The Murashû Archive from Nippur
Some 730 cuneiform business tablets of a family firm, found in one room at Nippur in 1893. They name a canal Kabaru, identified with Ezekiel’s river Chebar, and many people with Judean names.
See the object at archive.org ↗The editor’s identification of the canal Kabaru with the Chebar (p. 28) ↗
In May 1893 the University of Pennsylvania’s expedition to Nippur found a room containing about 730 clay tablets, the records of a firm that its editor called “Murashû Sons”. The tablets are dated by the regnal years of the Persian kings Artaxerxes I and Darius II. They record loans, leases and deliveries in and around Nippur.
Tablet no. 4 of the first published volume, dated to the twenty-second year of Artaxerxes, provides for a delivery of dates “at the canal Kabaru”. The editor, Hermann Hilprecht, identified this canal with the river Chebar of Ezekiel’s Visions among the Exiles, and he noted how many of the people named in the tablets bear names known from Ezra and Nehemiah. The tablets are evidence for where descendants of the exiles lived a century and a half after the deportations. They are not from Ezekiel’s own time.
Cited in
- 593 BC to 571 BC, estimated date