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THE LITERARY INFLUENCE of the UGARITIC FERTILITY MYTH on the OLD TESTAMENT by T. WORDEN Upholland, England the Study of Fertilit

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THE LITERARY INFLUENCE of the UGARITIC FERTILITY MYTH on the OLD TESTAMENT by T. WORDEN Upholland, England the Study of Fertilit THE LITERARY INFLUENCE OF THE UGARITIC FERTILITY MYTH ON THE OLD TESTAMENT BY T. WORDEN Upholland, England The study of fertility myths and ritual 1) is of considerable import- ance, since, in the last few years, so much in the Old Testament has been interpreted in the light of such myths and rituals. "The know- ledge of the general pattern of Near-Eastern religion has placed in perspective the religion of the Hebrews. The essence of this pattern is found in the fertility cult, which centred in the worship of the vegetation deity, who died in the autumn and was resurrected in the spring. The religious services took the form of a dramatisation of the death of the god, his resurrection, and his marriage to the mother- goddess. The popularity of this cult among the Hebrews has been abundantly evidenced by Old Testament scholars. It was the pre- dominant cult among the Egyptians, Syrians, Babylonians, Assyrians and many other peoples of the Near East." 2) "More and more have Old Testament scholars been led to find fertility cult symbolism in a considerable part of the Hebrew scriptures. Gradually it has been emphasised that the 'Canaanite' religion of Palestine was but a variation of the seasons cult ... the early religion of Israel in Palestine was little more than a syncretistic fertility cult with Yahweh pre- . dominant." 3) This tendency: to interpret much of the Old Testament in terms of fertility cult and ritual, has been strengthened by the discovery of the Ras Shamra tablets. The main part of this literature, in alpha- 1) For the relation between myth and ritual cf. HOOKF,Myth and Ritual, 1933: "The myth is the spoken part of the ritual: a description of what is being done. The original myth, inseparable in the first instance from its ritual, embodies in more or less symbolic fashion, the original situation which is seasonally re-enacted in the ritual." (p. 3). 2) MAY,"The fertility Cult in Hosea", A. J.5.L., 48 (1932), p. 73. 3) BROOKS,"Fertility Cult Functionaries in the Old Testament", J,B,L,, LX (1941), p. 227. 274 betic cuneiform, is written in the native language of Ugarit, and found exclusively at Ras Shamra (there is considerable doubt as to whether the Beth Shemesh tablet is in Ugaritic) DE LANGHE, whilst acknowledging the difficulty of classifying these texts, since the interpretation of so many of them remains obscure, divides them into the great Mythological and Legendary texts, and the small tablets dealing with various subjects: religious and liturgical, letters, lists of names of persons, towns, corporations and commercial texts 2). We are concerned exclusively with the mythological texts, the most important of which are those originally published by VIROLLEAUD in Syria during the years 1931-4, under the symbols of I AB, II AB, and I *AB. It is now unanimously agreed that the correct sequence is: II AB, I *AB, and I AB (GORDON: 51, 67, 62 & 49) 3). Whilst these tablets are related, in so far as they are all concerned with the same characters, it is not certain that they follow immediately, the one on the other, nor that they belong to the same cycle 4). The text is often fragmentary; there are many lacunae, and the interpre- tation of texts well preserved is often problematic. The language, which may be classified as North-West Canaanite b), has been sub- jected to many other influences, for the city of Ugarit, as the exca- vations show, has been influenced from the third millennium until modern times by all the civilizations of the Ancient Near-East, Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Egean, Hurrian, Hittite, Canaanite, Mycenian, Greek, Roman and Turk 6). In spite of difficulties of interpretation, however, it is clear that these tablets are concerned with fertility myth and ritual. 7) The first of these three important 1) DE LANGHE,Les textes de Ras Shamra-Ugarit et leurs rapports avec le milieu bibliquede l'Ancien Testanrent,Louvain, 1945, vol. I, p. 124. 2) DE LANGHE,op. cit., vol. I, p. 149. 3) The texts are quoted according to the edition of GORDON,Ugaritic Handbook. RevisedGrammar, Paradigms, texts in Transliteration,Comprehensive Glossary, Rome, 1947. 4) Cf. GORDON,Ugaritic Literature, Rome, 1949, p. 9. 5) Cf. ALBRIGHT,"The North Canaanite Epic of Aleyan Baal and Mot", IP.a.s., 1932, p. 207 f. 6) DE LANGHE,op. vol. I, p. 84. ') GRAHAM& MAY,Culture and Conscience,Chicago, 1936, à propos of the Baal cycle: "Under the guise of stories of the gods, the priests inculcated awareness of man's dependence on the processes of nature, and how, through a cultus technique by which they professed the ability to command those processes, they cultivated in the worshipper a disposition to appreciate the natural order, and, in actual life to co-operate with it." (p. 124). "The language of certain parts of .
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