Story

The Tablets of Ugarit

14th-12th c. BCE

Biblical Narrative

The Hebrew Bible knows its enemies by name. Baal of the storm, El the elder, Asherah of the grove, Yam the sea, Mot of death — these are not the inventions of later polemic. They are the gods Israel grew up among, and against. The prophets curse them; the historians record kings who served them; Elijah on Carmel mocks them. But what these gods sounded like in their own mouths — what their priests sang, what their myths actually told — was a silence the Bible left for archaeology to fill.

When Deuteronomy commands, Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk, the prohibition has long puzzled commentators. When the Psalmist sings of the Lord rebuking the sea and breaking the heads of Leviathan, modern readers hear poetry. When Hosea condemns the Baals and the calf of Samaria, we know there is a story behind the rage but not the story itself. The Bible polemicizes against a religious world it assumes its audience already knows in detail.

The Canaanite religion the Hebrew Bible attacks is, in its own pages, half a caricature: drunken Baal-priests, sacred prostitution, child sacrifice at Tophet, the abominations of the Amorites. The texts of Ugarit allow us to test that picture against the Canaanites' own self-presentation. The result is unsettling for both sides. The Canaanite gods are neither the buffoons of Elijah's contest nor the demons of later theology. They are a coherent pantheon with sophisticated theology, ritual law, and high poetry — and the language they speak is uncannily close to Hebrew.

If Israel's prophets were arguing against straw men, they would not have needed to argue so loudly for so long. The Ugaritic library shows what they were actually arguing against: a real, deep, beautiful, and to many Israelites persuasive religious system, whose vocabulary, meter, and imagery the biblical writers themselves had absorbed and reshaped.

Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk.Exodus 23:19; cf. Ugaritic ritual KTU 1.23

Archaeology · History · Genetics

In 1928 a Syrian peasant named Mahmoud Mella az-Zir struck stone with his plow on the coastal mound of Ras Shamra, twelve kilometers north of Latakia. The French archaeologist Claude F. A. Schaeffer began excavations in 1929 and continued, with interruptions, until his death; the site was the lost city of Ugarit, capital of a Late Bronze Age kingdom that paid tribute to Hatti, traded with Egypt and Cyprus, and was burned to the ground around 1185 BCE in the wave of destructions that ended the Bronze Age. Beneath the burn layer lay a royal palace, a temple of Baal, a temple of Dagan, and — in a private house belonging to a high priest — a library.

The Ugaritic tablets, written in a unique 30-sign cuneiform alphabet on clay, were deciphered with astonishing speed. Hans Bauer in Halle, Édouard Dhorme in Jerusalem, and Charles Virolleaud in Paris cracked the script independently between 1930 and 1932. The language proved to be a Northwest Semitic tongue closely related to Hebrew and Phoenician — close enough that Hebraists could read the texts within a few years of decipherment. The corpus, now standardized as KTU (Die keilalphabetischen Texte aus Ugarit), contains administrative records, diplomatic correspondence, ritual prescriptions, divinatory texts, and most importantly the great mythological cycles: the Baal Cycle, the Legend of Keret, the Tale of Aqhat.

Mark S. Smith's The Origins of Biblical Monotheism (2001) and The Early History of God (1990) trace, tablet by tablet, how the religion of early Israel emerged from a West Semitic matrix in which El was the high god and YHWH a younger storm-god of southern origin who, over centuries, absorbed El's titles and Baal's imagery. The Ugaritic El sits in council on Mount Lel; the biblical El Elyon in Genesis 14 sits on Zion. The Ugaritic Baal rides the clouds, hurls lightning, and conquers Yam-the-Sea; Psalm 18, Psalm 29, and Habakkuk 3 give YHWH the same chariot, the same weapons, the same enemies.

The Ras Shamra finds are still being published. Volumes of the Ras Shamra-Ougarit series have appeared continuously since 1979. Tablets from the House of the Hurrian Priest, the House of Urtenu, and the South Acropolis are still yielding new myths, new rituals, and new diplomatic letters. For biblical scholarship, no archaeological discovery of the twentieth century — not the Dead Sea Scrolls, not the Tel Dan stele — has so reshaped the field as the Ugaritic library.

Without the Ugaritic texts the religion of Israel would still be largely a closed book; with them, the linguistic and theological matrix from which the Bible emerged stands open.Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism (2001), paraphrased