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August 25, 2007

Ba'al the Thunderer?

John Hobbins has apparently ran out of Ancient Hebrew Poetry and has taken up ancient Ugaritic Poetry. He has a great post on prosody of Ugaritic poetry where he takes up part of KTU 1.10 as an example. Reflecting on KTU 1.10:5, John tells us,

A Ugaritic phrase that is difficult to translate is ’ilu haddu. I take it to be an epithet in this context, not a PN (‘the divine Thunderer,’ not ‘the divine Haddu’). In any case, Baal and Hadad are not conflatable divinities in the Iron Age on present evidence. The former is Canaanite and the latter Aramean.

At first, I wanted to nitpick this claim. But the more I have looked at the seventeen instances where hd occurs in alphabetic texts from Ugarit, the more I think he may be correct. Putting the special case of KTU 1.67 and the weirdness of KTU 1.19 aside for a while, I have been unable to find an example where hd need be understood as the divine name Hadad. But the place to look is not in the majority of texts where hd is clearly in parallel with Ba'al but in those texts where it may stand alone or might be a divine name without clearly being parallel with the divine name Ba'al. In a comment to John's post, Jim Getz says,

I think I'd have to take issue with your understanding of Ba'lu and Haddu. While conflation in the Iron Age between the Canaanite Baal and Aramean Hadad is of course true. The real issue is that Ugarit was neither Iron Age, nor Canaanite nor Aramean.

And lo and behold, John decided to go back to "divine Haddu." I think he gave in a little easy.

But let's start where Hadad and Ba'al are actually conflated to a certain extent. Many Akkadian texts, including those from Ugarit, represent both Ba'al and Hadad with ^dIM, the divine determinative followed by the Sumerian ideogram for the storm god whatever his local divine name or names may have been. This orthographic convention no doubt has caused some confusion for both ancient people and their modern interpreters.

I've taken a quick survey of the seventeen occurrences of hd in alphabetic texts from Ugarit and I can not find a single example where hd necessarily means Hadad as a god in his own right or as an alternative divine name for Ba'al. I said "alphabetic texts from Ugarit" because KTU 1.67 is in the Akkadian language even if written in the Ugaritic alphabet. hd occurs in line 17. And as I will show hd might stand for the divine name Hadad in this text but it is likely irrelevant to the current considerations.

KTU 1.4 VI: 38b-39a reads, bhr[h . bʿ]l | yʿdb . hd, "From [his] mountain [Ba']al makes thunder" provides a useful point of departure. This sentence is in the context of Ba'al rejoicing over his new palace. This interpretation, of course, depends on how some difficult issues in the larger context are resolved. While the grammar and context, to say nothing of the language, are quite different, one might compare Hebrew הד הרים in Ezekiel 7:7.

One of the more interesting occurrences of hd is in KTU 1.101. The first two lines of this hymn read,

1) bʿl . yṯb . k ṯbt . ġr . hd . r[x(x)]
2) k mdb b tk . ġrh . il ṣpn b [ġr?]

Ba'al dwells like dwelling (on) a thundering mountain (ġr this time), [. . .]
Like a flood in the midst of his mountain, El Saphon in [the mountain ?]

I have used a rather stiff and literal translation style because I think it best illustrates the point I want to make in quoting this passage. (And because I'm not much of a poet.) Among the possible restorations of the last word in line 1 is r[b]. A somewhat freer translation might be, "Ba'al dwells like one who dwells on a great thundering mountain." Reading hd here as an alternate name for Ba'al is much harder than reading it as the adjective, "thundering" or the like. k ṯbt . ġr . hd is in parallel with k mdb b tk . ġrh rather than Ba'al being in parallel with Hadad. In line 3 we hear that the "The strong(?) mountain is filled with lightning (brqm)."

So if I understand these two Ugaritic passages correctly, we see hd as a common noun in KTU 1.4 VI:38b-39a and as an adjective in KTU 1.101:1. In neither text does the divine name Hadad make much, if any, sense. In both cases, the word is associated with Ba'al. Of course, these observations do not guarantee that in passages where hd is in parallel with Ba'al (or otherwise defines him) it is an epithet rather than a name but they certainly encourage an interpretation like John's. When I consider John's correct observation about the "ethnic" based distinction between Ba'al and Hadad in the Iron Age, I am fairly convinced that John was correct in seeing hd as an epithet for Ba'al rather than an alternative divine name in these Late Bronze Age texts even as I agree with Jim that "Ugarit is Ugarit" and the Late Bronze Age is not the Iron Age. I even agree with Jim that Ugaritic is not Canaanite. But like much else in this business, how to understand hd in these passages is not completely clear.

There is another weird place where one might think the divine name Hadad was at least translated from Ba'al or the other way around. That is in the Akkadian list of gods, RS 20.24 (Ugaritica V, 18), and its alphabetic version, KTU 1.118. Below I reproduced the first six lines of the Akkadian text followed by the Ugaritic version (a "/" separates them).

