Studies in Hebrew and Ugaritic Psalms.

• Author: Pope, Marvin H.

This volume, dedicated to the memory of the author's mentor, Samuel E. Loewenstarnm, is a revised and enlarged version of a study first presented in Hebrew in 1989 concerning triplet words in the Bible and in ancient Semitic literature.

The introductory survey begins with H. Gunkel, who first compared biblical psalms with other poems in the ancient Near East. It then moves quickly to the relevance of the Ugaritic poetic texts for the study of biblical psalmody. T. H. Gaster and H. L. Ginsberg were the first to note and appreciate the affinities between Ugaritic poetry and biblical psalmody, particularly in Psalm 29. Thereafter no informed study of biblical poetry in general and Psalms in particular could be done without regard to Ugaritic prosody. W. E Albright, who had long been interested in early biblical poetry, called attention to striking similarities between Ugaritic poetry and the Songs of Miriam and Deborah, the Blessing of Moses, and Psalms 29 and 68, as well as Habakkuk 3. In his treatment of Psalm 68 Albright stressed the revolutionary relevance of the new Ugaritic materials, noting that fully half of the unique words in this psalm may be elucidated from Ugaritic. This psalm Albright perceived as a catalogue of thirty poems adapted from Canaanite literature between the thirteenth and tenth centuries. Albright's 1941-42 seminar on Psalms motivated J.H. Patron's study, Canaanite Parallels in the Book of Psalms (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1944), and the Anchor Bible commentary by M. Dahood (Psalms, vols. 1-3 [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965, 1968, 1970]), of which Albright opined that "even if only a third of his new interpretations of the Psalter are correct in principle - and I should put the total proportion higher - he has contributed more than all other scholars together, over the past two thousand years, to the elucidation of the Psalter" ("Some Excavation Reports and Syntheses" BASOR 186 [1967]: 54).

Avishur in his introduction also reviews major investigations of biblical psalms in light of Ugaritic up to the time of his writing, and in two parts (each containing three chapters), he goes into more detail. In part one, he reconsiders Psalm 29, Habakkuk 3, and presumed quotations of ancient hymns with affinities to Canaanite literature in later Psalms (Pss. 74:13-17, 77:14-21, 89:6-15, 92:9-10).

Part two deals with Ugaritic Psalms and Prayers. The first chapter treats KTU 1.119, the poignant prayer to Ba l when...