Ugarit and the Ras Shamra Tablets

On the coast of northern Syria, a short distance from the Mediterranean and some ten kilometres north of the modern city of Latakia, rises the mound of Ras Shamra, the “cape of fennel”. Beneath it lie the remains of Ugarit, a wealthy port city and the capital of a small kingdom that flourished in the Late Bronze Age and was destroyed around 1185 BCE. Since 1929 French and later Franco-Syrian expeditions have excavated there, and they have recovered several thousand clay tablets written in a variety of languages and scripts. Among them are texts in a previously unknown language, Ugaritic, written in an alphabet of cuneiform signs, which preserve mythological and epic poems, rituals, letters and records of the city’s life.¹²

The discovery of Ugarit transformed the study of the Hebrew Bible. Before 1929 the religion of the Canaanites was known almost entirely from the hostile descriptions of the biblical writers and from a few late Greek sources. The Ugaritic texts provided, for the first time, a direct witness to the gods, myths and poetry of a Semitic people of the Levant several centuries before the earliest biblical writings. They revealed a language closely related to Hebrew, a poetic tradition with many of the same forms and images as biblical poetry, and a pantheon whose members, El, Baal, Asherah, Anat, Yam and Mot, appear in the Bible in various guises. For nearly a century they have been used to illuminate obscure words and passages in the Hebrew text and to place the religion of Israel within its wider setting.³⁴

This article describes the discovery and excavation of the city, the history of Ugarit, the decipherment of its alphabet, the principal literary texts, and the ways in which these texts have been used in the study of the Hebrew Bible. It does not attempt to retell the history of every comparison that has been made, but to set out the main areas in which the Ugaritic evidence has proved significant and the cautions that scholars have come to observe in using it.

Discovery and Excavation

In the spring of 1928 a farmer ploughing his field near the bay of Minet el-Beida, on the Syrian coast, struck a stone slab which proved to cover a vaulted tomb. The region was then under French mandate, and the discovery was reported to the antiquities service, then directed by Charles Virolleaud, which sent the archaeologist Léon Albanèse to examine it. The tomb was found to contain Mycenaean and Cypriot pottery, indicating that it belonged to a Bronze Age settlement with wide commercial connections. In 1929 an expedition under Claude Schaeffer began to excavate at Minet el-Beida and at the large tell of Ras Shamra nearby, which was soon recognised as the site of the city to which the harbour had belonged.⁵⁶

Within weeks of the start of the excavation at Ras Shamra, the expedition discovered clay tablets in a building near the city’s two great temples. Some were written in the Akkadian cuneiform script familiar from Mesopotamia, but others bore a script of a few dozen simple signs, which had not been seen before. Texts in Akkadian found at the site, and the evidence of the archives of Tell el-Amarna in Egypt and of Hittite documents, made it possible to identify the city as Ugarit, known from those sources as a kingdom of the Levantine coast.⁷⁸

Schaeffer directed the excavations, with interruptions during the Second World War, until 1970, and they were continued by a series of French directors, including Jean Margueron, Marguerite Yon and Yves Calvet, latterly in collaboration with Syrian archaeologists. The excavations uncovered the royal palace, a large residential quarter, temples of Baal and of another god identified by many as Dagan, the houses of officials and priests, and tombs beneath many of the houses. Excavations at the nearby site of Ras Ibn Hani, on a promontory to the south, uncovered a second palace and further tablets. Work at the site was interrupted after 2011 by the civil war in Syria.⁹¹⁰

The tablets were found not in a single library but in many buildings across the city. Important groups came from the royal palace, which had several archive rooms, from the house of the high priest near the temple of Baal, where many of the literary texts were kept, and from private houses belonging to men such as Rapanu and Urtenu, who were involved in diplomacy and trade. From the 1970s onwards, work in the house of Urtenu, in the south of the city, produced a large group of letters and administrative texts, showing that much remains to be found.¹¹¹²

