Bible Synapse
Amarna letters
document · c. 1360–1332 BC · Before the kings · also called El-Amarna tablets, Abdi-Heba letters
See it on the map and timeline
- Date
- c. 1360–1332 BC (the letters’ writing)
- Found
- Tell el-Amarna, Egypt, 1887. Dug up by local people at Amarna in about 1887 and sold through dealers. The letters had been stored in the pharaoh’s records office; Flinders Petrie found more fragments at the site in 1891–92.
- Now
- Vorderasiatisches Museum, British Museum, Egyptian Museum and others, Berlin, London, Cairo and elsewhere
- Passages
- Joshua 10:1–5, Joshua 15:63, Judges 1:21, 2 Samuel 5:6–9
What it is
About 380 clay tablets in cuneiform, most of them letters in Akkadian, the diplomatic language of the day. They were sent to the pharaohs Amenhotep III and Akhenaten by the great kings of the region and by the rulers of small Canaanite city-states under Egyptian control. Six of them (EA 285–290) come from Abdi-Heba, ruler of Jerusalem, who insists on his loyalty, accuses neighbouring rulers such as Milkilu of Gezer, and begs for archers against raiders he calls ‘Apiru.
How it connects to the Bible
The letters show Jerusalem (Urusalim) as a small hill-country city-state with its own ruler, centuries before the Bible’s account of David taking the city from the Jebusites. Joshua 10 likewise names a Canaanite “king of Jerusalem”, and Joshua and Judges say the city long stayed outside Israel’s control. The letters also name the rulers of Gezer and Hazor, towns that appear in the same books.
What scholars debate
‘Apiru was not the name of a people but a label for uprooted men of many origins, such as raiders, outlaws and hired fighters, used from Mesopotamia to Egypt. Most scholars do not identify them with the Hebrews of the Bible; whether the two words are related at all is disputed.