Hebrew is a “language of Canaan,” says the prophet (Isaiah 19:18), a conclusion amply confirmed by archaeologically recovered inscriptions. In scholarly terms, Hebrew is a south Canaanite dialect.
As with the language, so with the alphabet: From its earliest appearance until the Babylonian destruction, Hebrew was written in the Canaanite alphabet.1
As with language and the alphabet, so with culture generally: Ancient Israelite culture was in many respects a subset of Canaanite culture.
The most powerful and extensive demonstration of this last statement comes from the body of literature uncovered at the site of Ugarit on the Mediterranean coast of Syria. The discovery of Ugarit has a certain fairytale typicality to it. A peasant was plowing below the tell of Ras Shamra in 1928 when he struck a solid mass, which later turned out to be a stone covering to a tomb. The French authorities—in charge of Syria at the time—were alerted, and in 1929 archaeologists from France, headed by the now-famous Claude F.A. Schaeffer, began the first season of excavation. The French have continued to dig at Ras Shamra until today, although with more involvement from the Syrians in recent years.
These excavations have revealed an extensive Late Bronze Age city 050(14th–13th centuries B.C.E.) with palaces, temples and houses of notables, most of which have yielded troves of texts. This city was destroyed at the end of the Late Bronze Age by the Sea Peoples—of whom the Philistines are perhaps the best known—and only modestly occupied thereafter.
The heavily fortified city gate of Ugarit protected entry into the palace area. The largest of the palaces, the royal palace, was a spectacular edifice covering three acres. A roughly rectangular structure, it measured 390 feet by nearly 300 feet. Smaller palaces provided sumptuous quarters for lesser figures, like the palace of the queen mother.
The Ugaritic language, like Hebrew and other Canaanite dialects, is part of the language group known as Northwest Semitic. As Hebrew is a south Canaanite dialect, Ugaritic is a north Canaanite dialect.
The other language commonly found at Ugarit, also written in cuneiform, is Akkadian, the lingua franca of the time. It was used for commercial and diplomatic documents and is part of the language group known as East Semitic and centered in Mesopotamia.
On the main acropolis of Ugarit were the temples and the House of the Chief Priest. The mythological tablets from this house (and some inscribed metal adzes) were the basis on which the Ugaritic language was deciphered, mainly in 1931. It took only a year or so to decipher because the script consists of only 30 characters and the language strongly resembles Hebrew and Arabic. The alphabetic signs are written in cuneiform but are derived from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet.a
Inside the temple of Baal, the chief Canaanite deity, was a magnificent stela of Baal bearing a weapon in his right hand and a thunderbolt in the form of a flowering spear in his left. Elsewhere on the acropolis, excavators uncovered a seated statue of the god El, a name also used in the Bible for the Hebrew God but in the Ugaritic texts the head of the pantheon. In the statue from Ugarit, El is pictured as an old man, the father of the gods; he sits on an armless chair, wearing a cloak and a conical hat.
Within a few years after the initial decipherment, scholars had translated extensive texts relating to the stories of Baal and his sister Anath; and of their nemeses Yamm, the sea god, and Mot, the god of aridity and death, and others.
Another lengthy text, the Epic of Aqhat, illustrates the relationship between Ugaritic literature and the Bible. The Epic of Aqhat is a narrative in epic verse preserved in part on three clay tablets. Its language and style are startlingly similar to Biblical poetry.
To begin with, the Epic of Aqhat solves a Biblical mystery in the Book of Ezekiel. The prophet Ezekiel is living in exile in Babylonia. In Ezekiel 14:12–20, the prophet utters a prophecy in the name of the Lord:
“O mortal, if a land were to sin against me and commit a trespass and I stretched out my hand against it and broke its staff of bread and sent famine against it and cut off man and 051beast from it, even if these three men—Noah, Daniel and Job—should be in it, they would by their righteousness save only themselves, declares the Lord God … [Even] those three men in it would save neither sons nor daughters, but they alone would be saved.”
(Ezekiel 14:13–14, 16)
The same language is repeated in the immediately subsequent verses of the chapter. (Then, at the end of the chapter, the prophet notes that even after the Babylonian destruction, survivors are left and they will be consoled.)
The problem in this oracle concerns the inclusion of Daniel along with Noah and Job. In the disaster that befell Noah, he was able to save his family—by virtue of his own righteousness. Noah’s wife and children were not necessarily meritorious, but they were nevertheless rescued from the great flood. In the disaster that Ezekiel is talking about, however, not even Noah’s children would be saved. The same, says the prophet, goes for Job, who also lost his children; it is not difficult to imagine their redemption along with Job himself.
