Unsettling sovereignty: politics and Poetics in the Baal Cycle.

• Author: Bodin, Jean
• Position: Critical essay

Cosmological speculations hold political ramifications. The breakdown of the hierarchical society of the European Middle Ages, for example, belonged to a general breakdown of hierarchical order in thought, belief, and action. (1) At the level of cosmology, this was exemplified in the turn from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican picture of the universe, since no analogy between above and below is possible in Copernican thought. (2) In the ancient Near East, the Babylonian epic Enama elis offers the most explicit expression of a parallel between political hierarchy and cosmological order. The late twelfth-century B.C. poem was intimately connected with the institution of Babylonian kingship. (3) By telling the story of Marduk's defeat of Tiamat (the primordial waters) and his subsequent organization of the universe, Enuma elis depicts the world as structured according to a fixed hierarchical order. Marduk sets heaven and earth in their proper places. (4) At the same time, the unequivocal acceptance of his kingship by the other gods establishes the hierarchy of rank among them. This hierarchy is reiterated on the spatial plane when Marduk fixes the position of his star Neberu as a reference point for the positions of all the others. (5) At the level of human politics, Marduk's cosmogonic act ushers in the establishment of Babylon. (6) That city's position at the apex of the world political order mirrors Marduk's position among the gods.

1. UGARITIC MYTH AND BRONZE AGE POLITICS

   The Baal Cycle has often been compared to Enuma e1is. (7) Discovered in 1929 at the coastal Syrian site of Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit), the account of the storm-god Baal's exploits survives in a single exemplar of six fragmentary tablets that were likely inscribed a century or so before the Babylonian poem took shape. (8) Both the Ugaritic and Babylonian poems contain episodes in which their respective heroes battle the sea, but whereas Marduk's battle culminates in a restructuring of the universe that gives it its hierarchical structure, Baal's victory holds no cosmogonic implications. (9) Unlike Tiamat, the Ugaritic sea-god Yamm is not a primordial adversary and his defeat does not usher in a new epoch. The Baal Cycle does not set up a clear, temporally distinguished opposition between current order and primordial disorder. As a result, conflict takes on a different meaning in the Ugaritic poem--it is a constituent element of political life, not a means by which the political overcomes the primordial. In the Baal Cycle political rule does not bring about an eradication of disorder. The Baal Cycle's non-cosmogonic employment of the topos of divine battle against the sea is consistent with the poem's representation of political rank as unstable and ambiguous. (10)

   The relationships among the Baal Cycle's divine protagonists run parallel to earthly political relationships. Perhaps the most interesting of these is the fundamentally hierarchical relationship between vassal and suzerain. The supreme god El states at one point that Baal is Yamm's vassal. (11) This has been taken to reflect "Ugarit's limited political situation lying between the great powers of the ancient Near East." (12) Baal was the patron god of Ugarit and Ugarit went through periods of vassalage to both Egypt and Hatti during the Bronze Age. (13) Yet the Baal Cycle offers not just a reflection of terrestrial realities, but critical reflection on the foundational claims of Late Bronze Age political institutions by calling into question the hierarchical principle that justifies them. Focusing primarily on the well-preserved "envoy scene" from the poem's second tablet that provides context for El's declaration, this essay will consider the implications of the Ugaritic poem's particular depiction of suzerainty and vassalage. (14) By presenting political positions that presuppose the idea of hierarchy--without actually affirming the principle that these positions depend upon--the Baal Cycle ultimately unsettles the traditional basis of sovereignty itself.

   In a 1967 article on treaty terminology in the Bible, the renowned Northwest Semitic philologist Jonas Greenfield noted that several phrases in the Baal Cycle echo the language of Late Bronze Age treaties. In this way, the poem uses contemporary diplomatic conventions to evoke relationships among the poem's protagonists. (15) Greenfield draws attention to two passages in the Ugaritic poem. In one, Baal sends a message to Mot, the Ugaritic deity of death, stating, "I am your bondsman forever" ('bdk 'an. wd'lmk). (16) Greenfield glosses: "In this verse Baal declared himself Mot's eternal vassal." (17) The other passage is a speech that El makes in reply to messengers sent by Yamm. El declares that Baal is a vassal of Yamm and so must bring tribute to the sea-god. (18) As Greenfield notes, the passage employs the same terminology that would have been used to articulate relationships among polities in the Late Bronze Age--a vocabulary of parity, subjugation, and domination. It is, in fact, the kind of language found in numerous documents attesting to Ugarit's political relationship with the kingdom of Hatti, the great imperial power that controlled much of Syria in the Late Bronze Age. El's comment that Baal must bring tribute (ybl 'argmn) echoes an Ugaritic document that identifies "the tribute that Niqmaddu, king of Ugarit, shall bring to the Sun, the Great King, his lord" ('argmn . nqmd . mlk 'ugrt, d ybl . 3.0 mil

