablet was set up for formal display somewhere inside the temple�of Jerusalem. The finding of the Tell Tayinat tablet and its elaborate curses of �� 53�55 that�invoke deities from Palestine, back up the claim of the 1995 doctoral thesis of the author of�this article that the impressive similarities between Deuteronomy 28:20�44 and curses from�� 56 of the EST are due to direct borrowing from the EST. This implies that these Hebrew�verses came to existence between 672 BC and 622 BC, the year in which a Torah scroll was�found in the temple of Jerusalem, causing Josiah to swear a loyalty oath in the presence of�Yhwh. This article aimed to highlight the similarities between EST � 56 and Deuteronomy 28�as regards syntax and vocabulary, interpret the previously unknown curses that astoundingly�invoke deities from Palestine, and conclude with a hypothesis of the composition of the book�of Deuteronomy.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 44 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.