Text of Lectures given at Religion and Society Seminar at Kellogg College, Oxford, January 2011
UGARIT AND ITS ECHOES IN THE BIBLE
The history of Ugarit is very short – from the invention of the script in c. 1500 BC to c. 1365 BC when we possess the last available document. Nevertheless, despite its brevity, the Tale of Aqhat throws a great deal of light on later Biblical texts. According to Francis Landy who translated the Tale of Aqhat: “In some ways the Bible, or at least that part of it known as the Old Testament, has been a great blocker of light. Its grandeur and authority, its canonical position in both the Jewish and Christian world, its acceptance as something absolutely unique and incomparable, have for long stood between the post-Biblical man and an awareness of his pre-biblical culture roots. One of the great achievements of modern Semitic studies has been to enable us to cross what Francis Landy calls “the other side of the ideological barrier of the Bible.”[1]
The Ugaritans who were Canaanites, though they speak to us from behind the biblical barrier, can now be seen to have inhabited a world that has all kinds of links with other ancient Middle Eastern cultures, not excepting that of the Israelites themselves.
THE TALE OF AQHAT
The Tale of Aqhat was found together with the other two epics, the Baal-Anat Cycle and the legend of Keret, in the library of the High Priest’s House, excavated in 1929. It was transcribed shortly before an earthquake destroyed half of Ugarit in 1365 BC.
The epic begins with the ritual Daniel undergoes to obtain a son, its success and his joy. The motif of the righteous man who is childless and granted a son by God is familiar from the Bible; one thinks of Abraham, Isaac and Samuel. The son miraculously conceived is ‘marked’ by divinity and is called the Son of God. The magical endowment of fertility initiates the dialectic of the poem. The subsequent bereavement makes the miracle ironic and cancels it out. The same pattern is to be found, in yet more terrible form, in the Sacrifice of Isaac, where the father is commanded to kill his own God-given son; or the miraculous birth of Christ and then his death and resurrection. Thus the question of theodicy is interwoven with that of death and fertility. It centers, however, round the figure of Aqhat himself.
Daniel, Aqhat’s future father, complains that he is getting old and has no son and pleads to El to give him a son:
‘Forlorn is Daniel, man of healing,
The valiant lord of Harnam grieves:
He has no son, child of his loins,
No root like his brothers, his kinsmen.
Let him not be without a son,
A root like his brothers, his kinsmen…[2]
El tells Daniel to go to his wife and promises him a son. The wife seems to have been made pregnant only as the result of Daniel touching her:
Daniel went to his bed, lay there,
Kissing his wife, caressing her;
Feverish she conceived,
Roused to the glow of conception,
To the heat of generation,
For the man of healing,
Lord of the Shades.
Thus was the house quick with a son,
A seed in the heart of the palace,…[3]
El now addresses the new born child, makes him the Son of God and gives him immortality
‘Wish, Aqhat, wish; life will I send you –
Ask, hero, ask; deathless I make you.
There you will number years with Baal,
Count seasons with the sons of God.
As Baal, when he returns to life,
A sweet voice plays, I tell you truly –
I offer noble Aqhat life for ever!’…[4]
The evil goddess Anat, however, becomes jealous and tries to destroy the son. When Aqhat is having his supper, she kills him. His death causes the whole world to mourn:
And now his murder blights the summer,
Fruits shrivel, and the sap grows sour,
The kernel in the unripe corn.’…
Now Daniel again goes to El, begging him to bring his son back to life. El answers his prayers and restores the son to life. On the third day Aqhat rises from the dead:
One day they ride, two days,
On the third day, at sunrise
El says: There is your son!..
Look at your hands!
See how your lips kiss the lost child!
Shoulder to shoulder brothers bustle,
Start up together, roused by El.
In El’s name, flesh forms, and the dead appear,
The valiant young men his Name’s blessing quickens![5]
Here one has both the element of an old man being given a son, the son being killed, and then being resurrected from death on the third day.
A study of this long line of religious beliefs in the Middle East shows that, far from being unique and exceptional, many Biblical stories are based on much older Mesopotamian and Egyptian sources. The history of religion reveals a gradual evolution of religious thought throughout the ages, with similar concepts being present in ancient texts that have been copied later and elaborated and put into new contexts.
If one believes in a divine and infallible source for one scripture, one should also believe the same for the others. However, this long record of borrowing and imitation does not mean that one should reject religion altogether. On the contrary, in the same way that great literary works have borrowed from older texts, and yet remain as sources of enlightenment and pleasure for successive generations, religious texts too are the by-products of man’s amazing imagination and creativity. They should be read not as unalterable divine texts, but as beautiful examples of man’s literary and artistic ingenuity and imagination, which might still have a great deal to teach us.
At the same time, this kind of reading of religious texts frees us from the obligation to have to accept superstitious and unscientific aspects of those texts that are no longer in keeping with our latest discoveries and scientific understanding of the world. Regarding religious texts not as infallible, but as literature, is liberating and unifying. We can read and enjoy the Vedas, the Gathas, the Upanishad, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Bible, the Gospels and the Koran, not as the word of God, but as great literary and poetic texts, without feeling that we have been unfaithful to the texts that we are more familiar with; in the same way that we can enjoy the poetry of Rumi, Dante, Goethe, Shakespeare and other great poets without feeling disloyal to any of them.
The great American poet, essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson made the following entry in his Journals on 13th March 1831:
The reason why I insist on this uniformity and universality of spiritual influence is because any other view that can be taken of the Holy Ghost is idolatrous. If it be received into the mind as a person and separated from God and God’s common operation, that moment the ideas of God received a wound in you. All that is added to the new power is taken from Him.[6]
The author of an essay on Transcendentalism in The Dial proclaimed: “Christ differs from other men only in degree, and the miracles he wrought differ from other men’s acts, only as he differs from them. He is to other religious teachers – to Moses, Zoroaster, Socrates, Confucius – what Shakespeare is to other poets.”[7]
In his essay appropriately entitled “Man Thinking”, Emerson wrote:
The man has never lived that can feed us ever. The human
mind cannot be enshrined in a person who shall set a barrier on any one side to
this unbounded, unboundable empire. It is one central fire, which flaming now
out of the lips of Etna, lightens the capes of Sicily; and now, out of the
throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one
light which beams out of thousand stars. It is one soul which illumines all
men.[8]
[1] Francis Landy, The Tale of Aqhat (The Menard Press, 1981), p 5.
[2] ibid, p 19
[3] ibid, p 20
[4] ibid, p 25
[5] ibid, p 40
[6] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, p 359
[7] The Dial: A Magazine for Philosophy, Literature and Religion, edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and George Ripley, Vol. 1, p 423
[8] The oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837, Nature; Addresses and Lectures (1849)
F Jahanpour 