Literary Composition in the Hebrew Bible: The View from Ugarit

This chapter illustrates the similarities that exist between the data from Ugarit and the next principal literary corpus, that to be found in the Hebrew Bible. The emphasis is not on the theology or the theological politics of the two corpora, but on their literary qualities. It stresses two aspects of the Ugaritic‐Hebrew parallels: first, the points of resemblance between the two corpora in the aesthetics of poetic structure and imagery; and, second, the evolution visible in the Hebrew Bible in the areas of literary genre, subject matter, and life setting of individual poems or collections of poems. The perspective is not that of a biblical scholar, but that of someone who has spent much of his career attempting to elucidate Ugaritic texts from the epigraphic and philological perspectives.

Alphabetic Origins

This chapter lays out the peculiarities of the Ugaritic language and hence of its peculiar contributions to our knowledge of the history of culture. It discusses the nature of the language and its place within the languages of the ancient Near East, the nature of the writing system, and the nature of the Ugaritic texts that have been preserved.

Ugaritic Literary Composition

Chapter 1 attempted a rough sketch of the uses of writing at Ugarit and, particularly, of the types of texts that are attested in the alphabetic script and the Ugaritic language. It showed that of the roughly 175 religious texts, only about fifty may be qualified as belletristic; virtually all of these are couched in poetry and all deal with aspects of the divine. It would be impossible to cover all of these texts even superficially in the space allotted, and, instead of flitting from one to another in a selection of these texts, this chapter concentrates on the longest literary composition from Ugarit, the six tablets making up the so-called Baal Cycle.