I want to thank @almas-shaikh for this answer. His comment made me check over C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_71\jre\bin and see that there was no java.dll library file inside that directory. What I did next was just deleting the jdk and reinstalling it via jdk-7u71-windows-x64.exe executable. Now when I execute java -home, I get
Now the part I don’t get is how the java.dll library file was deleted in the first place……