Jeremy M. Hutton University of Wisconsin Madison Madison, Wisconsin

Transcription

1 RBL 08/2014 Dennis Pardee The Ugaritic Texts and the Origins of West-Semitic Literary Composition: The Schweich Lectures of the British Academy 2007 Oxford: Oxford University Press, Pp. x Cloth. $ ISBN Jeremy M. Hutton University of Wisconsin Madison Madison, Wisconsin It is a rare honor for a scholar of the ancient Near East to be invited to present research before the British Academy and the Social Sciences in the form of the Schweich Lectures. A look at the British Academy s website ( suggests that an invitation is typically prompted by one s high stature in the field, the quality of one s work, and its importance for illuminating biblical study through reference to the larger historical context in which that text developed. Several well-known scholars of the ancient Near East have presented their work in the series, which runs at approximately three-year staggered intervals (P. R. S. Moorey, 2001; Lawrence Stager, 2004; Graham Davies, 2008; Fergus Millar, 2010; André Lemaire, 2013). It is the field s good fortune that the lectures presented in front of the Academy are usually made available subsequently in the form of a book published by Oxford University Press. The book under review presents the collection of Dennis Pardee s 2007 Schweich lectures (along with the updating of the notes with material in some cases as late as 2011); as such, it is aimed primarily at generalists interested in Hebrew Bible and, more broadly, the ancient Near East, although specialists in Northwest Semitics will find much helpful discussion in both the text and the notes. Indeed, Pardee has crafted an imminently readable book for

2 anyone interested in the topic, while also providing impeccably detailed supporting argumentation in the notes for the benefit of specialists. Pardee begins with a discussion of the development of alphabetic writing in Egypt and the Levant generally and at Ugarit specifically (ch. 1, 1 40). A brief recapitulation of the discovery and decipherment of the alphabetic texts at Ugarit leads into a survey of the underlying phonological system. Pardee carefully situates Ugaritic phonology within its broader Semitic background, both with respect to its phonemic repertoire and in terms of its relationship to the phonologies and graphic systems of the Canaanite dialects found to the south of Ugarit. He makes a strong case for the invention of the alphabetic cuneiform some time during the first half of the thirteenth century (11), noting a few arguments to the contrary. Pardee s historical survey touches briefly on the classification of the language as a Canaanite language, taking stock of the arguments for and against. Pardee demurs from stating his stance with definitiveness but wisely chooses the methodological clarity of separating linguistic profile from cultural context: linguistic classification must be based on linguistic criteria, cultural classification on cultural features (14). Brief surveys of Ugaritic phonology and morphology, along with discussion of the language s lexicon (15 21) allow consideration of Ugaritic as an intermediary between the Canaanite and the Amorite linguistic spheres ; commonalities obtain between Ugaritic and both these languages, of course, but diachronically speaking the position of Ugaritic as neither entirely one nor the other gives it a special place within the linguistic milieu of the Late Bronze Age Levant. Once this first (linguistic) survey has been made, Pardee engages in a survey of Ugaritic Literature and Its Place among the West Semitic Literatures (25 40). Drawing from the imagery of A.1968 and A.1858 (two eighteenth-century texts discovered at Mari and famously discussed by Durand in ), Pardee notes the continuity of the Ugaritic mythemes with their earlier (and, surprisingly [27 28], inland) precursors. In particular, the breadth and duration of the so-called Chaoskampf mytheme indicates that there was a broad cultural sphere in which the Ugaritic version of the mytheme was at home even perhaps more so than its older cousin preserved at Mari: such a myth must have arisen among one of their [the residents of Mari] ancestral lines who had regular contact with the Mediterranean Sea (28). These eastward continuities are manifested in Ugarit s own dependence on Mesopotamian curricular models in the training of its scribes (29). 1. J.-M. Durand, Le mythologème du combat entre le dieu de l orage et la mer en Mésopotamie, MARI 7 (1993):

