Ritual in Narrative: The Dynamics of Feasting, Mourning, and Retaliation Rites in the Ugaritic Tale of Aqhat.

AuthorParker, Simon B.
PositionReviews of Books

Ritual in Narrative: The Dynamics of Feasting, Mourning, and Retaliation Rites in the Ugaritic Tale of Aqhat. By DAVID P. WRIGHT. Winona Lake, Ind.: EISENBRAUNS, 2001. Pp. xii + 242. $37.50.

Ritual interpretations of Ugaritic narrative poems once had a prominent place in the critical literature. It was claimed by some that Baal and Aqhat in particular were recited as the verbal accompaniment of rituals or enacted as ritual dramas in a cultic context. Wright's book is not in this now largely discarded tradition. Rather, recognizing the pervasiveness of rituals among the actions performed by the characters in the story of Aqhat, the author raises the question why these rituals appear there. What is their function in the story? What is their role in the plot and in the characterization of the actors? Wright's aims are thus primarily literary and address a feature of the text that has not been directly or adequately addressed before. Further, recognizing the difficulty of interpreting the actual ritual texts from Ugarit (for which see Pardee 2000; Pardee forthcoming), Wright believes that the authors' portrayal of rituals, though serving their immediate narrative purposes, may also shed some light on how the people of Ugarit viewed their rituals, the roles of the gods in them, and their success or failure.

After reviewing various definitions of ritual, Wright opts for that of Catherine Bell (1992: 71), which focuses on what distinguishes ritual from ordinary, everyday activities in a given culture and on the ways in which it is privileged, especially by reference to transcendent powers. He then identifies twenty "ritual scenes or elements" in Aqhat, which fall into four categories: feasts, blessings, mourning rites, and retaliation rites. Wright examines each of these twenty units (in the order in which they occur in the story) in twenty chapters divided into four parts headed: Felicitous Feasts and Offerings (covering cols. I to V of the first tablet), Infelicitous Feasts and Offerings (tablet 1, col. VI to tablet 2, col. IV), Mourning and Retaliation (from the end of tablet 2, col. IV to tablet 3, col. IV, line 9), Renewal and Revenge (the rest). These titles adumbrate Wright's conclusions about the function of the rituals in different parts of the narrative. Most chapters follow a common pattern: presentatio n of text and translation, discussion of textual and philological problems, and discussion of the role of the ritual in its narrative...

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