Ugarit Tablets

A Ploughshare, and Four Men Before the Archaeologist

In the spring of 1928, a local farmer ploughing near Minet el-Beida on the Syrian coast struck a slab that turned out to be the roof of a vaulted tomb, and removed what could be sold from it. He is the first finder. His name is given confidently all over the internet and in popular books; it traces to no academic source — the scholarly accounts say only that a peasant opened a tomb — and it is not printed here. Charles Virolleaud, director of the Antiquities Service under the French Mandate, sent his colleague Leon Albanese to look; Albanese examined the plundered tomb, reported Cypriot pottery from it in the journal Syria, and went on to inspect the large mound inland called Ras Shamra. Rene Dussaud at the Louvre, reading those reports, arranged for a mission. Claude F.-A. Schaeffer of Strasbourg, with Georges Chenet, opened the first campaign at Minet el-Beida in April 1929 and moved to the tell in May, where inscribed tablets began to appear. Campaigns ran until 1939 and resumed after the war.

The tablets were written in a script nobody had seen: cuneiform wedges, but only about thirty signs, which meant an alphabet rather than a syllabary. Cracking it took months and the credit is a genuine three-way tangle. Hans Bauer in Halle received Virolleaud's published photographs on 22 April 1930 and believed he had the language by the 27th; his first public sign values appeared in a Berlin newspaper on 4 June. Edouard Dhorme, director of the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem, was working independently, was stuck until a colleague showed him Bauer's newspaper piece in mid-June, and published in the Revue Biblique that October the first list complete enough to actually read texts with, correcting several of Bauer's readings in the process; Bauer's own full alphabet appeared at almost the same moment with a note acknowledging Dhorme's corrections. Virolleaud excavated the tablets, published them, and contributed values of his own from a tablet of written-out numerals. In 1936 he published an account implying he had reached the solution first and independently; Bauer denied it, and Peggy L. Day's detailed reconstruction of the sequence concludes that Virolleaud's recollections are not trustworthy. Name all three. Nobody who has looked closely awards it to one.

Canaanite Religion in Its Own Words

What came out of the tell was not one text but libraries: a high priest's collection beside the temples of Baal and Dagan, palace archives, private houses. Alongside Akkadian diplomatic correspondence there are long poetic narratives in Ugaritic — the Baal Cycle, the Kirta epic, the tale of Aqhat — and ritual and offering lists that record which god got what. El is the aged head of the pantheon; Baal is the storm god who rides the clouds, dies at the hands of Mot and returns; Athirat, whose name is the same word as the Bible's Asherah, is El's consort; Anat is the violent goddess who avenges Baal.

The Old Testament argues with these gods constantly, and until 1929 it argued with them alone. Judges 2 says Israel served the Baals; Elijah's contest on Carmel is a straight confrontation between Yahweh and Baal; Josiah's reform burns the vessels made for Baal and for the Asherah. Before Ras Shamra, everything known about what those names meant to their own worshippers came through the polemic of their opponents. Now there is a body of Canaanite religious poetry, from the right region, in a language close enough to Hebrew that a student of one can work through the other, and the picture it gives is fuller and stranger than the Bible's summaries — which is what one would expect, since the Bible was not trying to describe Baal fairly. The overlaps of imagery are striking too: Yahweh in Psalm 29 thunders over the waters in language a Ugaritic poet would have recognised at once.

How Much It Explains — and Where That Argument Runs

That last point is where the real disagreement lives. One school reads the continuities as deep: that Israelite religion emerged out of the Canaanite world it shares a vocabulary with, that El and Yahweh were once distinguishable, and that the Asherah of the biblical texts was for many Israelites a goddess rather than a pole. M. S. Smith and Frank Moore Cross are the names to know here, and their case is built on the texts, not on hostility to them. Others urge caution about how much can be carried across a gap of four centuries and a different society, and point out that shared poetic furniture is exactly what neighbouring cultures have.

The app's position, and its reasons. The parallels are real and should be faced rather than minimised: a Bible study that pretends Psalm 29 and the Baal Cycle sound nothing alike is a study that will not survive a first-year course. But shared vocabulary is not shared theology, and the direction of the Old Testament's use of that vocabulary is consistently subversive — it takes the storm-rider imagery and gives it to Yahweh precisely to say that Baal is not the one who does this. Evangelicals themselves differ on how far to press this. Some read the shared language as deliberate polemical appropriation from the start; others accept a longer and messier history in which Israelite religion had more to unlearn than the finished text lets on, and take the prophets' furious opposition to Asherah worship as evidence that plenty of Israelites were doing it. Both readings are held by people who take Scripture as trustworthy, and the difference between them is a real one worth knowing about rather than a boundary marker.

Scripture references

• Judges 2:11-13 — Israel serves "Baal and the Ashtaroth" — the gods the Ugaritic texts describe from the inside
• 1 Kings 18:21 — Elijah on Carmel: "If Yahweh is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him"
• 2 Kings 23:4 — Josiah burns the vessels made for Baal and for the Asherah
• Psalms 29:1-3 — Yahweh's voice on the waters — storm-god imagery a Ugaritic poet would have recognised
• Deuteronomy 32:8-9 — The nations divided and Yahweh's portion, a passage read against Ugaritic parallels

Sources

• Holding institutionC. F.-A. Schaeffer, "Les fouilles de Minet-El-Beida et de Ras Shamra (campagnes du printemps 1929)" — Claude F.-A. Schaeffer, Mission de Ras Shamra — the excavating body's own first campaign report · Syria 10 (1929), 285-297. Open access at PerseeSupports: The 1929 excavation, the sequence from Minet el-Beida to the tell, and the find of the first tablets
• Primary textC. Virolleaud, "Les inscriptions cuneiformes de Ras Shamra" — Charles Virolleaud · Syria 10 (1929), 304-310 — the editio princeps of the first alphabetic tablets, the publication Bauer and Dhorme worked from. Open access at PerseeSupports: The texts that were published for decipherment, and Virolleaud's role
• ScholarshipP. L. Day, "Dies Diem Docet: The Decipherment of Ugaritic" — Peggy L. Day · Studi Epigrafici e Linguistici 19 (2002), 37-57. Reconstructs the decipherment week by week from the correspondence, and assesses the competing priority claimsSupports: The decipherment dates and the Bauer / Dhorme / Virolleaud credit dispute
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Ugarit

Further reading

• Wikipedia: Ugarit

Reflect

Psalm 29 uses a storm-god's vocabulary to say something a storm god could never say. Where has God taken something borrowed in your life and turned it to his own purpose?