Bible Synapse
Murashu archive
document · c. 455–403 BC · Persian period · also called Murashu tablets, Archive of the Murashu sons
See it on the map and timeline
- Date
- c. 455–403 BC (the tablets, dated in the reigns of Artaxerxes I and Darius II)
- Found
- Nippur, Iraq, 1893. Found at the end of May 1893 by the University of Pennsylvania’s expedition to Nippur: about 730 tablets in a single room some 6 m below the surface, the firm’s business archive. Under Ottoman excavation law they went first to the Imperial Museum in Constantinople; a share later given by the Sultan to the expedition’s Hermann Hilprecht went to the University of Pennsylvania. The main groups are now in Philadelphia, Istanbul and Jena.
- Now
- Penn Museum, Istanbul Archaeology Museums and the Hilprecht Collection (Jena), Philadelphia, Istanbul and Jena
- Passages
- Ezekiel 1:1–3, Ezekiel 3:15
What it is
About 730 clay tablets from the business archive of the Murashu family of Nippur in Babylonia, who leased land, lent money, seed and animals, and collected rents and taxes under Persian rule. The contracts name a great many clients of different peoples, among them men with Hebrew names built on Yahu, probably descendants of the Judean exiles. Some texts mention the Kabaru canal (nār Kabari), a large navigable channel near Nippur.
How it connects to the Bible
Ezekiel received his visions among the exiles “by the river of Chebar” (Ezekiel 1:1) and lived among them at Tel-abib by the same river (3:15). Hilprecht, who first published the tablets, identified the Kabaru canal they name near Nippur with Ezekiel’s Chebar, and scholars today generally agree. Their Judean names show exiles’ families still living in the region in the 5th century BC, more than a century after Ezekiel.