3 This focus on scribal affinities takes center stage in the remainder of this chapter, as Pardee puts forward a compelling argument for the independence of the scribal apparatus vis-à-vis the political establishment: Though there can be no doubt that the major center of scribal activity was the palace, it may be worth our while to look rapidly at documents illustrating the extent to which Ugaritic culture was permeated by writing I do not wish to claim that literacy itself was at a particularly high level but it does appear that the reasonably well-to-do levels of Ugaritic society, merchants and landowners, were able fairly easily to avail themselves of the services of a scribe. (30) The following short survey of epistolary and economic texts (30 33) bolsters Pardee s argument, and it is unfortunate here that he has had so little space to continue in this vein. His discussion of these texts as productions motivated by a population outside of the political pinnacle (if even of the economically privileged) directly touches on an issue that has become extremely important in biblical studies in the last decade: to what degree an educated scribal culture was rendered possible by the state (as argued by D. Jamieson- Drake 2 ) or rendered the state possible (as articulated most cogently, albeit briefly, by Ryan Byrne 3 ). The conclusion at which Pardee arrives from examination of two representative texts is that these texts were indubitably produced by affluent members of society, often in a household context, and they were set down on the tablets by well-trained scribes who either belonged to the firm or to the household in question or were readily available for hire (33). This model of the freelancing scribe complements similar observations in the Mesopotamian context 4 and, if applicable to the LB Iron I transitional period, as is suggested by Byrne, dramatically changes the way we must think about the possibilities of scribal production, both in the political centers and in the peripheral areas as well. 5 Pardee uses the final movement of the first chapter as a précis for the following chapters: the use of writing at Ugarit served not only to record bureaucratic decisions and 2. David W. Jamieson-Drake, Scribes and Schools in Monarchic Judah: A Socio-archaeological Approach (JSOTSup 109; SWBAS 9; Sheffield: Almond, 1991). 3. Ryan Byrne, The Refuge of Scribalism in Iron I Palestine, BASOR 345 (2007): See also the work of William M. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp ; and Seth L. Sanders, The Invention of Hebrew (Traditions; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009). 4. See, e.g., Michel Tanret, The Works and the Days On Scribal Activity in Old Babylonian Sippar- Amnānum, RA 98 (2004): The issue of scribal production in the periphery is especially important in cases such as the Tel Zayit inscription; see the essays in Ron E. Tappy and P. Kyle McCarter Jr., eds., Literate Culture and Tenth- Century Canaan: The Tel Zayit Abecedary in Context (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2008), especially Tappy s, which focuses on issues of center versus periphery.

4 economic transactions; it was also used to set in place literature. In Ugarit s preservation of literary works we have one of the closest ancient Levantine parallels to the collection of genres found in the Hebrew Bible, and it is to the comparison and contrast of these two bodies of work that Pardee turns in the following chapters. Chapter 2 (41 77) serves as an exposition of the structural and poetic conventions of Ugaritic literature. The focus of this chapter rests squarely on the six tablets of the socalled Baal Cycle, but rather than delve immediately into study of the text itself Pardee displays evidence of his deep familiarity with and long consideration of the material and cultural milieus in which the Ugaritic literary corpus is embedded. His first consideration is of the cultural information that may be gleaned from scribal colophons: the scribes of the Ugaritic texts did not in general practice self-identification. [t]he major exception is ʾIlîmilku, who signed at least one tablet of each of the major cycles, the longest colophon being on the last tablet of the Baal Cycle (42). Pardee deduces from the information preserved in ʾIlîmilku s colophons that not only was the scribe a relatively late inhabitant of Ugarit (who worked during the reign of Niqmaddu II [ near the end of the thirteenth century ], 45), but also that he was firmly entrenched in the royal household as well as in the cultic establishment (46). Perhaps the boldest (and correspondingly most exciting) of Pardee s conclusions in this section is that ʾIlîmilku was no mere copyist; rather, ʾIlîmilku acknowledges that he once learned the art of writing from a master but he claims that the content of his mythological works is his own. His view expressed in terms of his time may be translated into contemporary terms as meaning that he was an oral poet, that he learned the stories, not from someone whose duties were primarily scribal or more broadly administrative, but by listening to other poets until he was able to recite the poems on his own. Thus his writing master did not teach him these poems; no one taught him these poems. He learned them by absorbing them in the company of senior poets. This interpretation squares with the fact that no true duplicates have yet been found of any of the mythological texts they were inscribed once and once only by ʾIlîmilku. (47 48) Although Pardee s argument is convincing here, the final sentence of this block quotation merits some qualification. I had the opportunity to teach Ugaritic during the fall semester of As luck would have it, two students each happened to be working on a small fragment that either replicated or resembled a small portion of the Baal Cycle (and both of which Pardee has written on previously). 6 The first six lines of the fragment KTU I am grateful to Aaron West and Nathaniel Greene for engaging me in discussion on this point.

