Source of Bible Covenant with God discovered?

[Liffrea]

Archaeologists working in Turkey have unearthed an Assyrian tablet dating to around 670 BCE that "could have served as a model for the biblical description of God's covenant with the Israelites." What this fascinating discovery suggests, of course, is that the Bible tale of a divine pact does not represent "history" or a "factual" event, but is instead a fictional rewrite, borrowing or plagiarism of this older Assyrian treaty.

http://www.examiner.com/x-17009-Freethought-Examiner~y2010m4d13-Source-of-Bible-Covenant-with-God-discovered

[Cato]

Blah, more of an attempt to "disprove" the Bible by citing some recent find archaeology has found.

Covenant-making formed a large part of interpersonal and international dealings in the ancient Near East (and elsewhere), and much of it followed formulaic patterns and used formulaic wording. The idea that a deity would make a covenant with a particular people, shockingly enough, isn't so shocking at all (the Romans had contracts with their own Gods as an outside example):

http://www.followtherabbi.com/Brix?pageID=3343

Some explanation of ancient Near Eastern covenants in the above article is mixed in with the religious verbiage. This tablet isn't the source of the Mosaic Covenant; by the time this tablet was struck as a record of the royal agreement between the Assyrian monarch and the lesser king, covenant-making had been a practice in the Near East since time immemorial- and this practice is the source of the covenant between the Jews and their deity.