Shalim

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The root comes before the god. The three consonants š-l-m run through the whole of the West Semitic world carrying a single dense idea — something brought to completion, made whole, set right, at rest. From it grow the words for soundness and well-being, for the closing of an account, for the peace that is wholeness rather than mere absence of war: Hebrew šālôm, Arabic salām, Aramaic šĕlām, and a long file of greetings and blessings that are still in daily use across the region. Shalim — also written Shalem, Salim, Šlm — is the divine face of that root at the moment it touches the sky. He is the god of dusk, of the day brought to its completion, the light that closes rather than opens. To name the evening as a god, and to name it with the word for peace, is to read the end of the day not as loss but as a thing made whole.

He is known almost entirely from one place. The tablets unearthed at Ugarit, the Late Bronze Age city on the Syrian coast whose mound at Ras Shamra was struck by a farmer’s plough in the spring of 1928 and excavated by Claude Schaeffer’s French campaigns from 1929 onward, opened a window onto the religion of the Levant that the Hebrew Bible had largely left in shadow — the world of El, Baal, Asherah, and Anat surveyed under Ugaritic / West Semitic religion. Before those tablets were read, the gods of Canaan were known mostly from their enemies and their late summarizers — from prophets who named them only to curse them, and from Greek and Roman antiquarians writing a thousand years after the fact. Ugarit gave the Canaanite pantheon its own voice, in the world’s first alphabetic cuneiform, and within that pantheon Shalim has a small but precise place.

The entrance to the archaeological site of Ugarit (Ras Shamra), north of Latakia on the Syrian coast, where the tablets naming Shalim were found — Mbenoist, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The birth of dusk

His clearest appearance is in a single tablet, cataloged as KTU 1.23 (the older sigla UT 52 and RS 2.002 name the same object), a poem of some seventy-six lines usually titled “The Birth of the Gracious Gods” or “The Goodly Gods.” It is a hybrid text, myth braided into liturgy: rubrics and refrains that belong to performance are set among narrative lines, so that the story of the gods’ begetting is also, in part, a script for the rite that celebrated it. At its center stands the high god El, the aged father of the Ugaritic gods, who encounters two women at the shore of the sea. He desires them, kisses them, lies with them, and they conceive. The women are most often identified with Athirat — the great mother-goddess the Hebrew Bible remembers as Asherah — and a figure named Rahmay, “the merciful one,” though the reading is debated, as much in this poem is. What is not in doubt is the issue of the union: two sons are born together, twins, and they are named Shahar and Shalim — Dawn and Dusk.

The pairing is the heart of the figure. Shahar is the dawn, the first light; Shalim is its counterpart at the close of day. Read together, the brothers mark the daily turning of the sky from one edge to the other, the two seams where light meets dark. The poem describes them as ravenous at birth, with a lip to the earth and a lip to the heavens, devouring the birds of the sky and the fish of the sea — an image of the twilight powers swallowing the visible world as they cross it. They are then sent out to wander the wilderness for a span of years before being received at a feast of bread and wine. The text belongs to ritual as much as to story, and its precise use in worship — a sacred-marriage rite, a seasonal first-fruits celebration, a royal liturgy enacting the king’s role among the gods have all been proposed — remains contested. What the tablet preserves is the moment of their begetting, not a developed mythology of the dusk god going about his own affairs.

Because Shahar is unambiguously the morning, Shalim is read by elision as the evening, and a venerable line of scholarship — the dusk identification is usually credited to William F. Albright — has tied the twins to the planet Venus, which burns brightly at both ends of the day as morning star and evening star, one body wearing two names. Whether the brothers are Venus doubled or simply the two thresholds of light in general is not settled by the tablet; the astral reading is an inference from the pairing, not a statement the poem makes. Either way the logic is the same: the day has two edges, and each edge has its god.

A god by his root, and by his absence

Outside KTU 1.23, Shalim is a thin presence — a name that surfaces in the god-lists and offering-records of Ugarit, listed among the powers who receive sacrifice, and an element that recurs in personal names, where it is hard to say whether the šlm honors the god or simply invokes the blessing of well-being. This ambiguity is the constant condition of the figure: with Shalim the deity and šlm the word for wholeness were never far apart, and the same syllable can point either way. He sits among the lesser, more shadowy members of the pantheon, overshadowed in the surviving texts by El, Baal, and Anat. He left no scripture of his own, no cycle of combats, no temple that excavation has fixed to his name, and no continuous cult that history can trace forward. The model of the Ugaritic pantheon set out by Mark S. Smith places the high god El and his consort Asherah at the summit, with the active gods — Baal, Anat, Astarte, and the rest — beneath them; in that scheme Shahar and Shalim belong to the family of El’s children, present in the divine household but not among its great workers. Dusk is a real power, but a quiet one.

