Ugaritic / West Semitic religion

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Ugaritic religion is the cult and mythology of the Late Bronze Age city of Ugarit, on the Mediterranean coast of northern Syria, and by extension the wider West Semitic religious world its tablets opened to view — the world of El, Baal, Asherah, and Anat that the Hebrew Bible remembers chiefly as its rival. Until a farmer’s plough struck a tomb at Minet el-Beida, the port of Ras Shamra, in the spring of 1928, that world was known almost entirely from its enemies and its late summarizers — from prophets who named its gods only to curse them, and from Greek and Roman antiquarians working a thousand years after the fact. The excavation that began the following year, under the French archaeologist Claude Schaeffer, recovered a temple quarter, scribal libraries set inside the houses of the men who kept them, and hundreds of clay tablets written in a cuneiform alphabet of some thirty signs — the oldest complete alphabet yet found, its letters set out in a fixed order on a schoolboy’s practice tablet. Within two years Hans Bauer, Édouard Dhorme, and Charles Virolleaud had broken the script independently, and Virolleaud was publishing the first mythological tablets. The city fell around 1200–1185 BCE, in the general collapse that ended the Bronze Age across the eastern Mediterranean, and its archives were baked hard in the destruction, so that the fire which killed Ugarit is the reason its words survive.

A pantheon under an aged father

What the texts present is a structured pantheon under an aged patriarch. El, whose name is simply the common Semitic word for god, presides as “father of years” and “creator of creatures” from a distant dwelling at the source of the twin rivers, where the deeps meet. He is the grey-bearded sovereign who decrees and grants, gentle and a little remote, more often consulted than commanding; the great myths turn on petitions carried to his tent. His consort Athirat — the same goddess the Hebrew Bible knows as Asherah — is “creatress of the gods” and mother of their seventy sons, and she too is approached as an intercessor whose word with El moves the assembly. Beneath the divine couple stand Anat, the violent warrior-maiden who wades through blood to the knee; Yam, prince of the sea; Mot, the throat of death; Shapshu, the sun who crosses both the living day and the land of the dead; the craftsman Kothar-wa-Khasis; and Athtart, the goddess Astarte, here a hunting companion of Anat rather than the queen she would become in the first-millennium Phoenician cities. The pantheon was kept in writing as well as in story: ordered god-lists, several of them set out hierarchically and one preserved in a Mesopotamian-style syllabic edition that matched each Ugaritic deity to a Hurrian and an Akkadian counterpart, register the same theology the myths dramatize, and show a coastal kingdom translating its gods across the borders of three languages.

The Baal Cycle: sea, palace, death

The longest and most ambitious composition is the Baal Cycle, six tablets copied around the fourteenth century by the scribe Ilimilku in the service of King Niqmaddu — a single author’s name attached, for once, to a Bronze Age mythology. Its hero is the storm god Baal, the title (lord) of Haddu or Hadad (see Adad, his Mesopotamian cognate), “rider on the clouds,” whose voice is the thunder and whose rain is the difference between harvest and famine. The cycle moves through three contests that together establish, lose, and recover his kingship. In the first, Baal defeats Yam, the Sea, in cosmogonic combat — Kothar forges him two weapons that leap from his hand like eagles, and the unruly waters are beaten down so that order can stand. In the second, Baal has no house of his own; through the mediation of Anat and then of Athirat, El at last grants him a palace on his northern mountain, Sapanu, and the building of it — windowed at the god’s bold insistence, against his own first caution — is the architecture of a kingship made permanent. In the third and gravest, Baal is summoned down into the gullet of Mot, Death, who boasts of an appetite that splits the lip to the earth and the lower lip to the sky. Baal descends and dies before the autumn rains. El comes down from his throne, sits in the dust, gashes his cheeks and chin and forearms in mourning for the storm; the fields crack; Anat searches, finds the body, and weeps until, like a cow for her calf, she carries Baal up the mountain for burial. Then she falls on Mot himself: she cleaves him with a blade, winnows him with a sieve, burns him, grinds him, and sows him in the field like cut grain. Baal revives; the heavens rain oil and the wadis run with honey; and after a final, exhausted duel the two powers are parted by Shapshu’s word and the rhythm of the seasons is restored. Whether this death and return is “resurrection” in any strict sense, or the disappearance and recovery of a vanishing god of the Anatolian type, is among the most argued questions the tablets raise — the strongest single case, the textual evidence being direct and securely Bronze Age, for taking a dying-and-rising pattern seriously in the ancient Near East.

Kings, omens, and the cult of the dead

Beside the divine myths stand two long poems about human kings. The Kirta epic follows a childless king, addressed as a son of El, who loses his whole house and is granted by the high god, in a dream, the campaign by which he wins a new bride and a new line — only to fall mortally ill when he neglects a vow, his sickness threatening the order of the realm until El himself fashions a being to drive the disease out. The Aqhat epic turns on a marvelous bow: Kothar makes it, the boy Aqhat owns it, the goddess Anat covets it, and when he refuses her she has him killed — after which the land is struck by a seven-year drought and his father Danil mourns at the threshing-floor while his sister sets out to avenge him. Both poems break off before their certain end, and both bend, in their surviving lines, toward death, the duties a son owes his dead father, and the fragile divinity of kings.