The City and Its History

Ugarit was occupied from the Neolithic period, and its history as a city reaches back to the third millennium. It is mentioned in texts from the archives of Ebla and Mari, but its period of greatest prosperity came in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE, when it was ruled by a dynasty of local kings. The kingdom controlled a fertile coastal plain and the hills behind it, and its harbour gave it a central place in the trade between Egypt, the Hittite lands of Anatolia, Cyprus, the Aegean and Mesopotamia.¹³¹⁴

Politically, Ugarit lay between the great powers of the time. In the fourteenth century it was within the Egyptian sphere, and letters from its kings were found in the archives at Tell el-Amarna. Later in the century, under king Niqmaddu II, it became a vassal of the Hittite empire, and treaties and legal decisions issued by the Hittite kings and their viceroys at Carchemish were found in the palace archives. Despite this subordination, the kingdom remained rich and cosmopolitan, with a population that included speakers of Ugaritic, Hurrian and Akkadian, and merchants from many lands.¹⁵¹⁶

The end of Ugarit came in the early twelfth century BCE, during the widespread collapse of the Late Bronze Age states of the eastern Mediterranean. Letters from the last years of the city refer to enemy ships and to the danger from the sea, and the last king, Ammurapi, appears in correspondence with the king of Cyprus and the Hittite viceroy concerning the threat. The city was destroyed by fire around 1185 BCE and was never rebuilt, which is why the tablets in its buildings remained in place to be recovered by the excavators. The destruction is generally associated with the movements of the groups known from Egyptian sources as the Sea Peoples, though the causes of the general collapse were complex.¹⁷¹⁸

The Alphabetic Cuneiform Script

The new script of Ugarit consisted of thirty signs, each made of a few wedges impressed in clay with a stylus, in the manner of Mesopotamian cuneiform, but representing individual consonants rather than syllables or words. Its decipherment was achieved in 1930 with remarkable speed. The German scholar Hans Bauer, working from published copies, assumed that the language was Semitic and identified a number of signs by analysing the likely forms of prepositions and words. The French scholars Édouard Dhorme and Charles Virolleaud independently made progress at the same time, and their combined work resolved the script within a year.¹⁹²⁰

The script is an alphabet in the strict sense of representing consonants only, except that three of its signs represent the glottal stop ʾ combined with the vowels a, i and u, which provides some information about vocalisation. The language it records had more consonants than Hebrew, retaining distinctions between sounds which in Hebrew had merged. Ugaritic was written from left to right, unlike the Phoenician and Hebrew linear alphabets, which were written from right to left, and words were divided by a small vertical wedge.²¹²²

In 1949 the excavators found a small tablet bearing the signs of the alphabet in their traditional order. This abecedary showed that the order of the Ugaritic letters corresponded closely to the order of the Phoenician and Hebrew alphabets, with the additional letters placed at intervals and at the end. Another tablet, found later, lists the letters in a different order corresponding to the South Arabian alphabet. These texts demonstrated that the alphabetic order known from Hebrew already existed in the Late Bronze Age, and that the Ugaritic alphabet, though written with wedges, belonged to the same family as the linear alphabets from which the Hebrew script descended.²³²⁴

The Languages of Ugarit

Ugaritic is a North-West Semitic language, belonging to the same broad group as Hebrew, Phoenician, Aramaic and Moabite. Its precise classification has been debated: some scholars regard it as an early member of the Canaanite branch to which Hebrew and Phoenician belong, while others treat it as a separate branch of North-West Semitic. Its vocabulary, grammar and verbal system show many correspondences with biblical Hebrew, and its preservation in texts several centuries older than the earliest Hebrew writings makes it invaluable for the history of the Semitic languages.²⁵²⁶

Alongside Ugaritic, the scribes of the city wrote Akkadian, the international language of diplomacy and law, and many of the legal and diplomatic documents found there are in Akkadian. They also copied Sumerian and Akkadian literary and lexical texts, including multilingual word lists in which Sumerian, Akkadian, Hurrian and Ugaritic equivalents were given in parallel columns. These lists provide information about the vocalisation of Ugaritic words that the consonantal script does not indicate. Texts were also found in Hurrian, sometimes written in the alphabetic script, in Hittite and Luwian, in Egyptian hieroglyphs and in the Cypro-Minoan script of Cyprus.²⁷²⁸