5 (=RS ) contains lexemes in the same order as they are found in 1.3.v:32 41, 1.4.i:4 16, and 1.4.iv: Indeed, the distribution of these lexemes around sizeable lacunae suggest that 1.117:1 6 closely replicates the text underlying the Baal Cycle. In opposition, the divergence of lines 7 13 demands that we consider this to be either the continuation of the narrative in an otherwise unknown form or episode, a different tradition within which a familiar snippet was embedded, or the beginning of a different text entirely (although inspection of the photos of KTU housed on Inscriptifact [ yields little in the way of paratextual markings that would show a break in the text). Similarly, KTU 1.133:1 11 (RS ) bears lexical affinities to KTU 1.5.i: Here, however, the order of poetic cola in each text is in a slightly different order, and there are some other textual inconsistencies that suggest what we have here might be a scribal exercise; this impression is heightened by the horizontal line separating this snippet of text from the following lines. My point here is not to contradict Pardee insofar as only one copy of the Baal Cycle of any significant length has been found at Ugarit, his assertion holds. However, the near-duplication of a short section of the Baal Cycle text in KTU suggests either (1) that ʾIlîmilku s version of the Baal Cycle was perhaps not as unique as suggested in the quote (which, in fairness to Pardee, must be recognized as removed from its larger context; Pardee is considerably more circumspect in the larger section than I have been able to quote here indeed, he anticipates this caveat with his clarifying remarks at 48 n. 20, where he notes other exemplars of the same phenomenon); or (2) that ʾIlîmilku s version had come to serve as a scribal primer of sorts. The same inferences might be drawn from comparison of KTU with KTU 1.5.i: In the detailed note mentioned immediately above (48 n. 20), Pardee seems to favor the second option: There are clear cases of extracts from the Baal Cycle as we know it from the hand of ʾIlîmilku, with or without additional material, inscribed in a single column on single tablets and hence probably in some sense school texts. This conclusion is logically inferred with respect to KTU 1.117, but I am somewhat less persuaded by the argument in the case of KTU In the case of the latter tablet, the overlap between its text and that of its putative source (i.e., the Baal Cycle as penned or stylused? by ʾIlîmilku) is less than precise and strikes me as conforming more to the type of normal variation(s) that might occur in the process of the preservation of orally transmitted texts. David Carr, following in a well-established line of scholars studying orality and its effects on textual form, has called such switches in vocabulary non-essential, aural, or memory variants. 7 The complexity of the textual tradition here goes deeper than Pardee 7. See, e.g., David M. Carr, Empirische Perspektiven auf das Deuteronomistische Geschichtswerk, in Die deuteronomistischen Geschichtswerke: Redaktions- und religionsgeschichtliche Perspektiven zur Deuteronomismus -Diskussion in Tora und Vorderen Propheten (ed. Markus Witte et al.; BZAW 365; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006), 1 17; and idem, The Formation of the Hebrew Bible: A New Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). For his earlier, seminal discussion of orality in the service of

6 is able to probe in this short chapter, and I look forward to seeing his future reflections on the mechanisms of scribal training at Ugarit. Next Pardee examines some of the narrative conventions that were employed in the Baal Cycle. He does this through a survey of what might be called the type-scene of the commissioning and sending of messengers, followed by the messengers arrival and fulfillment of their commission (specifically in KTU 1.2.i:11ʹ 41ʹ; 50 61). Pardee summarizes briefly here in anticipation of a fuller discussion in chapter 3: the principle structural feature of early West Semitic poetry is parallelism of sound, grammar, and vocabulary across poetic units that consist regularly of two or three utterances (55). In a section that I found particularly informative (61 72), Pardee asks the question of whether the Baal Cycle is indeed a cycle, insofar as that term denotes a series of episodic texts that, when read together constitute a continuous narrative text (Pardee uses the term cycle without concerted attempt to define what he means; the definition I have given here is my own formulation of the definition as it emerges over the course of Pardee s discussion). In this section Pardee gives his account of his discovery that the tablets KTU 1.3 and 1.8 join physically (with the concomitant result that the storyline of is most likely followed immediately by the episodes in 1.4, 62 63). He then makes a compelling argument for a reassessment of how we must read KTU 1.1 and 1.2, given those tablets physical dimensions and shape. The argument here will be familiar to those who have worked firsthand with clay tablets, but its clarification for those unfamiliar with the peculiarities of the material record will be very helpful. At the very least, its explicit statement can help to explain what has always struck me as a tacitly held principle among Assyriologists and Ugaritologists: with regard to KTU 1.1, as a cushionshaped tablet, that is, one that is thinner at the edges than in the middle, was inscribed, gravity would cause the edges to sag; since the reverse is by definition inscribed after the obverse, the obverse will be the flatter of the two principle surfaces (67). In my own (limited) experience, the principle of a flatter obverse and rounder reverse of clay tablets holds. However, it would be interesting to test Pardee s hypothesis, which would seem to hold more clearly for larger tablets, where the additional weight of the edges and pronounced distance in profile between the (thick) center of the tablet and (thinner) edges would allow a more pronounced sagging effect: Does the same mechanism of scribal practice, see idem, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Orality in the biblical tradition has seen renewed focus in recent works; see, e.g., Robert S. Kawashima, Biblical Narrative and the Death of the Rhapsode (Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); Raymond F. Person, The Deuteronomistic History and the Book of Chronicles: Scribal Works in an Oral World (SBLAIL 6; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2010); Robert D. Miller II, Oral Tradition in Ancient Israel (Biblical Performance Criticism 4; Eugene, Ore.: Cascade, 2011).

