Interview with David Noel Freedman

The following interview with Professor David Noel Freedman was conducted by BAR Editor Hershel Shanks on November 25, 1979.

Professor Freedman has been more influential than anyone else in the United States in publicizing the Ebla tablets. In early 1976, Freedman flew to Rome to talk to Paolo Matthiae and Giovanni Pettinato, the University of Rome archaeologist and epigrapher, respectively, who headed the Italian Mission to Ebla. Following this trip, Freedman circulated a lengthy memorandum which formed the basis for the early American press reports on the Ebla finds.

Freedman is also editor of the Biblical Archeologist, a semi-scholarly publication of the American Schools of Oriental Research, where both Matthiae and Pettinato have published articles on the Ebla finds and where Freedman himself wrote about what he then thought was the significance of the finds.

BAR: Can you give to the general reader who is not a scholar an idea about what bearing the Ebla tablets are likely to have on Biblical studies.