The Literary Texts

The best known of the Ugaritic texts are a group of long poetic compositions found mainly in the house of the high priest. Several of these tablets bear a colophon naming the scribe Ilimilku, who describes himself as a pupil of the chief priest Attenu and who worked in the reign of king Niqmaddu, probably Niqmaddu II in the fourteenth century. The colophons suggest that the poems were copied from an older oral or written tradition, and they are among the earliest substantial narrative poems in any West Semitic language.²⁹³⁰³¹

The longest is the Baal Cycle, preserved on six tablets, which recounts the conflicts of the storm god Baal with Yam, the god of the sea, and with Mot, the god of death. With the help of his sister Anat, Baal defeats Yam, obtains permission from El, the head of the pantheon, to build a palace, and then descends into the underworld, where he is swallowed by Mot. In his absence the land withers, until Anat defeats Mot and Baal returns to life. The cycle explores the kingship of Baal among the gods and the relationship between fertility, rain and the forces of death.³²³³

The epic of Kirta, preserved on three tablets, tells of a king who loses his family, is instructed by El in a dream to seek a new wife by military expedition, and later falls ill and nearly loses his throne. The epic of Aqhat, also on three tablets, tells of a righteous ruler named Dan’el who receives a son, Aqhat, through divine favour, and of the death of Aqhat at the instigation of the goddess Anat, who desires the bow given to him by the craftsman god. These poems combine royal ideology with reflection on mortality, succession and the favour of the gods.³⁴³⁵

Besides these major poems, the literary texts include shorter mythological compositions, such as the poem on the birth of the gracious gods, the text describing the marriage of the moon god Yarikh and the goddess Nikkal, and the texts concerning the Rephaim, the deified dead. The ritual texts include lists of offerings, prescriptions for sacrifices and festivals, incantations against snakebite, and lists of the gods, which allow the structure of the pantheon to be reconstructed.³⁶³⁷

The Gods of Ugarit

The head of the pantheon of Ugarit was El, called the father of the gods and of humanity, the creator of creatures, the eternal king and the bull. He was presented as wise, aged and kindly, presiding over the divine assembly from his dwelling at the source of the rivers. His consort was Athirat, the mother of the gods, whose name corresponds to the Asherah of the Hebrew Bible. The most active god in the myths was Baal, the storm god, also called Haddu, the rider of the clouds, whose voice was the thunder and who brought the rain on which agriculture depended.³⁸³⁹⁴⁰

Among the other deities were Anat, the warlike sister of Baal; Yam, the sea; Mot, death; Shapsh, the sun goddess; Athtar; Resheph; and Kothar-wa-Khasis, the craftsman god. The assembly of the gods, called the sons of El, appears frequently in the texts. Many of these names and concepts appear in the Hebrew Bible, sometimes as rivals of Yahweh condemned by the prophets, sometimes as poetic images or as words whose divine connotations had faded.⁴¹⁴²

Ugarit and the Hebrew Bible

From the first publication of the literary texts in the 1930s, scholars recognised numerous parallels with the Hebrew Bible. The most striking concern the language of poetry. Like biblical poetry, Ugaritic poetry is composed in parallel lines, in which a second line restates, completes or contrasts with the first, and it makes extensive use of fixed pairs of words, such as “heaven” and “earth” or “silver” and “gold”, which appear in parallel in both traditions. The recognition of this shared poetic tradition has helped scholars to analyse the structure of biblical poems and to understand unusual word pairs.⁴³⁴⁴⁴⁵

A second area concerns the description of the divine. The Baal Cycle describes the defeat of Litan, the fleeing serpent, the twisting serpent, the mighty one with seven heads. Isaiah 27:1 speaks of Leviathan, the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, in nearly identical language. The image of the god who rides on the clouds, applied to Baal in the Ugaritic texts, is applied to Yahweh in Psalm 68:4. The conflict of the storm god with the sea, Yam, corresponds to biblical passages in which Yahweh rebukes or divides the sea, as in Psalm 74:13–14 and Job 26:12. Such parallels suggest that Israelite poets drew on a common stock of Levantine religious imagery, adapting it to their own god.⁴⁶⁴⁷⁴⁸