   In addition to recognizing such political terminology in the Baal Cycle, scholars have begun to pay special attention to the familial relationships among the poem's deities. In his work on the patrimonial household at Ugarit, David Schloen maps those relationships onto the typical kinship relationships and rivalries found in Mediterranean joint-family households. (20) This model affords a vantage onto the interactions among deities in the poem. Building on Schloen's work, Mark Smith and Wayne Pitard have argued that the Baal Cycle's depiction of Baal's rise corresponds to the succession of a young king within a royal household. "The imagery used [in the Baal Cycle]," they write, "is that of regular royal succession, in which the old patriarch/king, toward the end of his reign, appoints his successor, who then takes on both the title of king and the duties delegated to him by the patriarch." (21) They argue that the poem ends in the establishment of co-regency between El and Baa1. (22) In this line of reading, the combats depicted in the poem are meant to evoke the struggles between competing successors to the throne.

   Though the poem no doubt plays upon recognizable aspects of familial rivalry, I want to suggest a different tack. Rather than approach the poem as a depiction of royal succession within a single political dynasty, I believe the epic employs kinship as a metaphor for international politics. This is in keeping with the practice among monarchs of Ugarit's day who used kinship language to define their relations to each other, as though the international system were one large family. (23) Approaching the poem in this way makes better sense of the phrases discussed by Greenfield. Whereas the Bronze Age supplies clear evidence of international diplomatic discourse employing familial language, there is to my knowledge no evidence of relationships within an actual household being described metaphorically with terminology taken from the realm of foreign affairs. Though a term like 'servant' ('bd) can be found in both contexts, it is difficult to see what the bringing of tribute (ybl 'argmn) would mean in a household situation. Greenfield's observations point toward reading the divine familial relationships in light of the contemporary political metaphor. To the extent that the poem unsettles the suzerain-vassal relationship, it throws into question the suitability of the kinship metaphor for articulating the nature of international relations.

2. THE POETICS OF SOVEREIGNTY

   The Baal Cycle depicts El as responsible for establishing Yamm in his kingship. The father of the gods appears to name Yamm as a king in an early fragment of the poem, (24) and he later orders the craftsman-god Kothar-wa-Hasis to build the sea-god a royal abode. (25) It was standard practice in the Late Bronze Age for higher-ranked kings to grant kingdoms to their subordinates. In Hittite vassal treaties, the sovereign bestows kingdoms on subject kings, even in cases where the subject king's royal house long predated the subjugation to Hatti. (26) The recipient king then becomes the vassal of his more powerful benefactor. At the point of the poem when Yamm sends an envoy to El, we would expect a vassal-suzerain relationship to govern the association between the two deities. Remarkably, however, Yamm's actual behavior is not in line with such expectations.

   The envoy scene opens with Yamm dictating instructions to his messengers. The sea-god declares:

   Go, lads, don't dally, head for the assembled council, for Mount Lalu. Don't fall at El's feet, nor bow to the assembled council. Standing, speak the speech, recite your instructions. Say to the Bull, [my] father [El], recite to the assembled council: "Message of Yamm, your lord, your master, Ruler Nahar: Give up, gods, the one you obey, the one the multitude fears; Give up Baal so I may humble him, Dagan's son, so I may seize his gold." (27) A number of features of this speech are unsettling coming from the mouth of a vassal. Most blatant is the instruction for the messengers not to bow before El and the assembled council. As we learn from a letter discovered at Mari, only the messengers of a vassal king were required to bow when presenting their message at a foreign court. (28) By telling his messengers not to bow, Yamm asserts that he is not subject to El. The wording of his message reinforces this idea and pushes it one step further. Not only is Yamm not subject to El, Yamm's message...