DINGER a-be / ilib
ilum^lum / il
^dda-gan / dgn
^dIM be-el ḫuršȃn ḫa-zi / bʿl ṣpn
^dIM II / bʿlm
^dIM III / bʿlm

While Nougayrol, 44, renders IM, adad, he could have as easily rendered it balu. Scribes at Ugarit and elsewhere used the Sumerian ideogram for both. The Akkadian text continues with four more ^dIMs each with a number after it. The Ugaritic equivalents of these lines all read bʿlm (without a number). The next god after the Ba'als is ^dIDIM ù IDIM (arṣ w šmm) and 22 additional gods follow in the Akkadian version. Hadad is not among them. At least he is not in any part of the Ugaritic portion of the text and, except for a letter here or there, every line is readable. Of course, other known gods are missing from these lists, so Hadad might have been there but likely not represented by IM as one would expect. I should note that if Hadad is considered equal to Ba'al then one would not expect his name in this list. If there is any real issue concerning Hadad as an alternative name for Ba'al in these two texts, and I don't think there is, it is a matter of comparative mythology and not of alternative divine names.

There are two texts that may be problematic to John's interpretation. The badly broken KTU 1.9:13 has hdd apparently as an alternative for Ba'al. The line reads,

. . . u qšt pn hdd . yx[ . . . ]
. . . and he (some now lost verb) the bow before hdd.

But look at lines 17 and 18:

17) zbl bʿl . ġlm . [        ]
18) ṣġr hd w r[        ]

Prince Ba'al, servant (boy) of (?) [ ]
Young thunderer (?) and ?[ ]"

Why do these tablets always seem broken at the most important places? This tablet may be a scribal exercise. See Dietrich, Loretz and Sanmartin, 31. Is hdd in line 10 a scribal error for hd? Did the student scribe make this mistake because he or she was from a tradition that called the storm god Hadad and pronounced the name hadad rather than haddu? Since the Akkadian "spelling" in proper names and elsewhere is rather consistently ad-du when it is not represented by IM, one would need to further speculate that the student scribe was neither Assyrian nor Babylonian. Having put forth this speculation, my own view is that hdd is a plain old fashioned scribal error for hd meaning "thunderer" or Hadad. If this text were dictated by a master, the scribe may have (in line 13 but not line 18) failed to follow the orthographic convention concerning geminated consonants.

The other problematic text is KTU 1.67. A detailed study of KTU 1.67 is beyond the scope of this post and perhaps beyond the scope of any other post of which I am capable of writing. As I said, this text, while written in the typical alphabetic cuneiform of the Ugartic texts, is actually in the Akkadian language (or at least some of it is). The few Akkadian texts written in the cuneiform alphabet are among the most difficult texts in the corpus. In the horribly broken line 17 we see the consonant string hd. I probably should look at Segert's study of this text before I say anything else, but ignorance has never stopped me before; so I will make a couple of comments anyway. Another, very brief, look at this text can be found in Cunchillow and Vita, 227. I have looked at this. First, in the readable part of this text Ba'al does not appear even once. If, and this may be a rather big if, hd is to be understood as the god Hadad, he is likely not associated with Ba'al. Other Akkadian mythological and religious texts from Ugarit do not necessarily reflect what we know of Ugaritic mythology and religion. So, I don't make too much of the occurrence of hd in this text.

One area that needs further exploration is the use of (h)addu as a theophoric element in several names from Ugarit. One of the more interesting examples is the name of three kings of Ugarit, Niqmadu. It is often written ^mniq-ma-^dIM in Akkadian texts, particularly those texts that originate from Ugarit (see for example, RS 17.315 [PRU IV, 111] and EA 49:2). But on other occasions it is written, ^mni-iq-ma-an-du/a/i or some minor variation (See RS 17.227:8 [PRU IV, 40f]). Of course, the name is consistently written nqmd in alphabetic Ugaritic. This theophoric element in personal names makes me think that at some time Hadad was part of the Ugaritic pantheon or was indeed used as an alternative name for Ba'al, even if it is not necessarily so in the existing mythological material.

Now, this is a long way of saying that I think John's understanding of ’ilu haddu in KTU 1:10 and elsewhere is likely correct but there are some abnormally interesting problems around the edges. It is also against the bulk of scholarly tradition. But, if you can't question scholarly tradition on a blog, where can you question it?

References

Posted by Duane Smith at August 25, 2007 2:26 PM | Read more on Ugarit |

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Comments

Posted by: John Hobbins at August 25, 2007 3:11 PM

Posted by: Glen Gordon at August 27, 2007 8:42 AM

Posted by: Duane at August 27, 2007 9:01 AM

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