The figure of El has received particular attention. In the Bible, El is both a generic word for “god” and a name for the God of Israel, as in the patriarchal names El Shaddai, El Elyon and El Olam. The Ugaritic portrayal of El as the aged and wise king who presides over the divine council resembles biblical scenes such as Psalm 82, in which God stands in the council of the gods, and Daniel 7, where the Ancient of Days is enthroned. Frank Moore Cross argued in 1973 that early Israelite religion identified Yahweh with El, while taking on features of Baal as divine warrior, and that much of the imagery of biblical poetry can be traced to this dual inheritance.⁴⁹⁵⁰

The name Dan’el in the epic of Aqhat has been compared with the Daniel mentioned in Ezekiel 14:14 and 28:3 together with Noah and Job as an example of righteousness. Since the Daniel of the later biblical book lived in the Babylonian exile and would be an unlikely companion of Noah and Job, many scholars have suggested that Ezekiel refers to an ancient figure of Levantine tradition, like the Dan’el of Ugarit. The Rephaim of the Ugaritic texts, the deified dead, have been compared with the biblical Rephaim, who are both an ancient people and the shades of the underworld.⁵¹⁵²

The Ugaritic texts also illuminate Israelite religious practice. The ritual texts describe sacrifices with terms similar to those of the Hebrew Bible, including offerings called by names corresponding to the Hebrew šelamim and the whole burnt offering. The texts show that a temple cult with priests, offerings and festivals existed in the Levant long before the temple of Jerusalem. At the same time, there are differences, and the Ugaritic system cannot simply be read into the Bible.⁵³⁵⁴

Ugaritic and the Hebrew Lexicon

One of the most fruitful uses of the Ugaritic texts has been in the study of the Hebrew vocabulary. Many rare words in the Hebrew Bible, whose meaning was uncertain or which the ancient versions had translated in different ways, appear in Ugaritic in contexts that clarify their sense. In some cases, Hebrew words that had been understood in one way have been shown to have a second meaning, derived from a different root that had merged with the first in Hebrew but remained distinct in Ugaritic.⁵⁵⁵⁶

The most ambitious application of this method was the commentary on the Psalms by Mitchell Dahood, published in three volumes of the Anchor Bible between 1966 and 1970. Dahood proposed hundreds of new interpretations of the Hebrew text based on Ugaritic parallels, often re-dividing words, re-pointing vowels or giving familiar words unfamiliar meanings. Some of his suggestions have been accepted, but many were criticised as speculative, and his work became a cautionary example of the dangers of relying on parallels without sufficient attention to the Hebrew context and the Masoretic tradition.⁵⁷⁵⁸

Later scholars, such as Peter Craigie, Mark Smith and Dennis Pardee, have emphasised a more cautious approach, recognising the value of the Ugaritic evidence while also stressing that Ugarit was separated from Israel by centuries and by geography, and that it was not identical to the Canaanite culture that the Israelites encountered. The Ugaritic texts are best understood as evidence for the wider cultural world of the Levant, of which Israel later formed a part, rather than as a direct portrait of the religion that the biblical writers opposed.⁵⁹⁶⁰⁶¹

Ugarit and the Later Inscriptions of the Levant

The Ugaritic texts belong to the Late Bronze Age, and between them and the earliest Hebrew inscriptions lies a gap of several centuries, during which the linear alphabet replaced the cuneiform alphabet of Ugarit. Later inscriptions in the linear alphabet show the continuation of some of the same traditions. The inscription from Deir Alla in the Jordan Valley, for example, uses religious vocabulary that resonates with the Ugaritic texts, though its own content and context are treated in the article devoted to it on this site. The inscriptions from Kuntillet ʿAjrud, with their references to asherah and to El and Baal in a theophany, show the survival of Bronze Age religious imagery into the Iron Age.⁶²⁶³

The history of writing in the Levant also links Ugarit with the Hebrew tradition. The alphabetic order known from the Ugaritic abecedary reappears in the Hebrew alphabet and in the acrostic poems of the Bible, and the early linear alphabet, from which the Phoenician and Hebrew scripts developed, was already in use in the Late Bronze Age alongside the cuneiform alphabet of Ugarit. The two traditions represent different ways of writing the same principle, the representation of consonants by individual signs.⁶⁴⁶⁵