7 gravitational warping exert its influence in cases of smaller tablets (where the same basic correlation of shape to orientation tends to hold true)? Moreover, if I have correctly imagined the scenario that Pardee envisions, the sagging theory assumes placement on a flat surface: Do we find, or should we expect to find, physical indications of that placement on the obverse of the tablet? And is it possible to test the degree to which we might expect this sagging to affect the precise forms of the written characters? 8 The fact that these questions can even be asked in response to Pardee s discussion should serve as testimony to the well thought-out and detailed explanation provided in this book we see in this section the fruitful ruminations of a scholar with vast experience working with the primary texts (indeed, the only physical exemplars of the texts). A final section rounds off this chapter, in which Pardee ruminates on The Meaning and Function of the Baal Cycle (72 77). Pardee quickly identifies and discusses the three major themes: the competition between Baʿlu and the Sea god over kingship, Baʿlu s struggle to gain the right to a palace, and, after the palace is constructed and inaugurated, his conflict with the god of Death (72). But Pardee adduces a fourth theme that has not been subject to the same scrutiny as the three major themes: the complex family relationships of which many threads run through the stories, often perceivable only in divine titles, with no presently known myth to provide the background and meaning of the title (75). The third and final chapter (79 124) compares and contrasts the literary traditions of Ugarit with those crystallized in the Hebrew Bible. These literary traditions display many common attributes, encompassing both their respective poetic structures, in which parallelism features as a dynamic principle (80 92), and their poetic imagery, including the use of metaphor as a medium for theological expression (the main discussion here is of YHWH s arrogation, in the Hebrew Bible, of prerogatives formerly reserved to Baal and El; ). The continuity of the tradition of parallelistic structure persists, with relatively minor changes, into the period of the Hebrew Bible s formation. Yet despite the overwhelming similarities between the structural principles of these two corpora, there are contrasts to be made as well: the topics addressed [by the Hebrew poets] were, for the most part, very different from what we actually find attested in the Ugaritic corpus (107). These topics include prayer (107 10), wisdom poetry (110 12), love poetry (113 15), lament poetry (115 21), and prophetic poetry (121 24). Other than a short petition embedded in a larger context characterized by prescriptive instructions for a ritual (RS :26ʹ 36ʹ) and wisdom motifs embedded in narrative settings (e.g., KTU 1.17.i:25ʹ 33ʹ), the first two of these genres are almost entirely unheard of in the Ugaritic corpus. 8. I am grateful to Nathaniel Greene for engaging me in conversation on this topic. He served as a most useful sounding board and contributed significantly to the formulation of the questions I have posed here.

8 Similarly, there are no independent love poems in Ugaritic, even though the presence of the genre, used in some narrative poetic texts, suggests that the inhabitants of Ugarit were not immune to the emotional impact of a well-crafted love poem. Lament poetry also is familiar from the Ugaritic context, but here, too, we typically find its instantiations embedded in the larger narrative poems, not couched as stand-alone compositions. Finally, Pardee summarizes the dearth of prophetic material: From Ugarit no reference to prophetism is as yet attested, neither in prose, nor in poetry, neither in Ugaritic nor in Akkadian (122). Pardee s work in this book is that of a consummate specialist dedicated to the refinement and explication of his field. The book is lively and readable; the main text manages to remain relatively unencumbered by the pedantic jargon and overwhelming detail of technical studies that would put off more casual readers (however, specialists appetites for details will undoubtedly be sated by the notes, which contain a wealth of bibliographical references and more technical observations). Biblicists will recognize immediately much of chapter 3 s discussion (which is why I have treated it more briefly here), but the contextualization provides a helpful summary of the differences between these two corpora. At the same time, chapter 2 s summary of Ugaritic literary stylistics and especially its many subsidiary discussions focused on the materiality of the texts themselves would serve as a wonderful addition to the graduate classroom. I regret that I found this concise but informative discussion too late to use in my own class this past semester; the second chapter will certainly be on the syllabus the next time around. Although this book does not intentionally broach significant new topics (many of which Pardee has himself broached, as a look at the bibliography suggests), its observations and arguments may serve to inaugurate some fruitful lines of inquiry (my questions above should serve as indicators of where I foresee some interesting work being accomplished). The book succeeds well at targeting a broad demographic: it will be understandable to the neophyte, engaging for the interested nonspecialist, and informative for the specialist.