The Hittite Empire
Among the seven nations the book of Deuteronomy lists as inhabitants of the Promised Land — Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites — the Hittites stand first. Genesis presents…
Biblical Narrative
Among the seven nations the book of Deuteronomy lists as inhabitants of the Promised Land — Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites — the Hittites stand first. Genesis presents them as a settled, propertied people of the central hills: Abraham buys the cave of Machpelah from Ephron the Hittite for four hundred shekels of silver in the audience of the assembled Hittite elders at the gate of Hebron, the first land transaction in scripture. Esau marries two Hittite women. Uriah, the soldier David sends to die, is a Hittite.
For more than two thousand years, scholars who tried to find these biblical Hittites in the world beyond the Bible came up empty. Egyptian inscriptions named a great northern empire of Kheta; Assyrian tablets named the land of Hatti; but no one connected them to the Hebrew Hittim. Voltaire, in the eighteenth century, took the absence of Hittites from Greco-Roman sources as evidence that the Bible was unreliable. Then in the late nineteenth century, the cuneiform archives of Boğazköy in central Turkey were found and read, and it became clear: there had indeed been a great Hittite empire, and it had ruled Anatolia and northern Syria for half a millennium.
The biblical 'Hittites' of the southern hills do not match the imperial Hittites of Hattusa neatly — many scholars distinguish a Neo-Hittite cultural sphere of post-imperial Anatolian-Syrian principalities, more plausibly the milieu of Ephron and Uriah. But the question Voltaire thought decisive — whether the Hittites had ever existed at all — was answered conclusively by spade and decipherment.
More striking still is the literary parallel. The book of Deuteronomy is structured as a covenant between the Lord and Israel, with a preamble, a historical prologue, stipulations, witnesses, blessings and curses, and provisions for storage and periodic public reading. The form has no convincing parallel in biblical-period Egyptian, Assyrian, or Mesopotamian treaties — except in Hittite suzerainty treaties of the Late Bronze Age, where every element appears in the same order. The covenant of Sinai, mediated through Moses, takes its literary form from the imperial diplomacy of Hattusa.
And the field of Ephron, which was in Machpelah, which was before Mamre, the field, and the cave which was therein, and all the trees... were made sure unto Abraham for a possession in the presence of the children of Heth.Genesis 23:17-18
Archaeology · History · Genetics
The Hittite Empire was an Indo-European state centered on the Anatolian plateau, with its capital at Hattusa (modern Boğazkale, Turkey). Its political history runs from the Old Kingdom of Hattusili I (c. 1650 BCE), through the New Kingdom of Suppiluliuma I (c. 1344 BCE), to its sudden collapse around 1180 BCE in the Late Bronze Age implosion. At its height it ruled Anatolia, controlled northern Syria as far south as Qadesh on the Orontes, and was the Bronze Age peer-rival of Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon.
Hugo Winckler's 1906 excavations at Boğazkale recovered some 30,000 cuneiform tablets in a state archive on the citadel of Büyükkale. Their decipherment by Bedřich Hrozný, announced to a Berlin audience in 1915, established that Hittite was the earliest attested Indo-European language. The corpus includes royal annals, treaties, mythological texts, omens, hymns, prayers, festival rituals, and an extensive law code; the foundational publications are the Keilschrifttexte aus Boghazköi (KBo) and Keilschrifturkunden aus Boghazköi (KUB) series.
The Hittite suzerainty treaty is the form most directly relevant to biblical scholarship. Examples include the Treaty of Suppiluliuma with Niqmaddu II of Ugarit, the treaty of Mursili II with Manapa-Tarhunta of the Seha river-land, and most famously the Treaty of Kadesh between Hattusili III and Ramesses II of Egypt (1259 BCE) — preserved in both Hittite (cuneiform tablet from Hattusa) and Egyptian (hieroglyphic version on the wall of Karnak) versions, the earliest international treaty whose two parties' versions both survive.
The Hittite-biblical question divides into two layers. The 'Hittites' of Genesis — the southern-hill-country small-holders from whom Abraham buys land — are widely read as Anatolian-derived populations of the Late Bronze southern Levant, perhaps better called 'Neo-Hittites' or as a generic term for non-Israelite landowners. The Hittites of the Sinai-covenant form-criticism, by contrast, are the imperial Hittites of Hattusa, whose treaty-template the Hebrew authors knew either through direct Late Bronze Age contact or through Neo-Hittite intermediaries.
The discovery and decipherment of the Hittite archives in the early twentieth century rescued an entire civilization from oblivion, and recalibrated our understanding of the Late Bronze Age international system.Trevor Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites (revised ed. 2005)