But the case of Daniel is different. Ezekiel’s reference to Daniel presents a very difficult chronological problem. At the time of Ezekiel, Daniel was a teenager and not the father of a family. It makes no sense for Ezekiel to include Daniel here.
The mystery is solved by the Ugaritic Epic of Aqhat. The Daniel that Ezekiel is talking about is not the Daniel we know from the Bible. Instead, it is the Daniel we know from the Epic of Aqhat. In the Ugaritic epic, Daniel is the father of Aqhat himself.
How do we know that Ezekiel is referring to the Ugaritic Daniel? For one thing we know it from a careful examination of the Ugaritic text compared to the Biblical text. In the Ugaritic text, it is not exactly Daniel; it is Danel. Look carefully at the Biblical text in Hebrew. When you do this, you will see that it is missing one Hebrew letter, a yod (y). The resulting name would be pronounced Danel, not Daniel, as in our English translations.
There is additional confirmation that Ezekiel is really talking about Danel, rather than Daniel. In Ezekiel 28:1–3, Ezekiel is delivering an oracle against the Phoenician prince of Tyre who is “so haughty” as to consider himself a god. Ezekiel addresses him sarcastically: “You are wiser than Daniel.” In this context, it makes no sense for Ezekiel to mock the prince of Phoenician Tyre by reference to young Daniel living in Babylon. But it does make sense to mock the prince of Tyre by reference to Danel, the renowned father of the young hunter Aqhat. And indeed this is confirmed by looking closely at the spelling of Daniel in the Hebrew text of Ezekiel 28:3: It, too, is Danel, without the yod (i in English), not Daniel.
In the Ugaritic epic, Danel is a pious judge who pays homage to the gods for seven days in a row until Baal takes Danel’s plea to El. El blesses him with a son, Aqhat, who is the hero of the Ugaritic 052epic. Ezekiel’s reference to the Danel of the Ugaritic epic makes perfect sense. Danel lost his son Aqhat to a murderous scheme of the goddess Anath, and it is widely assumed that, in the missing final tablet of the epic, he gets him back. More than that, it emphasizes that Ezekiel’s audience was doubtless familiar with the Aqhat legend and could easily understand the prophet’s allusion to Danel.
In David’s lament over the death of Saul and Saul’s son Jonathan, David cries out: “O hills of Gilboa, let there be no rain or dew on you” (2 Samuel 1:21).
This verse was taken almost directly from Danel’s exclamation of grief over the death of his son in the Epic of Aqhat.2 By evoking a classic Canaanite expression of grief, David adds depth to his lamentation for Saul and Jonathan.
That is not all. Almost every word in this Ugaritic passage has a cognate in Hebrew, and it is replete with Biblical associations. A couple examples will suffice. Earlier in the epic, Danel’s son Aqhat is killed by the jealous goddess Anath. When Danel discovers that his son is dead, as mentioned above, he lays a curse on the earth:
“For seven years may Baal make drought,
For eight, the Rider of the Clouds!
There be no dew, no rainfall,
No welling up of the two watery deeps,
No sweetness of Baal’s voice [that is, no rain following thunder]!”
The parallelism of “seven” and “eight” recalls the many Biblical verses where a number X is parallel to a number X + 1.
For example, in Job 5:19 one of Job’s friends tells him:
“[God] will deliver you from six troubles;
In seven no harm will reach you.”
In the first chapter of Amos, the prophet delivers an oracle in the name of the Lord against Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom and the Ammonites. In each case the prophet intones:
“For three transgressions of [the particular place or people],
For four, I will not revoke it.”
Baal is referred to in the passage from the Aqhat Epic quoted above as “the Rider of the Clouds.” The same epithet is applied to the Israelite God3:
The Ugaritic epic quoted above also juxtaposes the waters from above (“no rainfall”) with the waters from below (“no welling up of the two watery deeps”). The juxtaposition of these two sources of water is familiar to any reader of the Bible. For example, in the account of the flood (Genesis 7:11), this is how it is described:
All the fountains of the great deep burst apart,
And the windows of the sky broke open.
Moses’ blessing of Joseph is recited in Deuteronomy 33:13:
“Blessed of the Lord (YHWH) be his land
With the bounty of dew from heaven,
And of the deep which lies below.”
Finally, in Proverbs 3:19–20, we are told that
“the Lord (YHWH) founded the earth by Wisdom.
He established the heavens by understanding.
By his knowledge the depths burst apart,
And the skies dripped dew.”
