In 1936 a French archaeological expedition to Mari, the capital of a kingdom on the Middle Euphrates in Syria, uncovered a vast archive of some 25,000 cuneiform tablets. Examining this huge corpus of Old Babylonian documents, mostly from the Mari palace, Malamat provides evidence of how the tablets reveal a vivid picture of Mesopotamia at a time when the Israelites were in their earliest formative stage. The broad spectrum of the Mari documents, from...