Cuneiform Tablet Uncovered in Hazor

Photo by Isranet

The Hazor law code fragments are being prepared for publication by a team headed by Professor Wayne Horowitz. Thus far, words that have been deciphered include “master,” “slave,” and a word referring to bodily parts, apparently the word for “tooth.” The style of the text is similar to that of the Hammurabi Code. “At this stage, it is difficult to determine whether this document was actually written at Hazor, where a school for scribes was located, or brought from somewhere else,” said Horowitz. He said that this latest discovery opens an interesting avenue for possible further investigation of a connection between biblical law and the Code of Hammurabi.

These two fragments are the 18th and 19th cuneiform finds from the Hazor excavations, which now form the largest corpus of documents of cuneiform texts found in Israel.