It is clear that the Aqhat Epic, like so much of Ugaritic literature, served as the literary background for some of the most classic moments in the Hebrew Bible. We have other examples of 053Ugaritic literature, mostly incomplete, that must have been known to the Israelites writing hundreds of years after they were circulating at Ugarit. Moreover, these were part of a larger Canaanite literature that has been lost. Surely there were many more poems, mostly oral but also written. And for each of them, there were doubtless many versions.
The ancient Hebrew authors were apparently trained in the conventions of ancient Canaanite literature, and in the course of their training they learned the classics of that tradition.b The Biblical writers assume their audience’s familiarity with this Ugaritic literature.
Understanding the Ugaritic background to a Biblical passage often imparts new meaning to it. One example: When Moses comes down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments and sees the Israelites singing and dancing about the golden calf, he becomes enraged and hurls the tablets from his hands, shattering them. Then he directs his attention to the golden calf:
He took the calf they had made. He burned it with fire; he ground it till it was fine; he scattered it over the water and so made the Israelites drink it (Exodus 32:20).
This combination of burning, grinding, and scattering over water may seem puzzling—until we look at an Ugaritic parallel. In one of the Ugaritic Baal myths, the hero is swallowed by Mot, the ravenous god of death; in revenge, the goddess Anath destroys Mot in much the same way that Moses destroyed the golden calf:
She seizes the god Mot. With a sword she cleaves him; with a sieve she scatters him; with fire she burns him; with millstones she grinds him; in the field she sows him.
In this Ugaritic myth, we find the same combination, albeit perhaps in a different order, of burning, grinding and scattering.
In the Ugaritic myth, birds consume Mot’s remains, just as the Israelites were made to drink the remains of the golden calf from the finely ground remains scattered in a nearby stream. When a reconstituted Mot later recalls what happened to him, he says he “was sown in the sea!” Like the golden calf, Mot was scattered over water.
In the golden calf story, the animal was being treated by the Israelites as a god. Suddenly the strange combination of burning, grinding and scattering over water makes sense. As we learn from the Ugaritic myth, this is the stereotypical method of destroying a deity. The ancient Hebrew audience, upon hearing the story of the golden calf’s disposal, would understand that the statue was being treated like a god in need of elimination. Knowing the Ugaritic source enables us to understand the Biblical narrative more authentically.
This taste of Ugaritic does not even begin to survey the extent and depth of the literary linkage between Ugaritic literature and the Hebrew Bible. Taken as a whole, it demonstrates that Israelite literature is an outgrowth of Canaanite literature, just as the Hebrew language is an outgrowth of the Canaanite language. In short, Ugaritic and Biblical literature belong to the same stream of tradition.
Hebrew is a “language of Canaan,” says the prophet (Isaiah 19:18), a conclusion amply confirmed by archaeologically recovered inscriptions. In scholarly terms, Hebrew is a south Canaanite dialect. As with the language, so with the alphabet: From its earliest appearance until the Babylonian destruction, Hebrew was written in the Canaanite alphabet.1 As with language and the alphabet, so with culture generally: Ancient Israelite culture was in many respects a subset of Canaanite culture. The most powerful and extensive demonstration of this last statement comes from the body of literature uncovered at the site of Ugarit on the Mediterranean coast […]
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See Shmuel Aḥituv, Echoes from the Past: Hebrew and Cognate Inscriptions from the Biblical Period, trans. Anson F. Rainey (Jerusalem: Carta, 2008), pp. 249–252.
2.
The Hebrew text adds “Nor steppes of offerings!” This makes no sense. Slight emendation of the Hebrew letters (sh-d-y t-r-w-m-t) following the Ugaritic (to sh-r-’ t-h-m-w-t) produces a perfect line: “No welling up of the watery-deeps!” In a footnote, the JPS translation suggests this emendation on the basis of the Ugaritic parallel. With this emendation, the Hebrew text follows the Ugaritic parallel exactly, invoking both the rain from the heavens and the springs from the deep.
3.
In the Hebrew text referred to below, the Israelite God is called Elohim. The text goes on to say, however, Yah, short for Yahweh, is his name (Psalm 68:4). See also verses 18 and 20, where the name YHWH is used. Compare also verse 1 with Numbers 10:35—in the latter of these two almost identical verses, YHWH stands in place of Elohim.
4.
In old translations we often find the rendering “who rides through the desert.” Hebrew ‘arava is a term for “desert.” However, even before the discovery of Ugaritic, some translated “rider of the skies,” by comparing verses 33–34 and verses from elsewhere. We now know that the Hebrew term ‘aravot refers not to “deserts” but to clouds, like the cognate Ugaritic term.
