Ugaritic Texts

Background

Ugarit was an ancient city-state on the Mediterranean coast of what is now northwestern Syria. Its ruins lie at the mound of Ras Shamra, north of Latakia. In the Late Bronze Age, around the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC, it flourished as a trading center linking Egypt, the Hittite realm, and Mesopotamia. It is believed to have been destroyed in the early twelfth century BC amid the upheavals that accompanied the migrations of the so-called Sea Peoples, and it was never rebuilt. The name Ugarit does not appear in the Bible. Nevertheless, the city has attracted attention for what it reveals about the culture of the Canaan region around the time Israel was settling in the land.

Discovery and Decipherment

• 1928: The discovery was set in motion when a farmer plowing his field on the nearby coast came upon an ancient tomb.
• 1929: The French archaeologist Claude F. A. Schaeffer began excavations, and clay tablets came to light in the very first season.
• Around 1930: Some of the tablets were written in an alphabetic script of thirty wedge-shaped signs. Hans Bauer, Édouard Dhorme, and Charles Virolleaud deciphered the script at nearly the same time. The language proved to be a Northwest Semitic language closely related to Hebrew and came to be called Ugaritic.
• Excavations continued in later years, and documents in Akkadian, Hurrian, and other languages were recovered alongside those in Ugaritic.

Contents

The texts include administrative and diplomatic documents, letters, and ritual (offering) lists, as well as myths and epics. Representative works include the following:

• The Baal Cycle: the story of the storm god Baal battling Yam, the god of the sea, and Mot, the god of death.
• The Legend of Kirta and the Tale of Aqhat: epics about a king and a hero.

The head of the pantheon is El, and his consort is Athirat. Scholars generally regard Athirat as a goddess of the same tradition as the Old Testament Asherah. Baal, Anat, Dagon, and other deities also appear.

Results and Influence

• Language: The texts provide comparative material for explaining rare words and grammatical features in Old Testament Hebrew.
• Poetic form: Poetic forms resembling those of the Psalms have been identified, such as parallelism, in which the same idea is repeated across two lines. Psalm 29 is frequently compared with hymns to Baal.
• Expressions: Isaiah 27:1 calls leviathan "the piercing serpent" and "that crooked serpent." These expressions are nearly identical to the description of the monster Lotan in the Baal Cycle. In addition, a phrase in Psalm 68:4 (KJV "him that rideth upon the heavens") is sometimes read as "him who rides upon the clouds," which matches an epithet of Baal.
• Religious background: The texts shed light on what the worship of Baal and Asherah, against which the Old Testament warned, actually looked like. For this reason they serve as background material for reading accounts such as Elijah's contest on Mount Carmel and the prophets' denunciations of idolatry.

Assessment

Along with the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Ugaritic texts are counted among the discoveries that most influenced twentieth-century study of the Old Testament. Scholars differ, however, on how this material should be interpreted.

• Some critical scholars hold that Israelite religion arose within Canaanite religion and gradually diverged from it. They emphasize continuity between the two religions, as in the relationship between El and Yahweh.
• Evangelical and conservative scholars acknowledge the shared language and literary forms. They maintain, however, that the Old Testament borrows these expressions in order to refute the Canaanite gods and to proclaim that Yahweh alone is the true God, and they emphasize the differences between the two religions.

It has also been pointed out that most of the Ugaritic texts date from the latter half of the second millennium BC, so the difference in date must be taken into account when comparing them directly with later Old Testament texts.