Outside links:
"What's Ugaritic Got To Do With Anything?" Link here. This was "c. 2025" but o/w undated.
We recently placed what is, as far as we know, the first electronic digital library for the study of the Ugaritic language and its literature on our pre-Pub page.
Ugaritic, the language of ancient Ugarit (in modern Syria), isn’t something that most people think about when it comes to Bible study. However, the clay tablets discovered and deciphered in the late 1920s and early 1930s provide an unparalleled glimpse into the life and religious worldview of the ancient Israelites. [Israelits does not equal Jews.]
Some (including myself) would argue that they are as important as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Ugaritic is important because of the fact that its vocabulary is so close to biblical Hebrew — many Ugaritic words are letter-for-letter the same as biblical Hebrew.
It is the religion of Ugarit, however, that is especially important to Old Testament scholarship.
You might be thinking that all you really need to know about the religion of the Israelites is in the Bible. You’d only be partially correct in that thought. We are centuries removed from the world of the Bible, and a lot of material in the Bible is pretty obtuse to those of us in the 21st century. Those who wrote the Bible weren’t writing for a technological society, and so words, phrases, descriptions, and concepts that were completely familiar to an Israelite are lost on us. There’s also the matter of the kinds of ideas that were floating around in Israel from other religions—like Baal worship—that were being embraced by people who were supposed to be following the God of Israel. You have to wonder why, to paraphrase Elijah (1 Kings 18:21), Israel kept halting between two opinions as to who was the true God.
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The Book
Author: assistant professor of religion at Trinity College and the editor of the Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions. Trinity College, Hartford, CT.
This is going to be very "heavy reading" for me.
From the internet: The Israelites were a group of people who spoke Hebrew and lived in the land of Canaan during the Iron Age. They were the first followers of Judaism and the founders of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
Wow, this book dovetails with Who Really Wrote The [Hebrew] Bible: The Story of the Scribes, which I'm reading at the same time, link here.
The question the author will explore in this book, from the preface, page xi:
If Arameans wrote Aramaic, Phoenicians wrote Phoenician, Hebrews wrote Hebrew, and the like, what were people in Israel doing with all this Babylonian [cuneiform]?
From wiki: The Arameans, or Aramaeans (Hebrew, Ancient Greek, Classical Syriac; Aramaye) were a tribal Semitic people in the ancient Near East, first documented in historical sources from the late 12th century BC. Their homeland, often referred to as the land of Aram, originally covered central regions of modern Syria. So, when one "hears" Aramaic, they're talking Syria.
And now it all comes together, the interest in Assyrian. Assyria had many different periods of highs and lows, beginning with central Iraq and at various times extended east to the Hittite empire and west to include Egypt. Eventually, 7th century, conquered by Babylonia (Nebuchadnezzar, 605 - 562 BC -- ruled for 43 years).
One of several "big groups": Syrian, Assyrian, Hebrew / Israeli, Phoenician, Babylonian.
So, rough timeline????
Egypt / Phoenician --> Assyria --> Babylon. Concurrently, Canaan / Israelites.
Preface
Author had been invited to Hebrew University to help edit "the corpus of cuneiform in Canaan." Project to write "from Israel outside the Bible." What was the relationship between speaking and writing. Unlike other writing, the Bible for over 2,000 years seemed to be talking directly to the people who read it. The Bible was for the public. All other writing in Near Eastern texts was for scribes, courts, and kings.
Introduction
The Bible: unlike other writing at the time. It seemed to "speak to people" like nothing else had ever done before.
Chapter 1
Modernity's Ghosts: The Bible as Political Communication
Thesis: Bible criticism -- text seen as text. In fact, the author argues, early criticism lost sight of what the texts were about; to whom were they addressed; what was their purpose?
Accounts of biblical scholarship begin with fundamental assumptions already in place -- they narrate the fragmentation of the text into sources, initiated in the 18th century and developed in the 19th century. Very interesting.
This author / this text: the question of what Hebrew and early Hebrew texts were for.
The discovery of the non-modern -- p. 14.
Chapter 2
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