The Rephaim: Sons of the Gods.

• Author: Smith, Mark S.

The Rephaim: Sons of the Gods. By JONATHAN YOGEV. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, vol. 121. Leiden: BRILL, 2021. Pp. xii + 216. $142.

Any comprehensive treatment of a topic as important as this one is welcome. At 216 pages, the treatment is taut. Following an introductory chapter of four pages, one chapter is devoted to each of the three West Semitic corpora containing references to the Rephaim (Ugaritic rp'u/rp'um, Phoenician-Punic rp'm. Biblical repd'im). A brief, final chapter closes the volume with some general conclusions. The four-page introductory chapter 1 notes that the nature of the Rephaim has been disputed for a long time. The discussion offers light reference to prior scholarship on the topic, largely with a summary list of views. Instead, the book is focused on the primary data. In an admirable interest to eschew preconceptions in the secondary literature, this study is largely inductive and decidedly philological. This work gleans from the evidence text by text, and along the way, it indulges in some questionable inferences and unsupported speculations. It also offers minimal literary and cultural consideration, especially on the genres containing the relevant information as well as the interrelations between these genres (though see p. 97 for some barebones claims on this score, discussed below). The claim is made that "arranged in the proper order, much of the complete picture is revealed" (p. 4). What "the proper order" is and why goes unstated. On the whole, this chapter lacks sufficient discussion about the book's procedure or methodological assumptions and perspective.

The one general point offered in the introductory chapter is that the Ugaritic and Phoenician sources depict the Rephaim positively while the biblical sources represent them negatively (see also p. 108). There are other general differences perhaps worth noting at the outset. For example, the scale of the Ugaritic material, with whole texts devoted to the Rephaim, is massive compared with the Phoenician and the biblical sources, with the biblical evidence often taking the form of scattered references. Also important, Phoenician is the only one of the three corpora lacking a Transjordanian tradition about the Rephaim. More such general considerations might have contributed to a stronger introductory framework.

Chapter 2 is devoted to the Ugaritic evidence, based on consultation of high-resolution images from the Inscriptifact Project of the University of Southern California; photos or drawings of the texts' alphabetic signs are not included. The Ugaritic texts initially examined for the rp'um are KTU 1.20-1.22 because "it is best to begin with the earliest texts that are attributed to them" (p. 7). This one sentence devoted to the methodological procedure at this chapter's outset is unclear. (Although the discussion moves on to the publication date of 1.20-1.22, the sentence would not appear to be a claim about the priority of publication, since the Baal Cycle, Kirta, and Aqhat with their references to the Rephaim were published prior to the publication of 1.20-1.22.) The order of the three tablets as well as their relationship to one another is covered well. These are attributed to the scribe llimilku, said to be a mid-fourteenth-century scribe (pp. 10, 175), although the date for this figure is now put by several scholars in the late thirteenth century.

The discussion notes that the rp'um in 1.20 I 2 are called 'ilnym, translated "divine ones" (p. 11), and in 1.20 II 9 they are identified as 'ilm, translated "gods" (p. 15); thus, they are divine. More ambiguous perhaps is mtmtm in 1.20 I 3, which may refer either to the "dead" or to "men." While the former has been preferred in several translations, the latter is adopted in this study, based on the reasoning that the rp'um eat and drink, and they are very mobile and active (p. 13). Yet the same activities also mark gods and goddesses in the Ugaritic texts. Thus, these activities are no indicator of living human figures. Instead, with the rp'um labeled as 'ilnym (and arguably 'ilm as well) in 1.20-1.22, the question to be asked is what sort of 'ilnym (and 'ilm) they are.

In a further bid to show the rp'um as humans, it is reckoned that Danilu rides along with them in 1.20 II (p. 17), but there is no evidence for this deduction. The same understanding of rp'um as living humans informs the claim that they are the referent of "son/s and grandson/s" (bn bn) in 1.22 I 2-3; this, too, is unclear. Based on these observations, the claim is made that the rp'um are both divine and human (p. 13), but there is no explicit evidence indicating the rp'um as human in these texts.

On another matter (e.g., p. 30), it is said that there "isn't sufficient evidence in Ugaritic to support" a view, but the very same may be said for the view of the rp'um as human. A minor point: it is claimed that tmn in 1.20 II 1 refers to the number of Rephaim as a group of "eight" (pp. 18, 37); they do constitute a group as suggested by the noun qbs in KTU 1.161.3 and 10, by phr qbs in 1.15 III 4 and 15, and by sd in 1.20 I 4 (as rightly noted by Yogev), but perhaps only eight rp'um in 1.20 II 1 are in view here compared with the four named in KTU 1.161.4-7. The idea that these texts show a coronation of Baal (pp. 37-38) is an understandably made speculation, based on the enthronement language in 1.21 II 17-18 and the introduction of Baal into the material in 1.22 I 25-26. Still, whether 1.21 II 17-18 refers to Baal...