Ugarit and the Bible: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Ugarit and the Bible, Manchester, September 1992.

• Author: Pardee, Dennis

The proceedings of this conference, organized by members of the Departments of Religions and Theology and of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Manchester, have been edited and published with admirable speed.

This review will concern chiefly the following eight papers: "The Psalms Since Dahood," by Adrian H. W. Curtis (pp. 1-10); "Ugarit and the Bible: Do They Presuppose the Same Canaanite Mythology and Religion?" by John Day (pp. 35-52); "The Kingship of Yahweh Against Its Canaanite Background," by J. C. L. Gibson (pp. 101-12); "'Canaanite': Some Methodological Observations in Relation to Biblical Study," by Lester L. Grabbe (pp. 113-22); "The Less Inspired Scriptures," by M. E. J. Richardson (pp. 275-91); "Mythology and Myth-Making in Ugaritic and Israelite Literatures," by Mark S. Smith (pp. 293-341); "Is Ugaritic A Canaanite Language?," by Joseph Tropper (pp. 343-53); and "Grace in Ugaritic?" by Edward Ullendorff (pp. 355-61). Others whose papers appear in the volume are: Andrew A. da Silva, Lucy Davey, J. A. Emerton, Terry Fenton, Daniel E. Fleming, Richard S. Hess, Paul Edward Hughes, W. J. Jobling, Klaus Koch, Oswald Loretz, Johannes C. de Moor, Gregorio del Olmo Lete, W. H. van Soldt, Wilfred G. E. Watson, N. Wyatt, and Marguerite Yon. There are indices of non-biblical references, biblical references, and modern authors (pp. 441-70).

I came away from this book with two primary impressions: how far we have come in the last quarter century from a Bible-centered approach to Ugaritic studies and from naive comparisons of Ugaritic and Israelite or Biblical phenomena (the mention of M. Dahood in the first article only underscores how different this conference was from what a hypothetical conference of the same name held in Rome in 1970 would have been); and, secondly, how little we yet know about the relationships, synchronic and diachronic, among the various cultures which have left written records. The latter point was impressed on me by the various references to Canaan/Canaanite and Israel/Israelite/Hebrew in these communications. Three addressed the question of relationship directly (Day, Grabbe, and Tropper), while several referred to one phenomenon or another as "Canaanite," "Israelite," or both.

The evolution noted in the first observation reflects, I believe, progress and the maturation of the discipline. Richardson's tongue-in-cheek reference to the genres of texts traditionally less studied (e.g., administrative documents or scribal exercises) as "scriptures" is indicative of the growing willingness to study Ugaritic documents of all sorts as means of learning about Ugarit rather than about Jerusalem; only when these Ugaritic texts are appreciated in their own right can truly fruitful comparisons between the two cultures be done.

The relationship between Ugaritic language, mythology, and other features and those of Canaan is a problem relating to data and to terminology, rather than to intellectual trends as such, for "Ugaritic" is easily defined as that which pertains to the kingdom of Ugarit up to its destruction at the end of the Late Bronze Age, while "Canaan" is a much broader term, for the origin and early history of which there are few data. Because a Ugaritic administrative text classifies an individual as "Canaanite," A. F. Rainey concluded some years ago that Canaanites were considered foreigners at Ugarit.(1) Because the Israelites, according to various passages in the Hebrew Bible, considered Canaanite religion as inimical to theirs, many authors have lumped Ugaritic polytheistic religion together with...