The Editions of the Texts

The Ugaritic texts were first published by Virolleaud in a series of articles and volumes, and later by other members of the French mission. In 1963 Andrée Herdner published a corpus of the alphabetic texts found up to 1939. The standard edition is now The Cuneiform Alphabetic Texts from Ugarit, Ras Ibn Hani and Other Places, known by the abbreviation KTU, prepared by Manfried Dietrich, Oswald Loretz and Joaquín Sanmartín, first published in 1976 and issued in a third edition in 2013. The texts are cited by the numbers assigned in this corpus.⁶⁶⁶⁷

Translations of the literary texts into English have been made by many scholars, including the collection edited by Simon Parker in 1997 and the translation of the religious texts by Nicolas Wyatt in 2002. The Handbook of Ugaritic Studies, edited by Wilfred Watson and Nicolas Wyatt in 1999, provides a comprehensive survey of the field. Grammars by Daniel Sivan, Josef Tropper and John Huehnergard, and the dictionary of Gregorio del Olmo Lete and Joaquín Sanmartín, have made the language accessible to students of the Hebrew Bible.^68697071

Significance for the Study of the Bible

The discovery of Ugarit has given the study of the Hebrew Bible a body of comparative evidence from the Levant itself. Its texts have enabled scholars to understand the poetic techniques of biblical poetry, to identify mythological images and allusions in the Bible, to clarify the meanings of rare Hebrew words, and to place the religion of Israel within the religious history of the region. They have shown that the God of Israel was described in language that had long been used of El and Baal, and that the struggle of the biblical writers against the worship of Baal and Asherah took place within a shared cultural world.⁷²⁷³⁷⁴

For the history of the Hebrew text, the Ugaritic evidence has also been a test of method. Proposals to emend the Masoretic Text on the basis of Ugaritic parallels have been numerous, and the more extreme of them have been rejected. The experience has reinforced the value of the Masoretic tradition as a carefully preserved witness, while showing that the Hebrew language of the Bible had a history that can be illuminated by its older relatives. The Ugaritic texts do not replace the evidence of the Hebrew manuscripts, but they help to explain features of the text that the Masoretes preserved without fully understanding.⁷⁵⁷⁶

Conclusion

Ugarit was a Bronze Age port city destroyed more than three thousand years ago, long before the kingdom of Israel existed. Yet its ruins have preserved a library of texts that has changed the understanding of the Hebrew Bible. The thirty-letter cuneiform alphabet, the myths of Baal, Yam and Mot, the epics of Kirta and Aqhat, and the ritual and administrative texts give a view of the religion and poetry of the Levant that the Bible itself could not provide. Read with care, and with due attention to the distance in time and place between Ugarit and Israel, they remain one of the most important resources for understanding the language, imagery and religious world from which the Hebrew Bible emerged.⁷⁷⁷⁸⁷⁹

