The Hittite Empire Emerges in Asia Minor

The event

In the rugged highlands of central Anatolia, modern Turkey, a people speaking an Indo-European language built their capital at Hattusa and, under kings like Hattusili I and Mursili I, forged the Hittite Old Kingdom into a serious regional power. In one of the most audacious raids of the ancient world, Mursili I marched his army all the way down the Euphrates and sacked Hammurabi's Babylon itself around 1595 BC, effectively ending the Old Babylonian dynasty before withdrawing home.

The Hittites' name appears throughout the Old Testament as one of the peoples inhabiting Canaan alongside the Amorites, Jebusites, and others, well before Israel's conquest of the land (Genesis 15:20; Joshua 3:10). Abraham himself purchased the cave of Machpelah as a family burial site from Ephron the Hittite living at Hebron (Genesis 23), and Uriah the Hittite later served faithfully as one of David's mighty men (2 Samuel 11:3) — small but telling details that match the historical spread of Hittite-connected populations well beyond Anatolia itself.

For much of the twentieth century, skeptical scholars pointed to the Bible's Hittites as evidence of inaccuracy, since no other ancient source seemed to mention them. The discovery and translation of the Hittite royal archives at Hattusa beginning in 1906 reversed that judgment decisively, revealing an entire lost empire exactly where and when the Bible had placed it — one of the twentieth century's clearest archaeological vindications of Scripture's historical reliability.

Dating

The date of the Hittite sack of Babylon (c. 1595 BC) is itself one of the key anchor points debated between competing Mesopotamian chronologies, so it can shift earlier or later depending on which chronology a scholar adopts.

Scripture references

• Genesis 15:20
• Joshua 3:10
• Genesis 23
• 2 Samuel 11:3