Before the Bible

In the spring of 1928 a farmer ploughing near the Syrian coast, at a place called Minet el-Beida, broke into a stone tomb. The French sent an archaeologist, Claude Schaeffer, and on the mound of Ras Shamra nearby he found a city that had burned around 1185 BC and a library of clay tablets written in an alphabet nobody had seen. It was deciphered within a year. The city was Ugarit, and its poems named gods every reader of the Bible already knew: El, Baal, Asherah, and a sea serpent called Lotan.

This page reads four of the oldest texts on our shelves beside the Bible: the Baal Cycle and the birth of Dawn and Dusk from Ugarit, written down a few centuries before the oldest books of the Bible; and two poems from Sumer, a thousand years older again, Enheduanna's hymn to Inanna and Inanna's descent to the dead. All four are complete on the shelf, and every excerpt opens into its book.

It begins with a storm god and the sea.

The storm and the sea

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Baal is the storm, the god of the rain that the farms of the Levant lived on. His enemy is Yam, the Sea, also called Judge River, who has been given kingship by El, the old father of the gods. The craftsman god Kothar makes Baal two clubs and names them, and the second one does the work.

Read the Psalms after this and the sea is everywhere, and so is a god who beats it. The Hebrew word for sea is the same word, yam.

“The floods have lifted up, O LORD, the floods have lifted up their voice; the floods lift up their waves. The LORD on high is mightier than the noise of many waters, yea, than the mighty waves of the sea.” (Psalm 93:3–4, King James Version)

Athtart's rebuke gives Baal a title, Rider of the Clouds. The Bible gives it to its own God: "the LORD rideth upon a swift cloud" (Isaiah 19:1), "who maketh the clouds his chariot" (Psalm 104:3).

Lotan, the fleeing serpent

Behind the Sea there is a monster. Anat, Baal's sister, boasts that she has killed it, and later Death taunts Baal with the same deed. Its name is Lotan, and it has seven heads.

In Hebrew the name is Leviathan. When Isaiah describes the end of days, he uses the Ugaritic phrases nearly word for word: in both languages the beast is the fleeing serpent and the twisting serpent, and beside it stands Tunnan, the Hebrew tannin, the dragon.

“In that day the LORD with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.” (Isaiah 27:1, King James Version)

“Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength: thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters. Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces.” (Psalm 74:13–14, King James Version)

The voice in the clouds

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Baal wins a palace, and after a long argument with its builder he lets it have a window. Through the window, a rift in the clouds, he speaks, and the earth shakes. The tablet is broken here, but the voice comes through.

Psalm 29 sounds the same note seven times. Frank Moore Cross, in Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (1973), was one of many scholars to read it as an old Canaanite storm hymn taken over for Israel's God. Others see the Psalm answering Baal on his own ground: the voice is real, and it belongs to someone else.

“The voice of the LORD is upon the waters: the God of glory thundereth: the LORD is upon many waters. The voice of the LORD is powerful; the voice of the LORD is full of majesty. The voice of the LORD breaketh the cedars.” (Psalm 29:3–5, King James Version)

Death swallows the storm

Then Baal meets an enemy he cannot club. Mot, Death, opens his mouth.

Baal goes down, and the rain goes with him. El hears that Baal is dead and comes down from his throne to sit in the dust. Anat goes looking for her brother, and when she finds Death she takes him apart like a harvest.

Then El has a dream. If Baal is alive, the sky will rain oil and the dry riverbeds will run with honey. They do.

Israel's prophet turns the image round. In Baal's story Death swallows the god. In Isaiah, God swallows Death.

“He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from off all faces.” (Isaiah 25:8, King James Version)

Dawn and Dusk

The second poem from Ugarit is a liturgy with a story in the middle. Old El walks by the sea, takes two women home, roasts a bird for them, and they give birth to two gods, Shachar and Shalim, Dawn and Dusk.

Shachar turns up in Isaiah, in the taunt over the fallen king of Babylon. The Hebrew calls him Helel ben Shachar, "shining one, son of Dawn". The Septuagint put it into Greek as ὁ ἑωσφόρος, the dawn-bringer, and Jerome's Latin as lucifer, the light-bringer. That is how a Canaanite morning star became the name of the devil. The name Jerusalem, Urusalim in Egyptian letters of the 14th century BC, may hold Shalim, the god of dusk.

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!” (Isaiah 14:12, King James Version)

The same tablet has an instruction for the rite: a kid cooked in milk. When it was first read in the 1930s, scholars took it as the Canaanite custom behind the strange law of Exodus 23:19, "Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk". Later readings of the broken line made that much less certain, and the link is now doubted.

The first author

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Go back another thousand years, to Ur in southern Mesopotamia around 2300 BC. Sargon of Akkad had made the first empire, and he set his daughter Enheduanna in Ur as high priestess of the moon god Nanna. She wrote hymns, and she signed them. She is the first author in history whose name we know.

In the Exaltation of Inanna she praises the goddess of love and war as a storm that flattens mountains. Then the hymn turns. A rebel named Lugal-ane has taken the temple and driven her out, and she speaks in her own voice.

She ends with praise, and the goddess takes her back. The shape will be familiar to anyone who knows the Psalms: praise, then the complaint of someone wronged and abandoned, a plea, and praise again. Nobody claims the psalmists read her. Her hymns were copied in Mesopotamian schools for centuries after her death, and the form she used lasted.

The goddess who went down

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The last poem is Sumerian too, copied on tablets from Nippur around 1800 BC. Inanna decides to go down to the land of the dead, ruled by her sister Ereshkigal. At each of seven gates she has to give up one of her powers, a crown, a necklace, a ring, until she comes in naked.

Her servant Ninshubur goes from god to god, and the clever Enki makes two small creatures from the dirt under his fingernails and sends them down with the plant of life and the water of life.

Readers have noticed the three days and three nights, and the goddess who rises. Most scholars warn against reading the Gospels into a Sumerian poem two thousand years older, and the story has a price the Gospels do not: someone must take her place. Inanna gives up her husband, the shepherd Dumuzi, and in the end he and his sister share the sentence, half the year each.

Dumuzi became Tammuz in the later languages of the region, and women were still mourning him in the time of Ezekiel, at the gate of the Temple in Jerusalem.

“Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the LORD'S house which was toward the north; and, behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz.” (Ezekiel 8:14, King James Version)

What the Bible owes

Hebrew and Ugaritic are close cousins, both Canaanite languages, and the poets of Israel and of Ugarit shared a stock of words, pairs and pictures. El is the ordinary Hebrew word for God. Most scholars today, Mark S. Smith in The Early History of God (1990) among them, think Israel's God took on titles and deeds that belonged first to El and to Baal: the father enthroned among the gods, the rider of the clouds, the one who beats the sea. Mesopotamian stories reached the Bible too, the flood above all, along a longer road.

That is a historian's reading, and there are others. Jewish and Christian readers have long seen the Bible's use of these images as a polemic: the prophets take Baal's titles and Leviathan's heads to say that what the neighbours gave to many gods belongs to one. The Bible itself remembers the rivalry. Elijah's contest with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel is a contest over who sends the rain.