Notes

1. Marguerite Yon, The City of Ugarit at Tell Ras Shamra (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2006). ↩
2. Wilfred G. E. Watson and Nicolas Wyatt (eds), Handbook of Ugaritic Studies (Leiden: Brill, 1999). ↩
3. Peter C. Craigie, Ugarit and the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983). ↩
4. Mark S. Smith, Untold Stories: The Bible and Ugaritic Studies in the Twentieth Century (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2001). ↩
5. Marguerite Yon, The City of Ugarit at Tell Ras Shamra (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2006). ↩
6. Wilfred G. E. Watson and Nicolas Wyatt (eds), Handbook of Ugaritic Studies (Leiden: Brill, 1999). ↩
7. Marguerite Yon, The City of Ugarit at Tell Ras Shamra (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2006). ↩
8. Itamar Singer, “A Political History of Ugarit”, in Watson and Wyatt (eds), Handbook of Ugaritic Studies (1999). ↩
9. Marguerite Yon, The City of Ugarit at Tell Ras Shamra (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2006). ↩
10. Manfried Dietrich, Oswald Loretz and Joaquín Sanmartín, The Cuneiform Alphabetic Texts from Ugarit, Ras Ibn Hani and Other Places (KTU), 3rd edn (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2013). ↩
11. Marguerite Yon, The City of Ugarit at Tell Ras Shamra (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2006). ↩
12. Dennis Pardee, The Ugaritic Texts and the Origins of West-Semitic Literary Composition, Schweich Lectures 2007 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2012). ↩
13. Marguerite Yon, The City of Ugarit at Tell Ras Shamra (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2006). ↩
14. Itamar Singer, “A Political History of Ugarit”, in Watson and Wyatt (eds), Handbook of Ugaritic Studies (1999). ↩
15. Itamar Singer, “A Political History of Ugarit”, in Watson and Wyatt (eds), Handbook of Ugaritic Studies (1999). ↩
16. Wilfred G. E. Watson and Nicolas Wyatt (eds), Handbook of Ugaritic Studies (Leiden: Brill, 1999). ↩
17. Marguerite Yon, The City of Ugarit at Tell Ras Shamra (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2006). ↩
18. Itamar Singer, “A Political History of Ugarit”, in Watson and Wyatt (eds), Handbook of Ugaritic Studies (1999). ↩
19. Wilfred G. E. Watson and Nicolas Wyatt (eds), Handbook of Ugaritic Studies (Leiden: Brill, 1999). ↩
20. John Huehnergard, An Introduction to Ugaritic (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2012); Daniel Sivan, A Grammar of the Ugaritic Language (Leiden: Brill, 1997). ↩
21. John Huehnergard, An Introduction to Ugaritic (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2012); Daniel Sivan, A Grammar of the Ugaritic Language (Leiden: Brill, 1997). ↩
22. Gregorio del Olmo Lete and Joaquín Sanmartín, A Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition, trans. W. G. E. Watson, 3rd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2015). ↩
23. John Huehnergard, An Introduction to Ugaritic (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2012); Daniel Sivan, A Grammar of the Ugaritic Language (Leiden: Brill, 1997). ↩
24. Grokipedia, “Paleo-Hebrew alphabet”; The Masoretes, “The Alphabet”; The Masoretes, “Hebrew and Aramaic”. ↩
25. John Huehnergard, An Introduction to Ugaritic (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2012); Daniel Sivan, A Grammar of the Ugaritic Language (Leiden: Brill, 1997). ↩
26. Wilfred G. E. Watson and Nicolas Wyatt (eds), Handbook of Ugaritic Studies (Leiden: Brill, 1999). ↩
27. Wilfred G. E. Watson and Nicolas Wyatt (eds), Handbook of Ugaritic Studies (Leiden: Brill, 1999). ↩
28. Dennis Pardee, The Ugaritic Texts and the Origins of West-Semitic Literary Composition, Schweich Lectures 2007 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2012). ↩
29. Dennis Pardee, The Ugaritic Texts and the Origins of West-Semitic Literary Composition, Schweich Lectures 2007 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2012). ↩
30. Simon B. Parker (ed.), Ugaritic Narrative Poetry (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997). ↩
31. Nicolas Wyatt, Religious Texts from Ugarit, 2nd edn (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002). ↩
32. Mark S. Smith, The Ugaritic Baal Cycle, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1994); Mark S. Smith and Wayne T. Pitard, The Ugaritic Baal Cycle, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2009). ↩
33. Nicolas Wyatt, Religious Texts from Ugarit, 2nd edn (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002). ↩
34. Simon B. Parker (ed.), Ugaritic Narrative Poetry (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997). ↩
35. Nicolas Wyatt, Religious Texts from Ugarit, 2nd edn (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002). ↩
36. Nicolas Wyatt, Religious Texts from Ugarit, 2nd edn (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002). ↩