Alongside the poetry lies a large practical literature recording what the city’s priests actually did: sacrificial calendars naming the offerings owed to each god on each day, ritual prescriptions, god-lists doubling as offering schedules, and a substantial apparatus of divination — omen compendia, astrological notes, models of sheep livers inscribed with the readings a diviner was to take from their lobes and fissures. A particular weight falls on the dead. The Ugaritic rapaʾuma are the deified royal ancestors, shades who travel and banquet and who, summoned by name in a funerary liturgy composed for the burial of a king around 1200 BCE, are called down with the sun into the dust so that they will bless the living heir and his city. Their name passes directly into the Hebrew rephaim, the shades of Sheol who in the prophets rise from their thrones to greet a newly dead king. The elite banqueting society called the marzeah, attested at Ugarit in legal and administrative documents and in a myth of El drinking himself insensible at a feast, reappears in the Hebrew prophets — condemned by Amos and named by Jeremiah — and survives across three thousand years, from third-millennium Ebla to a Byzantine map that still marks a “House of the Marzeah.” Whether this cult of the dead amounted, at Ugarit and after, to a true cult of beneficent ancestors or only to mortuary commemoration is the hinge of a long and unsettled scholarly dispute; the texts that name the dead kings one by one, and an Akkadian copy of the king-list that marks each of them with the determinative for god, have tilted the strictly Ugaritic side of it toward the maximal reading.

The continuum and the Hebrew Bible

For the study of the Hebrew Bible the discovery was transformative, because it recovered the near side of a quarrel hitherto audible from one party only. Yahweh, the God of Israel, bears El’s titles — the ancient one, the king, the father — and rides on the clouds and thunders from the heavens with Baal’s storm imagery. Psalm 29, in which the voice of Yahweh breaks the cedars and shakes the wilderness and he sits enthroned over the flood, reads in places like a Canaanite storm-hymn re-addressed; H. L. Ginsberg proposed as early as 1935 that it had once been sung to Baal. The Hebrew prohibitions against gashing the body for the dead, against feeding offerings to ghosts, against consulting the shades, and against the marzeah banquet turn out to name, point for point, the very practices the Ugaritic and Phoenician corpora attest — too detailed and too often repeated to be polemic against foreign curiosities, and better read as polemic against persistent options inside the house. Inscriptions from Kuntillet ʿAjrud, a desert way-station of around 800 BCE, blessing travelers “by Yahweh and his asherah,” have kept the goddess — or her wooden cult symbol, for the grammar is disputed — inside the argument over how early Israelite religion related to its neighbors.

Scholarship is careful with the inference, and the care matters. Ugarit lay north of Canaan proper, spoke its own language, and was destroyed centuries before the biblical books took shape, so its religion is a cousin of Israel’s world rather than its parent, and the city’s own cult was one local form among many. The eastern neighbor across the Euphrates, the older and grander civilization of Sumer and Akkad (Mesopotamian religion, with its own national gods like Assyrian Ashur), is a contrast as much as a source: Baal’s death in cosmic combat with personified Death is not the same thing as the shepherd Dumuzi handed over to the underworld as a substitute, however much the two lament-traditions touch. The resemblances down the West Semitic line are nonetheless dense enough that the phrase “West Semitic religion” now names a continuum — Ugaritic, Canaanite, Phoenician, Aramean — within which the God of Israel emerged, and whose dying storm-king has a southern relative in the Adonis the Greeks took from Byblos. It is a continuum the surviving sources allow one to trace only in part, and one whose mortuary cult and seasonal myth place it in the same wide landscape as the death-and-renewal patterns of the later mystery religions, without making it their ancestor. On that reading the polemics of the prophets are a family argument, and the tablets preserve the other side of it.

The texts and their reconstruction

Almost everything known of this religion has been recovered within a single century, and the recovery is still in progress. Virolleaud’s pioneering transcriptions — beginning with the death-of-Baal sequence he published in the journal Syria in 1931 — have been revised so heavily that no edition before the 1960s can be cited for philological detail; the order of the cycle’s first tablets has since been reversed. The standard reference corpus is now the Dietrich–Loretz–Sanmartín edition of the alphabetic texts (the sigla KTU/CAT), and the major modern critical editions of the Baal Cycle are those of Mark S. Smith and, for the later tablets, Smith with Wayne Pitard. The ritual and divinatory material is gathered and translated in Dennis Pardee’s Ritual and Cult at Ugarit (Society of Biblical Literature, 2002), which the publisher has made freely available in full. Nicolas Wyatt’s Religious Texts from Ugarit (2002) and the Ugaritic Narrative Poetry volume edited by Simon Parker remain the working English translations of the poetry. For the bearing on Israel, two books frame the debate: Theodore J. Lewis, Cults of the Dead in Ancient Israel and Ugarit (Harvard Semitic Monographs 39, 1989), which reads the biblical polemic as aimed at a real and proximate ancestor cult, and Brian Schmidt’s Israel’s Beneficent Dead (1994), which argues the minimal case. Mark S. Smith’s The Origins of Biblical Monotheism (Oxford, 2001) traces the convergence of El and Yahweh and the long demotion of Baal; Tryggve Mettinger’s The Riddle of Resurrection (2001) mounts the case, against the prevailing skepticism, that Baal and the Tyrian Melqart genuinely died and rose. A clean, openly licensed transliteration of the poetic corpus is maintained by the Göttingen Ugarit-Portal. The thinness of the freely reusable apparatus is an accident of timing — most of the foundational philology was done by scholars who died after 1955, and their work clears copyright only over the coming decades — but it does not touch the substance. What the tablets recovered is a religious world that was internally coherent, ritually elaborate, and historically continuous with the one the Hebrew Bible knew and resisted.

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