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March 9, 2006

Marduk - Ugarit - Early Hebrew

I've been working my way thought the latest Ugarit-Forschungen (Band 36) and the very first article has caused me to reflect on two issues. First, what was the role of Marduk at Ugarit and second, what can one really learn from a fairly high order linguistic parallel when that parallel is not only separated by language but by hundreds of years?

The article in question, "RS 25.460 and Early Hebrew Poetry" by Aaron Chalmers, is clear and beautifully concise. But I somehow feel it lacks something fairly important.

RS 25.460 is a rather strange Akkadian text from Ugarit. It was first published by Jean Nougayrol in Ugaritica V. The text of some 45 lines was called "(Juste) Souffrant" by Nougayrol. It is a combination hymn/incantation text addressed to Marduk by an unnamed sufferer. It was found among the documents in the library of a priest at Ugarit and the tablet dates from around 1300 BCE. Both Nougayrol and Chalmers as well as von Soden think this tablet is a copy of a text that is two or five hundred years older. I had briefly looked at this text a long time ago but never studied it in depth. I still haven't.

Marduk appears in this Akkadian tablet and, as far as I know, only four other Akkadian tablets from Ugarit and these four consist of two pairs of duplicate texts. The Mesopotamian god appears in the pantheon lists RS 20.121:61 and RS 24:309 (in the same position as in RS 20.121). These lists are conical lists of Mesopotamian gods often referred to as the An list because it begins with An. A fragment of this or a very similar list is known from Amarna. The other text from Ugarit which refers to Marduk is RS 17.155 and its duplicate RS 15:152. This is a magical text in which Marduk is addressed as the "sage of the gods." Marduk does not appear by that name on any of the Ugaritic alphabetic tablets. He is not in any pantheon text that otherwise has clear Ugaritic elements. So why was there interest in him such that two fairly long literary texts were keep by priests, one text in two copies? I don't have a certain answer to this question. It may be that Marduk was associated with Ba'al. There is some commonality between the Ba'al cycle at Ugarit and the Enûma Elish.

Now to the heart of Chalmers' account. He finds extremely interesting parallels between certain literary structures and language in RS 25.460:34-44 and various texts from the Hebrew Bible that he characterizes as early Hebrew poetry. I don't want to argue with this characterization. In fact, I think it is correct depending on what one means by "early." Here is one of several examples from his paper. I will just give his translations of the relevant texts.

RS 25:460:36-37
He broke me and tore me loose.
He scattered me and collected me together.

Job 5:18
For he wounded, but he shall bind up.
He struck, but his hands shall heal.

(Note for the concerned: the word translated "and" in RS 25:460 is ù and "but" in Job stands for waw.)

The pattern seen in lines 36 and 37 of Akkadian tablet are but two instances of a total of six such contiguous lines and patterns.

Chalmers also calls our attention to similar linguistic patterns in Deuteronomy 32:39, Hosea 6:1 and I Samuel 2:6 and 7. Each of these parallels have various differences that he tabulates in a very nice table.

However, Chalmers gives no account as to how these parallels came about. He ends with an interesting discussion of why early Hebrew poetry preferred certain lexemes and verbal forms not seen in the Akkadian. He notes that while Marduk is on occasion called the "lord of life" he is never the "lord of death" but according to Chalmers it was important to the early Hebrew poets for Yahweh to be associated with both.

He concludes,

Hence, to claim that it was Yahweh who both killed and brought to life was to say that Yahweh was supreme over both Mot and Ba'al, pushed further it may even represent a claim that Yahweh was the only deity.

If Chalmers' goal was to establish an important distinction between Yahweh and Marduk, I think he could have done it as well without reference to the literary parallels he develops between early Hebrew and RS 25:460.

I guess what bothers me is the rather abrupt move from an observation of a linguistic parallel to a theological point that leaves the rather large gap between the two literatures unaddressed. Put simply, what does a text, likely first written in Mesopotamia somewhere between 1800 and 1500 BCE and preserved in a copy from circa 1300 BCE at Ugarit, have to do with any Biblical text? To what extent does it inform us of the situation in Palestine at the time the Biblical texts or their sources were composed? I'm not sure that it doesn't inform them at all. But how much does it inform them? Of that, I am just not so very sure.

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I am extremely interested in the texts, both in Ugaritic and Akkadian, from Ugarit but I have always been bothered by parallels where the relationship between the parallel phenomenon was not well defined. This from an associate editor of a volume entitled, Ras Shamra Parallels; the Texts from Ugarit and the Hebrew Bible and the author of one of the chapters in that volume.

References:

Posted by Duane Smith at March 9, 2006 7:41 PM | Read more on Ugarit |

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