Baal and the Politics of Poetry

Aaron Tugendhaft

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351663779
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia antigua

Baal and the Politics of Poetry provides a thoroughly new interpretation of the Ugaritic Baal Cycle that simultaneously inaugurates an innovative approach to studying ancient Near Eastern literature within the political context of its production. The book argues that the poem, written in the last decades of the Bronze Age, takes aim at the reigning political-theological norms of its day and uses the depiction of a divine world to educate its audience about the nature of human politics. By attuning ourselves to the specific historical context of this one poem, we can develop more nuanced appreciation of how poetry, politics, and religion have interacted—in antiquity, and beyond.

1
Baal and the modern study of myth

In the spring of 1928, a farmer’s plow ran into stone just below the surface of the ground in a field near the Mediterranean coast of Syria. Upon examination, the farmer discovered the obstruction to be a flagstone covering a subterranean passageway leading into a tomb. There he found a number of ancient objects, which he later sold to an antiquities dealer. The French mandatory authorities then in control of Syria were soon informed of the discovery, prompting the director of the Antiquities Service of Syria and Lebanon, Charles Virolleaud, to assemble an archaeological team to explore further.

Under the direction of C.F.A. Schaeffer, excavations began in the spring of 1929, first in the vicinity of the discovered tomb near the bay of Minet el-Beida, and then on the nearby inland tell of Ras Shamra (Fennel Mound). Five days into work at the latter site, on the afternoon of May 14, the first clay tablet with cuneiform writing was unearthed. Several dozen texts were discovered that first season. Three days later, Virolleaud, a trained Assyriologist, arrived from Beirut to inspect the newly discovered tablets. “Strange, very strange,” Schaeffer reports his colleague to have exclaimed. Though a few of the tablets were clearly written in the syllabic cuneiform script well known from Sumerian and Akkadian texts excavated since the mid-nineteenth century, most were in a script hitherto unseen. The technique was similar to syllabic cuneiform in that it, too, inscribed wedges in clay, but its repertory of signs was significantly reduced – suggesting an alphabet. Virolleaud returned to Beirut, his satchel filled with the newly discovered texts, to ponder the yet undecipherable documents.¹

Decipherment came quickly. Virolleaud’s efforts were complemented by the work of two biblical scholars who had been cryptographers during the First World War: Hans Bauer at the University of Halle and Père Edouard Dhorme at the École Biblique in Jerusalem; within a year all the letter values had been determined.² The language of the texts was soon recognized to be a variety of Semitic related to biblical Hebrew.³ With the identification of Ras Shamra as the ancient city of Ugarit in 1931, the language came to be known as Ugaritic.

Excavations on the acropolis of the tell continued annually until the outbreak of the Second World War. They revealed two temples and a structure that came to be known as the House of the High Priest. Adjacent to the Temple of Baal, the house contained an extensive collection of texts. Along with lexical lists belonging to the traditional Mesopotamian scribal curriculum, international correspondence of kings and dignitaries in Akkadian, and several administrative lists, the excavators found numerous ritual texts and a collection of Ugaritic literary texts recounting the exploits of gods and heroes.⁴ Among these were six fragmentary tablets telling the story of the storm-god Baal and his struggles with the other gods.

Baal was a god already familiar from the Bible. Perhaps the most famous passage concerns Elijah’s challenge to the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. When they failed to produce a sign from their god, he slaughtered all 450 of them by the Kishon brook (1 Kings 18). Throughout the biblical corpus, Baal worship serves as the epitome of Israelite religious apostasy to the ways of their Canaanite neighbors. The discoveries at Ugarit, therefore, immediately attracted considerable interest from Hebrew Bible scholars.⁵ Among these was William Foxwell Albright (1891–1971).

