Cuneiform law-code fragment found at Hazor

CUNEIFORM DAY! Jack Sasson passes on a message from the excavators of Hazor:

From Amnon Ben-Tor Amnon , Sharon Zuckerman
and Wayne Horowitz
:
=======================================

Hazor Law Code Fragments

The Selz Foundation Hazor Excavations in Memory of Yigael Yadin have recovered two fragments of a cuneiform tablet preserving portions of a law code at Hazor.

The text parallels portions of the famous Law Code of Hammurabi, and, to a certain extent even the Biblical “tooth for a tooth”. The team is presently working its way down towards a monumental structure dating to the Bronze Age, where more tablets are expected to be found.

The tablet is currently being studied at the Hebrew University. More details to follow as soon as possible.

The excavations are sponsored by the Hebrew university and the Israel Exploration Society, and take place in the Hazor National Park.

This is excellent news. Ideally, it may indicate they are closing in on that elusive Late Bronze Age cuneiform archive for which they have been searching many years, and on which I was wistfully speculating last week. But we shouldn't get too excited yet about that possibility, since several other cuneiform tablets have been excavated at Hazor in past years, but neither that archive nor a possible second Middle Bronze Age one have been forthcoming. Still, we live in hope.

Nevertheless, the discovery of fragments of an LBA law-code from ancient Canaan is in itself important. I look forward to more details as they are released.

Christopher Rollston has some law-code bibliography here.

UPDATE: Seth Sanders has thoughts on this discovery too.

UPDATE: Jack Sasson e-mails to inform me that the Hazor fragments are Old Babylonian. So they bring further hope of recovering the MBA archive, not the LBA one.