bible study – The City Of Ugarit
Posted by Naama Baumgarten on February 27, 2008 under The Ancient Near East | 
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The City of Ugarit was a well-known city and kingdom which flourished during the second millennium BCE, located on the coast of the Mediterranean in today’s northern Syria. The location of the city was unknown until 1928, when a grave discovered by accident in the village of Ras Shamra turned out to be part of the Ugarit necropolis. Extensive excavations of the archaeological site took place from 1929 and revealed a rich material culture which included four libraries. The writings from these libraries are dated to roughly 1400 BCE, and include Ugaritic and other texts, mostly in Ugaritic or Akkadian.
Although Ugaritic is not a Canaanite language, it has close similarities to biblical Hebrew: while slightly varying in consonants and containing virtually no vowels, it is often titled “the closest sister language,” and the script was easily deciphered thanks to these similarities. The mythologies revealed in Ugarit show many similarities to biblical materials: many motifs, titles and characters in biblical literature were identified thanks to Ugaritic material. For instance: 1. the description in 1 Kings 22:19 of “YHWH sitting on his throne, and all the hosts of heaven standing by him to his right and to his left” is similar to Ugaritic descriptions of the chief god El. 2. In Ezekiel 14, Noah, Daniel and Job are mentioned as three righteous gentiles who will be saved thanks to their righteousness. The appearance of Daniel, a Jewish prophet, as part of this list was an exegetical mystery. However, thanks to the Ugaritic story of Aqhat it is now clear that the Bible was not speaking of Daniel, but of Dan’el, a righteous Ugaritic hero. 3. Ba’al, the storm god, is often presented as one who “rides on the clouds” – imagery also used to describe YHWH in Psalm 68:5.
More similarities can be found when examining the Ugaritic literary style: parallelism and the various word-pairs used in parallelism in Ugarit are virtually identical to those found in the Bible. This assists us in learning about the literary practices surrounding ancient Israel. In addition, many expressions found in biblical literature are found in a virtually identical form in Ugaritic literature, thus explaining the choice of imagery and its context and shedding light on the meaning of the biblical text.
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