Appointed W. W. Spence Professor of Semitic Languages at the Johns Hopkins University in the same year that Ugarit was discovered, Albright was by then well on his way to becoming the dominant figure in twentieth-century American biblical studies. A formidable linguist, Albright regularly published philological notes to the Ugaritic literary texts as soon as Virolleaud published them. His principal interest, however, was in the history of ancient Israelite religion. The surprising discoveries at Ras Shamra, therefore, elicited his great excitement. “It was universally assumed by competent scholars, up to 1929,” Albright wrote in an early article, “that the literature of the Canaanites and Phoenicians had perished for ever, in view of the well-known fragility of papyrus and leather and their poor resistance to moisture. Each year since then has yielded new discoveries of clay tablets containing parts of this long-lost literature, inscribed in a new cuneiform alphabet.”⁶

For Albright, the Ugaritic literary texts finally provided unmediated access to the Canaanite religion, against which the biblical prophets had so often railed. And Albright felt they had had a good right to do so. “The brutality of Canaanite mythology,” he once remarked, “passes belief.”⁷ Albright’s remark encapsulates two factors that have marked the reception of the Ugaritic literary texts: their assignment to the category of myth and the concomitant valuation of them as attesting a(n inferior) form of religion.⁸ These two factors were linked in that myth was understood to be a characteristic feature of polytheism – and so belonged to a type of religion conceived to be at odds with the monotheism of ancient Israel. Consider, for example, Albright’s 1968 synthetic study, Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan: A Historical Analysis of Two Contrasting Faiths. Though his study uses Ugaritic narratives about the gods extensively, Albright’s principal concern is not with myth as a literary phenomenon but with polytheism as a religious system. The former is reduced to a symptom of the latter.⁹

I will consider the alternative of prioritizing the work as literature later. For the moment, I would like to focus on the implications of a procedure that assumes a dichotomy between Canaanite and Israelite religion “drawn by those who are committed in advance to finding [the former] inferior, puerile, barbarous, retarded, or shocking.”¹⁰ That commitment, of course, derives from theologically based prejudice that re-embeds prophetic polemic in modern historical scholarship. Albright was convinced that the core of Israelite tradition was free of any connection to Canaanite ways.¹¹ His contrasting perspective led him to explain any similarities between the Ugaritic texts and the Bible as later Canaanite influence on Israel – the very influence that the prophets had railed against.

Though conservative voices remain, scholarship has largely abandoned the historicity of the biblical account of two genetically distinct peoples: Canaanites and Israelites. Rather, both archaeology and historical philology suggest that the Israelites were of Canaanite origin.¹² In the preface to his book Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, Albright’s student Frank Moore Cross criticized “the tendency of scholars to overlook or suppress the continuities between the early religion in Israel and the Canaanite … culture from which it emerged.”¹³

“Influences” and “continuities,” however, both measure the achievement of Israelite religion in terms of its distance from Canaanite myth.¹⁴ What Israel supposedly achieved – whether at its inception or sometime later – was the articulation of a nonmythological form of religion. In the face of this driving idea, the Ugaritic texts appear as little more than repositories of religion that progress or providence eventually overcame. The texts from Ras Shamra were immediately patched onto an old story about myth as belonging to a primitive form of religion superseded by the flowering of ethical monotheism.¹⁵

***

If scholars like Albright have understood myth in terms of theological progress, others have framed its study in terms of the progress of rationality. A watershed moment in this latter approach to myth took place just two months before Schaeffer’s initial discoveries in Syria. In March 1929, Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger met in Davos, Switzerland. The question of myth that they debated there had already engaged both philosophers for some time. In 1925, Cassirer dedicated the second volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms to the problem of “mythical thought.”¹⁶ Two years later, in Being and Time, Heidegger approvingly acknowledged Cassirer’s having “made the Dasein of myth a theme for philosophical interpretation.”¹⁷ (Dasein is Heidegger’s term for the experience of being that is particular to human beings.) Heidegger reiterated this point in a lengthy review of Cassirer’s book.¹⁸ Despite this, their interpretations of myth marked a fundamental divide between the two philosophers.