37. Manfried Dietrich, Oswald Loretz and Joaquín Sanmartín, The Cuneiform Alphabetic Texts from Ugarit, Ras Ibn Hani and Other Places (KTU), 3rd edn (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2013). ↩
38. John Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000). ↩
39. Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973). ↩
40. Grokipedia, “Baal”; Grokipedia, “Yahweh”. ↩
41. John Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000). ↩
42. Nicolas Wyatt, Religious Texts from Ugarit, 2nd edn (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002). ↩
43. Peter C. Craigie, Ugarit and the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983). ↩
44. Mark S. Smith, Untold Stories: The Bible and Ugaritic Studies in the Twentieth Century (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2001). ↩
45. The Masoretes, “The Poetic Accents”; The Masoretes, “The Psalms Scroll from Cave 11”. ↩
46. John Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000). ↩
47. Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973). ↩
48. Grokipedia, “Baal”; Grokipedia, “Yahweh”. ↩
49. Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973). ↩
50. John Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000). ↩
51. John Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000). ↩
52. Peter C. Craigie, Ugarit and the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983). ↩
53. Nicolas Wyatt, Religious Texts from Ugarit, 2nd edn (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002). ↩
54. Peter C. Craigie, Ugarit and the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983). ↩
55. Gregorio del Olmo Lete and Joaquín Sanmartín, A Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition, trans. W. G. E. Watson, 3rd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2015). ↩
56. John Huehnergard, An Introduction to Ugaritic (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2012); Daniel Sivan, A Grammar of the Ugaritic Language (Leiden: Brill, 1997). ↩
57. Mitchell Dahood, Psalms, Anchor Bible 16–17A, 3 vols (Garden City: Doubleday, 1966–1970). ↩
58. Mark S. Smith, Untold Stories: The Bible and Ugaritic Studies in the Twentieth Century (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2001). ↩
59. Peter C. Craigie, Ugarit and the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983). ↩
60. Mark S. Smith, Untold Stories: The Bible and Ugaritic Studies in the Twentieth Century (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2001). ↩
61. Dennis Pardee, The Ugaritic Texts and the Origins of West-Semitic Literary Composition, Schweich Lectures 2007 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2012). ↩
62. The Masoretes, “The Deir Alla Inscription and the Balaam Text outside the Bible”. ↩
63. The Masoretes, “Kuntillet Ajrud and the Blessings of Yahweh and His Asherah”; The Masoretes, “The Khirbet Qeiyafa Ostracon, the Gezer Calendar and the Earliest Hebrew Writing”. ↩
64. Grokipedia, “Paleo-Hebrew alphabet”; The Masoretes, “The Alphabet”; The Masoretes, “Hebrew and Aramaic”. ↩
65. The Masoretes, “Kuntillet Ajrud and the Blessings of Yahweh and His Asherah”; The Masoretes, “The Khirbet Qeiyafa Ostracon, the Gezer Calendar and the Earliest Hebrew Writing”. ↩
66. Manfried Dietrich, Oswald Loretz and Joaquín Sanmartín, The Cuneiform Alphabetic Texts from Ugarit, Ras Ibn Hani and Other Places (KTU), 3rd edn (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2013). ↩
67. Wilfred G. E. Watson and Nicolas Wyatt (eds), Handbook of Ugaritic Studies (Leiden: Brill, 1999). ↩
68. Simon B. Parker (ed.), Ugaritic Narrative Poetry (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997). ↩
69. Nicolas Wyatt, Religious Texts from Ugarit, 2nd edn (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002). ↩
70. John Huehnergard, An Introduction to Ugaritic (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2012); Daniel Sivan, A Grammar of the Ugaritic Language (Leiden: Brill, 1997). ↩
71. Gregorio del Olmo Lete and Joaquín Sanmartín, A Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition, trans. W. G. E. Watson, 3rd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2015). ↩
72. Peter C. Craigie, Ugarit and the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983). ↩
73. John Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000). ↩
74. Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973). ↩
75. Mitchell Dahood, Psalms, Anchor Bible 16–17A, 3 vols (Garden City: Doubleday, 1966–1970). ↩
76. Mark S. Smith, Untold Stories: The Bible and Ugaritic Studies in the Twentieth Century (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2001). ↩
77. Marguerite Yon, The City of Ugarit at Tell Ras Shamra (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2006). ↩
78. Dennis Pardee, The Ugaritic Texts and the Origins of West-Semitic Literary Composition, Schweich Lectures 2007 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2012). ↩
79. Peter C. Craigie, Ugarit and the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983). ↩