« An Abnormal Day
Main
Getting A Little Shuteye »
March 15, 2008
Is PZ Myers Habayu? or What Does YLŠN Mean?
I started out to write a hilarious post about PZ Myers of Pharyngula and the upcoming American Atheists Conference in Minneapolis. PZ said this about his preparation for the conference,
And I'll be sure to get my horns trimmed and tuck my tail into my underpants so I don't alarm people when I'm walking around downtown Minneapolis this week.
While I'm sure PZ had the image of another horned and tailed fellow in mind, I thought of KTU 1.114, the Ugaritic tablet I've been looking at recently. The passage that my mind drifted to is KTU 1.114:19b-21a.
[If you see squares, rectangles or something else that doesn't look right, please install the Charis SIL font.]
w ngšnn .ḥby .
bʿl . qrnm . w ḏnb .
ylšn / b ḫrih . w ṯnth
Then Habayu approaches him (El).
The owner of two horns and a tail
YLŠs him in his feces and his urine.
I was hoping PZ won't YLŠ too many drunken gods while he is at the atheist conference. This was where everyone was supposed to laugh hysterically.
But not knowing want ylšn means does take the edge off the joke. Bordreuil and Pardee, 2004, 47 and 179, tell us that it is an energic D-stem on the root *LŠY, meaning "avilir" which I think means "debase" and Pardee, 169, translates ylšn "knocks him over." The Arabic cognate would be لشى, meaning "destroy" or the like. I like this well enough and it does seem to fit the context better than some other understandings. Segert, 191, and many others going back at least to Gordon note Hebrew לוש, on a root, also known from Akkadian in lāšu, meaning "knead" as in "kneed dough." And "he kneads him in his feces and his urine" has a rather biological flavor to it. Then, one might just want to take the root of word as LŠN and understand ylšn as "he slanders him." But this has its own problems. By the way, it's not so clear what ngšnn in line 19 means either. See Ed Cook's post on this problem.
References
Pardee, Dennis, Ritual and Cult at Ugarit, Writings from the Ancient World, X, Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2002
Segert, Stanislav, A Basic Grammar of the Ugaritic Language with Selected Texts and Glossary, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984
Posted by Duane Smith at March 15, 2008 8:41 PM | Read more on Ugarit |
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telecomtally.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2441
Comments
Isn't it "Bull El" who has the horns and tail, and not Habayu? That seems a better reading to me. It doesn't really help with YL$N, though.
Whichever is the horned/tailed of the two, is there any characteristic thing that bulls do with urine and excrement? Kicking it at people or anything like that? It'd be worth looking into.
Posted by: Kevin P. Edgecomb at March 17, 2008 2:45 PM
Kevin,
Yeah, I've wonder about that myself. You may be correct. Pardee does seem to take it your way. But many translations are ambiguous at this point. Anyway you take it, there is a potential problem with the syntax. We know nothing of Habayu other than what is or isn't here. And we do know that El is a represented as a bull. But it never occurred to me that PZ would be El! Your question about bulls kicking or whatever urine and dunk is a good one. Not knowing that much about bulls I couldn't say, but I seem to remember one of Aesop's fables where a bull kicks dung in peoples faces. Can't find the reference. Perhaps it was an ass and not a bull.
Posted by: Duane at March 17, 2008 3:44 PM
I was thinking too, if there is perhaps a problem with YL$N. Perhaps it could be an error for YLB$N? This would be as likely: that Habayu is the dutiful slave cleaning up his master after a night on the town.
It takes some of the fun out of it, but it makes a ḫri-load more sense.
Posted by: Kevin P. Edgecomb at March 18, 2008 4:08 PM
Hmmm. You are right; this might provide an interesting (if not very exciting) solution. We know of at least one other missing letter in this text. I worry that the whole verbal scheme of the text needs to be worked through in some detail before one can be too certain of anything. Something is going on here but I'm not completely sure what it is. Pradee has done some of this work but I'm not altogether satisfied with the state of affairs.
By the way, I thought I fixed it so "span" would work in comments. It looks like I failed!
Posted by: Duane at March 18, 2008 7:40 PM
Yeah, that kind of blew my joke! I thought font would work. Pshaw!
Posted by: Kevin P. Edgecomb at March 18, 2008 7:57 PM
Maybe there is an allusion to the ingestion of monkeys/apes, which is a survival theme almost never publically discussed. There are linkages among all animals that hiss -- who has ever heard a cow hiss?
Posted by: M. L. Neil at March 25, 2008 6:56 PM
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.
Send me an email if it is important.