The “Baal with Thunderbolt” stele from Ugarit (c. 15th century BCE, Louvre AO 15775); active gods such as Baal overshadowed quieter figures like Shalim in the surviving texts — Jastrow, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

That quietness extends across the wider West Semitic world. The Phoenician cities of the Iron Age — Tyre, Sidon, Byblos — carried the Canaanite inheritance forward into the cults examined under Phoenician religion, reshaping it around their city-gods, and there Shalim all but vanishes from the record as an independent figure even as the šlm root remains everywhere in the language. He is a god more attested in his name than in his deeds — a power whose worship can be inferred but not narrated, whose festival, if he had one, has left no calendar entry that survives.

Ruins of the Royal Palace of Ugarit, whose archives yielded the god-lists and offering-records in which Shalim’s name appears — Frank Kidner / Dumbarton Oaks, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The name inside the city

The most discussed claim about Shalim reaches well beyond Ugarit. Jerusalem is among the oldest continuously named cities on earth, and its name is old enough to predate the Israelites by centuries. It appears in the Egyptian Execration Texts of roughly 1900–1800 BCE — curses inscribed on pottery and figurines naming the rulers Egypt wished broken — in a form usually transcribed Rušalimum; and again, some five centuries later, in the diplomatic correspondence of the Amarna letters of the fourteenth century BCE, where the city’s ruler Abdi-Heba writes to the Egyptian court from a place rendered Urusalim (URU ú-ru-sa-lim). Many scholars hold that the second element of that name is the god of dusk — that Urusalim means something like “foundation of Shalim” or “city of Shalim,” from a West Semitic verb for founding or laying a cornerstone joined to the divine name. On this reading the city was once a place under this god’s patronage, and the name of the dusk-god has outlived his cult by three thousand years, riding inside the name of one of the most contested cities on earth.

An Amarna letter (14th century BCE) from Abdi-Heba, ruler of Jerusalem, to the Egyptian court, where the city’s name is rendered Urusalim — Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The proposal is widely repeated and genuinely live, but it runs aground on the very ambiguity that defines Shalim. The early forms are open to more than one reading. The second element is š-l-m — exactly the root that means peace, soundness, completion — and a name built on it might honor the deity or might simply name the place as a “foundation of well-being,” a settlement founded sound and whole, with no god intended at all. The same syllable that may carry a divine name also carries the most ordinary blessing in the language, and the two are hard to prise apart precisely because, in the figure of Shalim, the god and the word were one thing seen from two sides. The honest position holds both possibilities open and adjudicates neither, and it carries a further caution: whatever stood in the name in the second millennium BCE, the modern city’s name cannot be read backward as proof of a deity’s worship, nor should a god’s origin be imputed to it as settled fact.

The matter is complicated by a second, related name that must be kept distinct. The book of Genesis tells of Melchizedek, priest-king of “Salem,” who blesses Abraham — a figure and a place that the later tradition came to identify with Jerusalem and that belong, in their own right, to Melchizedek. The “Salem” of that story shares the š-l-m root and is drawn into the same etymological orbit, but it is a different strand: a priest-king and a biblical place-name, related to the question of Jerusalem’s name but not a synonym for the Ugaritic deity. Shalim the dusk-god is one thread; Salem the priestly city is another; the modern city’s name is a third; and the šlm root runs through all three without making them one.

Texts and scholarship

The primary witness is KTU 1.23, “The Birth of the Gracious Gods,” whose critical edition stands in the standard corpus of Ugaritic texts (Dietrich, Loretz, and Sanmartín’s Cuneiform Alphabetic Texts, the source of the KTU sigla) and whose working translations are those of Dennis Pardee in The Context of Scripture and Nicolas Wyatt’s Religious Texts from Ugarit. The poem has drawn close study as a myth-and-ritual document; a representative recent treatment of its cultic dimension is available as Cultic Reciprocity, Performativity, and Materiality in KTU 1.23, which surveys the long debate over how the narrative of Shahar and Shalim’s birth functioned in performance.

For the figure himself the standard reference is the entry “Shalem” by Herbert B. Huffmon in the Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (2nd ed., van der Toorn, Becking, and van der Horst, eds., 1999), which lays out the Ugaritic attestations, the twilight identification, the theophoric names, and the Jerusalem question with full citation. The wider pantheon in which Shalim sits is mapped in Mark S. Smith’s The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts (Oxford University Press, 2001), the brief’s anchor study, where Shahar and Shalim appear among the children of El and the astral powers of the second tier. A convenient catalog of the divine names in which Shalim takes his place, with the relevant sigla, is the List of Ugaritic deities. The line on Jerusalem’s name runs through the same scholarship; John Day and others have weighed the “foundation of Shalim” reading against the peace-noun alternative, and the question sits within the larger study of West Semitic theophoric place-names rather than being a curiosity peculiar to this one city.

Shalim sits among the lesser, more shadowy members of the Ugaritic pantheon, overshadowed in the surviving texts by El, Baal, and Anat. He left no scripture of his own and no continuous cult that history can trace; what remains is a name on a handful of tablets and, perhaps, on a map. That the god of evening may survive in the name of one of the most contested cities on earth is the kind of long afterlife that the study of dead religions occasionally turns up — uncertain, and difficult to set aside.

→ Related: Baal · Ugarit · Ugaritic West Semitic Religion · Canaan · Phoenicia · Phoenician Religion · Astarte · Melchizedek