Attending to the disagreement between Cassirer and Heidegger allows a glimpse of the role myth has played in the elaboration of modern philosophy and the concomitant characterization of ancient thought.¹⁹ In the second volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer provided a philosophical analysis of the unifying form of myth, which he identified as an early stage in the development of human consciousness. Opposing a long tradition in philosophy that simply rejected myth as belonging to the realm of illusion, Cassirer argued that myth must be taken seriously because “the problem of the beginnings of art, writing, law, [and] science leads back to a stage in which they all resided in the immediate and undifferentiated unity of the mythical consciousness.”²⁰ Yet although he took myth seriously, Cassirer was ultimately concerned with explaining (and justifying) the dynamics of overcoming mythic consciousness through more differentiated modes of symbolic thought.

Religion, Cassirer argued, marks a step forward in this regard in that its sensuous images and signs are recognized as necessarily inadequate to the meaning they reveal. The self-conscious symbolization of scientific thought takes this process even further. For Cassirer, breaking away from myth is not only a cognitive achievement, but also an ethical one. A decisive turn away from mythical consciousness occurs “when the soul ceases to be considered as a mere vehicle or cause of vital phenomena and is taken rather as the subject of ethical consciousness.”²¹ Ultimately, the value of understanding mythical consciousness is that it allows us to recognize the superiority of the forms of consciousness that superseded it.

Consciousness does not offer itself to direct empirical observation. The researcher is able to access mythical consciousness only through mythical images that are understood to be objectifications resulting from a process of symbolization. Though Cassirer presents his work as an account of that process of symbolization – and the dialectical movement from immediate mythic symbolization to symbolizations of greater reflexivity – he necessarily had to work backward from the symbols to the consciousness that supposedly underlies them. This is where methodological questions relating to Cassirer’s use of historical sources arise.

Writing in the early 1920s, Cassirer obviously did not know of the texts from Ugarit. As the first professor of philosophy at the newly founded University of Hamburg, he did, however, have access to the vast collection of material in the field of mythology and general history of religion that Aby Warburg had assembled in his Hamburg library.²² His use of that material bears the marks of both the interpretive tendencies of the ethnologists and historians of religion upon whose studies Cassirer relied well and his self-imposed imperative to find a “spiritual unity of meaning” in the diversity of particular myths.

As the English anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard later forcefully argued, the ethnological reports used by the scholars upon whom Cassirer depended for aspects of his characterization of mythical consciousness were often highly selective and focused on the curious, crude, and sensational.

Consequently, by giving undue attention to what they regarded as curious superstitions, the occult and mysterious, observers tended to paint a picture in which the mystical (in Lévy-Bruhl’s sense of that word) took up a far greater portion of the canvas than it has in the lives of primitive peoples, so that the empirical, the ordinary, the common-sense, the workaday world seemed to have only a secondary importance.²³

Similar reservations can be voiced about the ancient scholarship that Cassirer used – from Hermann Usener’s Götternamen to the work of the pan-Babylonian school.²⁴ It is unclear what Cassirer would have concluded had he been more aware of the biases in his sources. However, he thought he had sufficient empirical evidence of myth as a unitary form of consciousness that encompasses the whole of existence. Albright and his fellow historians of religion were less interested in ancient narrative poetry as concrete works of literature than in how such texts provided evidence for an underlying form of religion that could be set in opposition to monotheism. Cassirer, too, was primarily interested in empirical myths (actual texts that circulated in particular cultural situations) because they supposedly revealed the existence of an underlying mythical form of thought that could be contrasted with more highly differentiated forms.

The extent to which Cassirer believed himself to be telling a historical story remains ambiguous. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is filled with the historical erudition for which Cassirer was rightly renowned. Furthermore, his account of religious thinking as emerging from its own mythical beginnings conforms...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Late Bronze Age Kings
• Introduction
• 1 Baal and the modern study of myth
• 2 The Baal Cycle and Bronze Age politics
• 3 Divine combat as political discourse at Mari
• 4 The politics of time
• 5 Unsettling sovereignty
• 6 Kinship contested
• Conclusion
• Appendix: The Envoy Scene (KTU 1.2 I 11–46)
• Bibliography
• Index