Are “The Cities of the Plain” Mentioned in the Ebla Tablets?

About five years ago, Giovanni Pettinato, the original epigrapher to the Italian Mission to Ebla, announced to the world that the Biblical Cities of the Plain (Genesis 14) were mentioned in the fabulous third-millennium B.C. cuneiform tablets found at Ebla. At the time of his announcement, Pettinato did not tell us the way in which the cities were written, nor did he give us textual references. Only recently has he done this and only for three of the five cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah and Zoar.^a Even now, however, he has not attempted to prove his proposed identifications. In fact, they are all wrong. Let us consider them one by one: