Fillets of Fatling and Goblets of Gold: The Use of Meal Events in the Ritual Imagery in the Ugaritic Mythological and Epic Texts 9781463216139

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FILLETS OF FATLING AND GOBLETS OF GOLD

GORGIAS UGARITIC STUDIES 4 General Editor N. Wyatt

Fillets of Fatling and Goblets of Gold The Use of Meal Events in the Ritual Imagery in the Ugaritic Mythological and Epic Texts

DAN BELNAP

GORGIAS PRESS 2008

First Gorgias Press Edition, 2008 Copyright © 2008 by Gorgias Press LLC All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of Gorgias Press LLC. Published in the United States of America by Gorgias Press LLC, New Jersey ISBN 978-1-59333-084-2 ISSN 1935-388X

GORGIAS PRESS 180 Centennial Ave., Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA www.gorgiaspress.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Belnap, Daniel. Fillets of fatling and goblets of gold : the use of meal events in the ritual imagery in the Ugaritic mythological and epic texts / Daniel Belnap. -- 1st Gorgias Press ed. p. cm. -- (Gorgias ugaritic studies, ISSN 1935-388X ; 4) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-59333-084-2 (alk. paper) 1. Ugarit (Extinct city)--Religion. 2. Dinners and dining--Religious aspects. 3. Ritual. 4. Ugaritic literature. I. Title. BL1640.B45 2008 299'.26--dc22 2008045043 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standards. Printed in the United States of America

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ................................................................................................. vii Part I—Ritual Theory and Ugaritic/Biblical Studies ......................................... 1 Chapter 1—The History of Ritual Theory .................................................. 3 The Myth-and-Ritualists .......................................................................... 5 The Weaknesses of the Myth-and-Ritual Approach in Ugaritic and Biblical Studies .......................................... 11 The Ritual Anthropologists and Victor Turner ................................. 15 Catherine Bell and the Process of Ritualization ................................ 18 Ritual Study since Myth-and-Ritual (Ugarit) ...................................... 24 Ritual Study since Myth-and-Ritual (Hebrew Bible) ......................... 29 Commensality and Ritual Theory ........................................................ 34 Commensality in Ugaritic and Biblical Studies .................................. 42 Purpose of this Study ............................................................................. 46 Part II—Meal Events in the Baal Myth ............................................................. 49 Chapter 2—The Feasts and Meal Events of Baal .................................... 51 Baal’s First Feast ..................................................................................... 57 Baal’s Meal with Athirat ........................................................................ 75 Baal’s Second Feast ................................................................................ 78 Ritual Failure in the Baal Myth ............................................................. 87 Baal as Maintainer of Order.................................................................. 91 Chapter 3—Other Divine Feasts in the Baal Myth .................................. 95 El’s Feasts ................................................................................................ 95 Athirat’s Meal ........................................................................................112 Shapsh’s Feast .......................................................................................116 Summary of Part II ......................................................................................121 Part III—Meal Imagery in the Kirta and Aqhat Epics..................................125 Chapter 4—Meal Events in the Kirta and Aqhat Epics ........................127 Kirta’s First Meal Event ......................................................................131 Kirta’s Second Meal Event .................................................................144 Kirta’s Third Meal Event ....................................................................148 Danil’s First Feasts ...............................................................................150 Danil’s Third Feast ...............................................................................155 v

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Anat’s Meal Offer to Aqhat ................................................................160 Chapter 5—El’s Cup of Blessing and YHWH’s Cup ............................167 YHWH and His Cup ...........................................................................174 Chapter 6—Ritual Failure in the Kirta and Aqhat Epics ......................187 Burray’s Feast ........................................................................................187 Danil’s Final Feast ................................................................................198 Pughat’s Drinking Event .....................................................................201 Summary of Part III ....................................................................................207 Conclusion ............................................................................................................209 Bibliography .........................................................................................................213 Index ......................................................................................................................237

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would be remiss if I did not take space to acknowledge my gratitude for those people and institutions that were instrumental in this publication. First, I would like to thanks Dennis Pardee, who, as my dissertation advisor, encouraged me to study the meal events in the Ugaritic literature and then provided invaluable criticism throughout the writing process. Similar appreciation is expressed to Christopher Faraone and David Schloen who also provided important insights. I am grateful to Gorgias Press and Steve Wiggins in particular, for both providing a venue for this study and their impressive availability to me and my questions. I would like to give a special thanks to the Religious Studies Center at Brigham Young University for providing the editing and formatting expertise. I would like to offer a deep, heartfelt thank you to Rachel Morris who worked long and hard hours to ready this study for publication. I would like to express my deepest appreciation to my wife, Erin, who stood by during the schooling/dissertation process and has since continued to encourage me, including in this specific endeavor. To my three children, Emma, Jack, and Sam, thank you for giving Daddy time to write. Finally, to my grandmother, who left a family legacy of love to those things ancient, I hope you enjoy this wherever you are.

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PART I RITUAL THEORY AND UGARITIC/BIBLICAL STUDIES

CHAPTER 1 THE HISTORY OF RITUAL THEORY

The study of ritual began with a prolonged and influential debate on the origins of religion.1

While ritual and ritualized behavior have long been recognized in Ugaritic and biblical texts, it has only been in the past two decades that new models of ritual theory, created and used in the social sciences, have begun to allow for greater appreciation of these practices. A thorough history of ritual theory and its relationship to biblical and Ugaritic studies would be of great value, but that is beyond the scope of this study, instead, the following is a brief synopsis intended to provide a foundation upon which the value of this study may be grounded. The study of ritual truly began in the late 1800s, emerging alongside an increasing appreciation for the complexity of myth. As early as 1861, Frederich Müller began the modern study of ritual with his works concerning what he took to be the Indo-European roots of Greek mythology.2 It was his contention that Greek myths arose from misunderstandings of earlier nomadic, Indo-European poetry and ideas. Because of the apparent predominance of sky and sun imagery in Greek mythology, these nomadic invaders must have been sun-worshippers, and therefore, the forerunners of the Greek mythical corpus would then have been based originally on solar myths. Though Müller’s ideas were criticized by later scholars, his concepts concerning the historical nature of myth laid the foundation for the work of those selfsame scholars. One such scholar was Edward Tylor, who believed that myth, specifically the Greek myths, were not just “mere error and folly” of later 1 Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3. 2 Frederich Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language [1861] (New York: Scribner, Armstrong and Co., 1967).

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generations confusing earlier narrative, but the means by which a society related to the world, thereby establishing the social structure. For Tylor, myths were windows that allowed an individual glimpses into the importance of a given social structure. It was a social mechanism that established permanence for these structures. Moreover, Tylor espoused an “evolutionary view of human social development,”3 meaning that mankind, or at least the different societal aspects of mankind, progressed from the savage primitive to the modern, enlightened understanding of religion. Since myth defined the relationship between one’s society and the outside world, by observing the myths used by a given society their social evolution could be traced.4 Tylor’s theories greatly influenced William Robertson Smith, who was primarily interested in explaining the rituals described in the Old Testament. Like Tylor, Smith accepted the evolutionary model of religious development, but whereas Tylor espoused the concept of soul as the foundation of religious structures, Smith saw ritual as the underlying framework. It was not the need to explain one’s relationship with the outside world but the internal need to strengthen the community that brought about religion and, therefore, the need for religious ritual. The very social order itself was exemplified in the religious rituals of the community. “Religion was made up of a series of acts and observances. . . . [It] did not exist for the sake of saving souls, but for the preservation and welfare of society.”5 Thus the ritual of sacrifice was not to provide a gift to the dead or other personas in the hopes of receiving a blessing in return, as Tylor suggested, but rather to provide “communion” between the community and the divine world, “sacralizing the social unity and solidarity of the group.”6 Like Müller before him, Smith believed that myth was secondary to the religious experience, arising as an explanation of the rituals when the original meaning was forgotten or rendered incomprehensible by later cultural accretions.7 Though some of his theories are now generally considered outdated, if not downright wrong (i.e., the cultural/religious evolutionary model), 3

Bell, Ritual, 4. E.B. Tylor, Anthropology [1881], rev. ed. (London: Macmillan, 1924). Also, Primitive Culture, 2 vols. (New York: Harper, 1958). 5 William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites: the Fundamental Institutions [1889] (New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1969), 58–9. 6 Bell, Ritual, 4. 7 Smith, Lectures, 18: “the myth was derived from the ritual, and not the ritual from the myth; for the ritual was fixed and the myth was variable, the ritual was obligatory and faith in the myth was at the discretion of the worshipper.” 4

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Smith’s insights on the nature of religion and ritual had and continue to have an impact on two areas in the study of ritual. First, his discussions concerning the interaction of ritual and myth brought about what Bell terms three “schools” of ritual study: 1) the myth-and-ritual school, 2) the sociological school, and 3) the psychoanalytical school.8 Second, his study brought to light one of the essential questions in the study of ritual concerning ritual itself: whether it is a system that brings about change or one that seeks to enforce the existing societal boundaries. As we shall see later, this fundamental question concerning ritual is one that is still debated among ritual scholars.

THE MYTH-AND-RITUALISTS Of the three schools mentioned by Bell, it is the first school, the myth-andritual school, that played a dominant role in the study of ritual for both biblical and Ugaritic studies. Perhaps because of Smith’s preeminent role in laying the theoretical groundwork for this “school,” the predominant scholars sympathetic with this theory were those associated with the study of the ancient Near East or those who studied its immediate geographic and cultural neighbors, such as classicists. Along with the work of Smith, the most influential scholar on this school was Sir James George Frazer. His contributions allowed for the universal application of the approach, which, while productive in terms of creating new avenues of exploration and study, was, as we shall see, greatly abused by Frazer because of his tendency to fit data into scholarly models where they did not naturally fit. Frazer followed Smith and Tylor in accepting the evolutionary model of human communal structure and religious belief, so, starting with the ancient Roman rituals at Numa, Frazer “discovered” that the underlying theme behind most, if not all, of the world’s folklore and myths (the continued prosperity and fertility for the land guaranteed annually by the ritual enactment of the dying and resurrected god) was more or less universal.9 8

Bell, Ritual, 5. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. 3rd ed., 10 vols. [1911], (London: Macmillan, 1955). Gary Anderson states that Frazer’s basic theory was fundamentally different from Smith’s, claiming that Frazer believed in the primacy of the myth of the dying and resurrected god which led to ritual, as opposed to Smith for whom ritual primary and begat the myth; see Gary Anderson, Sacrifices and Offerings in Ancient Israel: Studies in their Social and Political Importance, Harvard Semitic Monograph 41 (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1989). While 9

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The next myth-and-ritualist to follow was Samuel Henry Hooke, one of the first of the Cambridge Ritualists, a group of classicists and Near Eastern specialists who espoused the myth-and-ritual approach.10 Hooke, like Frazer, believed that the death and resurrection motif was present in the earliest cultures of the ancient Near East and therefore reflected in their ritual behavior. Yet, unlike Frazer, who believed that these patterns were universal and that their attendant rituals were left behind once they had evolved from their “primitive” states, Hooke believed they originated from the ancient Near East and that the rituals may have been observed among the earliest cultures, but that those cultures were not necessarily primitive.11 Therefore, the concepts behind the myth-and-ritual approach, particularly the ritual reenactment of the dying and rising god, originated in the ancient cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia and diffused outward, specifically to the Greco-Roman cultures. Following the lead of Frazer, who suggested the dominant festival celebrating the dying and rising deity was during the New it is true that Frazer held that a universal pattern existed of which a central feature is the myth of the dying and resurrected god (or king), the myth itself reflects a ritual pattern from which the environment, and society overall, benefits. Anderson’s analysis is colored by Frazer’s emphasis on the importance of magic. According to Frazer, magic, either in the form of homeopathic or contagious rituals, sought to manipulate the natural environment for the betterment of society. While this theory does go against Smith’s strictly communal purpose for ritual, it does not negate the fundamental importance of ritual. Moreover, like Smith, Frazer believes that the myth came second as an explanation of the original ritual process. 10 Alongside Hooke and other English-speaking myth-and-ritualists in ancient Near Eastern studies, the Cambridge school included noted classic scholars such as Jane Harrison, Themis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912); F.M. Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus (London: E. Arnold, 1907); Gilbert Murray, Five Stages of Greek Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925). The influence of this school across many different fields of scholarship is impressive. Jesse Weston’s study, From Ritual to Romance, first written in 1920, argued that the Arthurian epic and the Grail legend were forms of the dying and rising god/king motif. F.R.R.S. Raglan explored the motif of “the Hero” across folklore worldwide (The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama [New York: Oxford University Press, 1937]). 11 S. H. Hooke, “The Myth-and-ritual Pattern of the Ancient Near East,” in Myth and Ritual, ed. S. H. Hooke (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 1: “The term ‘primitive’ is a purely relative one. The only kind of behavior or mentality which we can recognize as ‘primitive’ in the strict sense is such as can be shown to lie historically at the fountain-head of a civilization. The earliest civilizations known to us are those of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and the earliest evidence which we can gather concerning the beliefs and practices there prevalent constitutes for us what is primitive in the historical sense.”

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Year, Hooke espoused reconstructed New Year ritual structures for the ancient societies of the Near East. The influence of Hooke and the other Cambridge scholars cannot be underestimated. Not only did they affect later English-speaking scholars of the Near East and classical world but they also influenced a group of Scandinavian scholars who came to be known as the Scandinavian myth-andritual school. Primary among these was Ivan Engnell who, upon reading Hooke’s theories, was struck by the rituals associated with kingship, specifically those that contributed to the concept of the divine king in Israel.12 Another Scandinavian, Geo Widengren, like Hooke, sought to explore general mythic structures throughout the ancient Near East, such as the ubiquity of myths concerning the tree of life, which he concluded, resulted from rituals associated with kingship.13 Another Scandinavian, Sigmund Mowinckel carried this further through his extensive study of the Psalms in which he reconstructed an entire New Year’s ritual complex and suggested that the set of rituals within that complex must be seen as underlying the psalmic texts.14 Another scholar, A. Bentzen used the same approach to study the book of Isaiah, seeing a ritual foundation of the mythical images and language used in Isaiah.15 The Cambridge school carried on its own myth-and-ritual approach through the works of biblical scholars such Aubrey Johnson, who, indebted to the psalmic work already provided by Mowinckel, published his own study on the theoretical New Year’s festival on ancient Israel. His reconstruction further developed the concept of the Israelite king, not necessarily as a divine being, but as one who, at least during the New Year festival complex, represented God, providing future prosperity guaranteed by the rituals enacted.16 The myth-and-ritual school also began to influence scholars working on the Ugaritic tablets discovered and interpreted from 1929 on. R. de Langhe, in his study “Myth, Ritual, and Kingship in the Ras Shamra 12 Ivan Engnell, Studies in Divine Kingship in the Ancient Near East (London: Basil Blackwell, 1960). 13 Geo Widengren, The King and the Tree of Life in Ancient Near Eastern Religion (King and Saviour IV), Uppsala Universitets Årsskrift 4 (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1951). 14 Sigmund Mowinckel, The Psalms in Israel’s Worship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). 15 Aage Bentzen, King and Messiah (London: Luttenworth Press, 1955). 16 Aubrey R. Johnson, Sacral Kingship in Ancient Israel (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1955).

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Tablets,” was one of the first to place the Ugaritic ritual material into this context.17 Among the Scandinavian school were Arvid Kapulrud and F.F. Hvidberg. Kapulrud wrote a series of independent articles concerning the different Ugaritic texts, specifically the mythical texts of Baal and Kirta, fitting them within the myth-and-ritual approach.18 Hvidberg’s study, Weeping and Laughter,19 also provided a myth-and-ritual framework of the newly discovered Ugaritic material. His work became the major influence in Engnell’s section concerning Ugaritic texts in his dissertation. One of the more significant scholars who bridged the gap between biblical and Ugaritic scholarship was Theodore Gaster. In 1950 he published his work Thespis which, as the title suggests, presented the mythical texts of Ugarit as the scripts for plays which would have ritually enacted the death and resurrection of the god Baal.20 What makes Gaster significant above the other myth-and-ritualists is that Gaster explicitly tied the myths to a seasonal pattern of growth and death emerging in new growth, or as Bell puts it, “[he] converted the dying and reviving god motif into the more embracing thesis of a seasonal pattern in all ritual by which it renews and revitalizes the total world order.”21 Moreover, Gaster agreed that the mythical texts as the world now had them were the secondary form of original ritual; he added an earlier stage to the process by stating that myth was more than merely an outgrowth of ritual but an “expression of parallel aspect.” Because of this view, Gaster disagreed with other myth-and-ritualists, suggesting instead that ritual and myth should be seen as developing in a historical process paralleling one another. Nevertheless, he ultimately concluded that his analysis still demonstrated the primacy of ritual and the ritual logic underlying these societies. Another scholar influenced by the myth-and-ritual school, though not necessarily an adherent, was the anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep. Like Tylor, he saw ritual as the means by which one found a place within society, and like other myth-and-ritualists, Van Gennep also saw a universal pattern underlying the rituals performed by a society. Yet he differed in his approach by suggesting another underlying reason for the purpose of ritual. 17 In Myth, Ritual, and Kingship: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Kingship in the Ancient Near East and in Israel, ed. S. H. Hooke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), 122–48. 18 Arvid Kapulrud, Baal in the Ras Shamra Texts (Copenhagen: Gad, 1952). 19 Flemming Friis Hvidberg, Weeping and Laughter in the Old Testament: A Study of Canaanite-Israelite Religion (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1962). 20 Theodor Gaster, Thespis: Ritual, Myth, and Drama in the Ancient Near East (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950). 21 Bell, Ritual, 7.

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Whereas the myth-and-ritualists saw ritual as a religious exercise used to tap into outside powers (supernatural or otherwise), Van Gennep was more concerned with ritual’s sociological role. He believed that ritual maintained the societal order by providing the mechanism for individual transformation from one social state to another. According to Van Gennep, rituals were associated with life crises, those moments when one was no longer able to participate in a social environment but had not yet entered into the next one. Like the myth-and-ritualists, Van Gennep claimed that these passages from state to state resembled the three-part pattern of the dying and rising god and thus his pattern for the initiation rite was made up of three transitional steps: 1) separation, 2) transition, and 3) incorporation.22 In particular, Van Gennep introduced the concept of “liminality” to those studying ritual.23 Taken from the Latin term for “threshold,” liminality decribed the spatial and temporal dimension in which the personal transformation could be enacted with endangering the rest of society. This “space-time” was where the young initiate was placed during the “transition” stage of his initiation pattern. Because liminality existed outside of “normal” space and time, this place was symbolized as death, the womb, the outside, and was a dangerous otherworld because it existed outside of “normal” reality. There the initiate remained until the reintroductory rites by which the individual reentered society, albeit in a transformed identity (manhood, womanhood, chief, mother, father, etc.). Thus Van Gennep blended the myth-and-ritual approach with the theories of functionalists, who believed that ritual had a function outside of religion, particularly in the establishment and creation of social relations (the functionalist approach will be discussed later).24 22 The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 10–11. 23 Ibid., 15–25. 24 See Ronald L. Grimes, Deeply into the Bone: Re-Inventing Rites of Passage (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2000), which presents ancient ritual narratives and modern narratives concerning moments of life crises (birth, marriage, death, etc.). This ritual approach has been overused by classicists leading to a backlash by others. See David D. Dodd, “Introduction,” in Initiation in Ancient Greek Rituals and Narratives, ed. David B. Dodd and Christopher A. Faraone (New York: Routledge, 2003), xiii–iv: “The popularity of initiation as a useful category for studies of classical antiquity goes back, at least in part, to work of JeanPierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet which quite openly declares its debt to both Lévi-Strauss and Van Gennep . . . their work radically changed the study of the ancient Greek world . . . [and has] created a kind of Kuhnian paradigm, which

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in turn has encouraged the often uncritical acceptance of the view that initiation was a common and coherently legible phenomenon within the Greek world and that it provides the hermeneutical keys to interpreting a wide array of cultural and literary productions.” Interestingly, Dodd sees a paucity of intiation approaches in other fields of study as evidence of the weakness of the initiation theory. Ibid., xv: “The concept of initiation had not been a very useful one to the scholars studying other ancient cultures. Although initially disappointing to us, this discovery cast further doubt on the popular use of the initiation paradigm among scholars of ancient Greece, for if such rites and beliefs were indeed universal, why was the paradigm so unhelpful in the study of ancient Chinese, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, or even Roman rites and narratives?” The problem with this reasoning is that it assumes the other studies, including ancient Near Eastern studies, knew and understood the approach well enough to make decisions regarding the effectiveness of the paradigm. In the field of ancient Near Eastern studies, the initiation approach may not have been used because of an unfamiliarity with the approach. Recent studies suggest this ignorance is fading; see Walter Vogels, “D’Égypte à Canaan: un rite de passage,” in Science et Esprit 52/1 (2000), 21–35; Paul A. Kruger, “The Removal of the Sandal in Deuteronomy XXV, 9: ‘A Rite of Passage?’” in Vetus Testamentum 56/4 (1996), 534–39; Jacob Milgrom, “The Priestly Consecration (Leviticus 8): A Rite of Passage,” in Bits of Honey: Essays for Samson H. Levey, ed. Stanley F. Chyet and David H. Elleson (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), 143–44; Nanette Stahl, Law and Liminality in the Bible, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 202 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995); Richard Whitekettle, “Leviticus 12 and the Israelite Woman: Ritual Process, Liminality, and the Womb,” in ZAW 107 (1995), 393–408; Jacob Milgrom, The Anchor Bible—Leviticus 1-16, a New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Auckland: Doubleday, 1991), 566–69; James W. Flanagan, “Social Transformation and Ritual in 2 Samuel 6,” in The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman in Celebration of His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Carol L. Meyers and M. O’Connor (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1983), 361–72. The recent popularity of interdisciplinary studies has no doubt introduced new theoretical applications into ancient Near Eastern studies and I suspect that more studies will emerge using the ritual approach, as the works cited above may be taken to indicate. Thus Dodd’s approach to throwing the baby out with the bathwater may be an overcorrection. See also Bruce Lincoln, Emerging from the Chrysalis: Studies in Rituals of Women’s Initiation (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 1981), 3–4: “Twin dangers attend any study of ritual, however. On the one hand lies superficiality, the more dangerous of the two. Glib multiplication of examples bearing a casual resemblance to one another without careful attention to detail and respect for the integrity of the cultures in which the rites are found not only can prove nothing, but will probably lead to misleading results, as was true in so many pioneer works in anthropology and history of religions. On the hand, the reaction against the excesses of Tylor, Frazer, Wilhelm Schmidt, and others has produced a Scylla to match the Charybdis

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THE WEAKNESSES OF THE MYTH-AND-RITUAL APPROACH UGARITIC AND BIBLICAL STUDIES

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The overwhelming popularity of the myth-and-ritual approach earlier in the last century was the primary cause of its fall as a useful approach to ritual behavior. Because of the ubiquitous use of the approach, criticism was widespread.25 This was particularly true in the use of the approach for Ugaritic and biblical scholars where three valid weaknesses to the approach can be seen. First to be noted was the too general nature of the theory. Beginning with Frazer, though certainly not ending with him, the myth-and-ritual approach sought to place every myth, even every literary genre, into the pattern. For instance, the American literary critic Herbert Weisinger approached Shakespearean tragedy from the myth-and-ritual viewpoint. While this approach allows one to find a general pattern within the plays, Weisinger never seeks to demonstrate the ritual background that Shakespeare himself was supposedly aware of and seeking to encapsulate in his plays.26 As Weisinger’s work demonstrates, the ritual is often not explicit either in the literature or in the history of the community; thus the myth-and-ritual approach is applied, even forced, onto any “mythical” expression (which, in this case, includes plays) whether or not the ritual background is there.27 The same critique could be expressed of the specifics of the approach, for example the New Year festival. In the ancient Near Eastern fields, the of superficiality: provincialism. Thus, there are those who decry the possibility of generalization at all, and others who would build general theories on a single wellchosen example, a dubious method at best.” 25 For some critical discussions see S.G.F. Brandon, “The Myth-and-ritual Position Critically Examined,” in Myth, Ritual, and Kingship, ed. S.H. Hooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 162–91; Joseph Fontenrose, The Ritual Theory of Myth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); William Bascom, “The Myth-Ritual Theory,” in Journal of American Folklore 70 (1957), 103–14. For a more recent critique see also Allan Rosengren Petersen, The Royal God: Enthronement Festivals in Ancient Israel and Ugarit? JSOT Supp. Series 259, Copenhagen International Seminar 5 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 91: Petersen argues that no evidence exists that “an enthronement festival was ever celebrated in Ugarit.” 26 Herbert Weisinger, “The Myth-and-ritual Approach to Shakespearean Tragedy,” in Centennial Review 1 (1957), 142–66. 27 This weakness can be found glaringly in the works of Lord Raglan in which he supposes that all myths, legends, folklore, and fairy tales can be traced back to an “ur-ritual,” specifically the annual ritual death of the king. See his The Hero; The Origins of Religion (London: Watts, 1949); and “Myth-and-ritual,” in Myth: A Symposium, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1955), 76–83.

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understanding of the king as the cultic focus of the society was applied universally to every culture of the ancient Near East. While it is true that certain commonalities do exist, for instance that the king’s value places him in communion with the divine world and allows him to be seen as the medium by which the divine intervenes in the human world, there are enough dissimilarities to make a common, generalized model inaccurate.28 A second weakness associated with the myth-and-ritualists was their own religious views. As noted earlier, Tylor believed that man had “evolved” religiously from the primitive worship of nature to the highly spiritualized and intellectual understanding represented in the Christian thinking of his day. One of Frazer’s primary purposes was to demonstrate the evolutionary aspect of man and religion from the magic to the spiritual, culminating in the Christianity of the modern world. The concept of a dying and resurrected god by whom prosperity and life were guaranteed allowed other scholars to find Christian doctrines within the many literary and prophetic genres of the Old Testament. For example, Brandon, in his critique of the approach, points out that the majority of the original scholars associated with Hooke’s anthology Myth and Ritual were Christian, which colored their approaches to the ancient Near Eastern texts. Hooke’s second anthology, The Labyrinth, constituted solely of a myth-and-ritual approach to Christianity. The Scandinavian school of myth-and-ritualists were especially interested in the Christian application of this approach as evidenced by Mettinger’s study on the king and the Messiah,29 Widengren’s research on the tree of life, Mowinckel’s discussion of Old Testament kingship and his study of the concept of the Son of Man.30 While this has allowed for theological expression, it has also led to a backlash in the scholarly community, as the 28

Brandon suggests that part of the problem was an overemphasis on the Egyptian culture as the template for understanding kingship in the other societies. See Brandon, “Myth-and-ritual Position,” 163–64: “As will be noticed at greater length presently, the exponents of the ‘Myth-and-ritual’ thesis have variously based themselves upon the diffusionist and evolutionary theories of culture; nevertheless it is evident in the earliest statements of the thesis that the view that the pharaonic kingship of Egypt had powerfully influenced the ideas and institutions of neighboring peoples was accepted as virtually axiomatic.” 29 N.D. Tryggve Mettinger, King and Messiah: the Sacral and Civil Legitimation of the Israelite Kings (Lund: LiberLäromedel/Gleerup, 1976). 30 Sigmund Mowinckel, He That Cometh, trans. G.W. Anderson (New York/Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1954). First published as Han som kommer (Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gad, 1951).

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approach began to be viewed as possessing a religious agenda rather than providing an objective tool for analysis. The third weakness found in Ugaritic and biblical scholarship was the almost exclusive use of one type of literary genre, specifically the mythical/poetic literature found in both the Hebrew Bible and the poetic texts from Ugarit. In the case of the Hebrew Bible, the theoretical rituals underlying the myths, specifically the myth of the dying and reviving god, were almost entirely reconstructed in the Psalms without explicit mention of the rituals themselves in the texts. Bentzen’s study in Isaiah took this one step further, constructing a ritual basis for kingship behind the Isaianic text, using the reconstructed ritual complex others had done in the Psalms as his template. As well constructed as these models are, they neglect the ritual material found in the other sections of the Hebrew Bible, specifically the cultic ritual texts of Leviticus, Numbers, and Exodus. In Johnson’s Sacral Kingship in Ancient Israel, for instance, there are eleven scripture references from Leviticus, eight of which are taken from Leviticus 23 and are concerned with those ritual performances which are associated with the New Year.31 Contrast this number of Levitical references with those of the Psalms: 177 psalmic passages are referenced. Yet the preponderance of explicitly ritual material lies in the Levitical passages, not the Psalms. Thus Johnson uses the “mythical” literature to discuss ritual, while practically ignoring those texts that deal formally with the ritual practices of the ancient Israelites. In Ugaritic studies, a similar disconnect exists between the theoretical rituals described by the myth-and-ritualists and the actual ritual texts discovered. This is explained in part by the simple fact that the ritual texts which could have had bearing (the rituals associated with the grape harvest or the first month) were not yet discovered.32 Yet, the fact remains that those rituals that had been discovered were ignored in this approach.33 31

The scriptures discussed have to do with what one is to do on the 1 st and days of the seventh month; these correspond to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, respectively, and fall during the Autumn festival, the period in which Johnson suggests his theoretical practices were performed. 32 Though the ritual text RS 1.003 was discovered in 1929, the parallel text 18.056, which allows for a fuller understanding of the fragmentary text of RS 1.003 and of the chronological significance of the rituals described therein, was found much later. 33 As in biblical and Ugaritic scholarship, the myth-and-ritualists in classics also experienced a backlash; for an excellent, objective study see Robert Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School: J.G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists (New York/

14th

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Though the myth-and-ritual approach is less in favor today than it once was, one is still able to find adherents for it, such as Johannes de Moor, who has attempted to demonstrate that the Ugaritic Baal Myth represents a series of ritual events associated with his reconstructed New Year festival, and who should be recognized for his attempt in bridging the Baal Myth with the ritual texts discovered so far.34 As one might predict, de Moor recognizes his indebtedness to the earlier work of Theodore Gaster. Others, such as Loren Fisher and Brent Knudson, have also attempted to place the Baal story within a cultic setting at a proposed autumnal celebration, commemorating the enthronement of Baal, and, in the person of the king as substitute, his victory over the forces of chaos.35 With that said, even the critics of this specific approach acknowledge positive effects the approach has had for both biblical and Ugaritic studies.36 Moreover, in fields unrelated to the ancient Near East, the approach has adapted and changed, thereby retaining some value as a useful avenue for study. This is especially true of classics since the religious London: Garland Publishing, 1991). For studies on the history of this approach see The Cambridge Ritualists Reconsidered, Proceedings of the First Oldfather Conference, Held on the Campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, April 27–30, 1989, Illinois Classical Studies, Supplement 2, ed. William M. Calder III (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991). 34 Johannes C. de Moor, New Year with Canaanites and Israelites (Kampen: J.J. Kok, 1972); also An Anthology of Religious Texts From Ugarit, Religious Texts Translation Series 16 (Leiden, New York, København, Köln: E.J. Brill, 1987). 35 Loren Fisher and Brent Knudson, “An Enthronement Ritual at Ugarit,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 28/3, 1969, 157–67. 36 For a good overview see Mark Smith, Untold Stories: The Bible and Ugaritic Studies in the Twentieth Century (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2001), 91– 100, 97–98: “The approach generated much later scholarly discussion, but it is not uncommon today for this stage of research to be overlooked or even denigrated. Indeed, to dismiss the work because of its speculative character would force the rejection of a good deal of other scholarship in the field (e.g., some of the work of C.H. Gordon or M.H. Pope). It might be preferable to await new evidence before ruling out such possibilities. In any case, despite some speculation, Scandinavian scholarship rightly raised questions about a possible fall enthronement feast. Furthermore, scholars especially in Scandinavia deserve their due for helping demonstrate the divine mythos of Judean royal ideology, commonly using the Ugaritic texts to do so. Despite the shift away from reconstructions heavily grounded in theory, the approach remains important for the discussions of kingship, especially in the Psalms. In sum, this line of scholarship deserves credit for appreciating ritual and its influence in the shaping of both Ugaritic and biblical literature.”

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baggage associated with biblical studies, and by association Ugaritic studies,37 is absent. There the ritual-and-myth approach is still used to evaluate mythical literature, particularly by combining aspects of this ritual approach with other ritual approaches, such as Van Gennep’s earlier work. Walter Burkert is one such classicist who would be a “classic” mythand-ritualist in the sense that he believes ritual to have existed prior to myth and myth to have arisen for the purpose of explaining ritual; but he differs in his understanding of the primary myth-and-ritual pattern. Instead of ritual representing the death and resurrection of the god/king in order to bring about promised fertility, Burkert ties ritual into the socio-biological imperative of hunting.38 In this he is beholden to René Girard’s notion of sacred violence, according to which violence in the community was ritualized, providing a recognized outlet for the release of societal tension, a view similar to that of Radcliffe-Brown.39 Finally, Burkert is also able to tie his theories into the initiation ritual approach.40 In this specific case, while Burkert is a true myth-and-ritualist, his approach is enhanced through his willingness to accept other approaches and provides the precedent for future Ugaritic and biblical studies referring to the myth-and-ritual approach.

THE RITUAL ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND VICTOR TURNER Though the myth-and-ritual approach is the most familiar ritual theory utilized by Ugaritic and biblical scholarship, it is not the only approach. As mentioned earlier, the work of Tylor and Smith led to another group of ritualists who sought to find the role of ritual within the societal framework, outside of the “chicken-and-egg” question posited by the myth-and-ritual approach. Instead of focusing on the relationship between myth and rituals, 37

N. Wyatt, Myths of Power: a Study of Royal Myth and Ideology in Ugaritic and Biblical Tradition (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 1996), 10. 38 Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, trans. Peter Bing (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1983), 34. Originally published under the same title in German (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1972). 39 See René Girard, La violence et le sacré (Paris: B. Grasset, 1972), English version, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 19: “Violence and sacred are inseparable. But the covert appropriation by sacrifice of certain properties of violence—particularly the ability of violence to move from one object to another—is hidden from sight by the awesome machinery of ritual.” 40 Burkert, Homo Necans, 12, 46, 48.

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these scholars explored the function of ritual in the activities of society and community. Importantly, unlike the myth-and-ritualist school, this separate group of ritualists primarily focused on cultures and societies outside of the ancient Near East. The first of these ritual functionalists was Émile Durkheim, who, like Smith, approached religion as a purely social phenomenon in which ideas and practices sacralize the structure and bonds of the community. Thus religion was a social phenomenon in which ideas and practices sacralize the structure and bonds of the community, ultimately functioning to ensure the unconscious priority of the community’s identification. In other words, ritual was the means by which individuals were introduced and incorporated into the community, thereby legitimating their existence. The weakness of this approach was that Durkheim saw society as the “unique and allencompassing fons et origo of human existence.”41 In Durkheim’s case, “God” was not an outside influence sought out by the community, “God” was the creation of society, thus in a real sense God was society. Notwithstanding this, Durkheim’s insights concerning the role of ritual as the social mechanism ensuring proper social bonding influenced the studies of later scholars. Two such scholars were the anthropologists Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, who both emphasized the role of ritual for minority groups within a society. Malinowski emphasized the role of ritual in alleviating the individual of anxiety, distress, fear, doubt, and sorrow.42 In this case, ritual worked to emphasize the importance of the individual by providing a way to retain individual identity within the larger society while at the same time affirming the primacy of the society. Radcliffe-Brown, on the other hand, suggested that ritual actually created anxieties within the society, but for a constructive purpose. Instead of just affirming or assuaging the extreme mental states of society, ritual actually creates them in order to tighten the social bonds of the community. To Radcliffe-Brown, ritual created these anxieties in order to establish a dependency necessary for the communal structure. As he himself states, “I suggest to you that what makes and keeps man a social animal is not some herd 41

Steven Lukes, Émile Durkheim: His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study (New York: Penguin, 1977), 481. 42 Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science, and Other Essays [1925] (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1974). See also Sex, Culture, and Myth (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1962). Interestingly, Robert Segal includes Malinowski in his anthology of myth-and-ritualists. See The Myth and Ritual Theory, ed. Robert Segal (Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 172–79.

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instinct, but the sense of dependence and the innumerable forms that it takes.”43 Thus Radcliffe-Brown emphasized the role of the “other” in ritual contexts since whatever is being expressed as “other” becomes the focal point for the communal attention, similar to the “scapegoat” theory of Girard. Another anthropologist who studied the role of ritual in the social structure was Victor Turner. He too saw ritual as the means by which individuals were incorporated into society, yet, unlike other anthropologists, he did not necessarily see ritual as only a way in which the status quo could be maintained, either acting as a cathartic event or by imposing the status quo through ritual. Instead, Turner saw ritual as a radical form of social expression engendering change.44 Through his concept of ritual anti-structure,45 ritual was the vehicle by which a society grows, expands into new territory, and, more importantly, survives the growth process.46 According to Turner, ritual “is fundamentally a response to the divisiveness, alienation, and exploitation that are associated with everyday social structure.”47 It was a response because, again according to Turner, ritual (1) relaxes some of the requirements of status differentiation, when, in its transitional stage, it moves participants from a former social identity or condition to a new one; (2) creates direct and egalitarian exchanges and invites experimentation with alternative, communitarian interaction by suspending everyday social statuses and roles, relaxing the mediating structures through which participants encounter one another in everyday social life; and (3) infuses the new community values into everyday social-cultural life by validating the ideal of social structure, which is serving the common good.48 These ritual results required a time and space to be engaged, and in this Turner was indebted to the earlier work of Van Gennep on liminality, the ritual space-time that allowed the participant to encounter the information or revelations needed to effect the change from one social state to 43

Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown, “Religion and Society,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 75 (1945), 38. 44 See Bobby C. Alexander, Victor Turner Revisited, American Academy of Religion Academy Series 74 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), 3: “Ritual is not basically conservative.” 45 The concept that ritual stood in a dialectical relationship with the social structure. 46 Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 298. 47 Alexander, Revisited, 2. 48 Ibid., 2–3.

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another succesfully. It would be there in the liminal state that the participants lost their old identities and began the preparations to gain new ones. But whereas Van Gennep emphasized the results of the transformation made by experiencing liminality, Turner claimed that the true power of ritual was not in the reintroduction of the individual to the community, but the experience of the individual while in the liminal state, in which not only did the individual transit from one state to another, but also touched the potentialities that were possible because of the “unreality” of the state of liminality. The potentiality of the liminal space, created by ritual, made ritual the creative structure for society. Turner himself would say that liminality was “a realm of pure possibility”49 in which the participant could interact with others in “spontaneous, direct, and egalitarian interchanges that [were] less alienating and more existentially satisfying.”50 Because it was more than the vehicle of transition from state to state, but the means by which potentialities were actualized, Turner also believed that ritual was ultimately subversive of the common social framework. By placing everyone in the liminal state in which they could experience and interact with each other outside of society, a state Turner called “communitas,”51 ritual was subversive to the specific society, even dangerous,52 while at the same time being indispensable to the overall social structure by providing the means by which the limitations of society could be redressed. Thus ritual provides society with an acceptable means both to grow and survive; ritual was society’s way of adapting to change.

CATHERINE BELL AND THE PROCESS OF RITUALIZATION In recent years, Catherine Bell has become one of the leading voices in ritual scholarship. In her study, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, she has avoided the temptation to produce a new theory for ritual action, instead focusing on what she terms “ritualization” or the fundamental “way of doing things to trigger the perception that these practices are distinct and the associations that they engender are special.”53 For Bell, ritual study itself is 49 Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 97. 50Alexander, Revisited, 18. 51 Victor Turner, Revelation and Divination in Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 16. 52 Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, 250. 53 Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 220.

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performed only by “secular societies” that “make the distinction between the pursuit of objective knowledge and practice of religion.”54 Thus, to Bell, current ritual theories do more to reveal the nature of the theorists and their society than they do to reveal the nature of the rituals being performed.55 She hastens to point out that this does not necessarily mean that there is no productive value in these different approaches. In fact, she admits to being indebted to them and their analyses, but she views the challenge of ritual study to be, as most appropriately expressed by Maurice Bloch, “How does ritual actually do what it says it does?”56 For Bell, the question should be, “How is it that ritual activities are seen or judged to be the appropriate thing to do?”57 Using Geertz’s presentation of a Javanese child’s burial as an example, she demonstrates that the real question in his analysis should not be how the rite failed Geertz’s ritual model,58 but instead “how minimal ritual procedures were improvised with sufficient respect for tradition that the child was considered buried more or less satisfactorily.”59 Bell contends 54

Ibid. Ibid., 222. A current example of the theorist and his/her society affecting the supposedly objective approach to ritual is the confession by Fritz Graf concerning his and his contemporaries’ affectation to the theories of Van Gennep’s notions of initiation and to the ideas of V. Turner, particularly his concept of ritual antistructure, in “Initiation: A Concept with a Troubled History” in Initiation in Ancient Greek Rituals and Narratives, ed. David B. Dodd and Christopher A. Faraone (London, New York: Routledge, 2003), 6: “Thus, I would argue strongly that part of the fascination with the topic stems from its originally subversive character: it is no coincidence that the relevant dates all crowd around 1968 and that the most visible propagators of the paradigm—Christiane Sourvinou Inwood, Jan Bremmer, Claude Calame, Bruce Lincoln, James Redfield, myself—are in about the same agegroup. The changing world of those years was helpful in overcoming the Nilsonnian paradigm, and the new awareness of society as a powerful entity with a tendency to impose its normative tradition upon reluctant individuals, and to perpetuate itself by pressing the young into a mould from which they had no chance to escape, made the institution of initiation suddenly highly topical and relevant.” As the reader has no doubt surmised, the emphasis on initiation was not based on the cultures studied, but arose from the social concerns of the “objective” scholar. 56 Maurice Bloch, “The Ritual of the Royal Bath in Madagascar,” in Rituals and Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies, ed. David Cannadine and Simon Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 271. 57 Bell, Ritual Theory, 115. 58 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 148. 59 Bell, Ritual Theory, 80. 55

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that by approaching ritual activities with the latter question in mind, scholarship will more correctly approach the importance of ritual. By studying the process of ritualization, the true effectiveness of the ritual can be discerned. Instead of approaching ritual from any given theoretical framework, she views ritual as a practice of human activity, in which ritual seeks to generate a “privileged opposition between ritualized and other activities and the production of ritualized agents through the generation of a structured environment experienced as molding the bodies acting within it.”60 These goals may be studied by approaching ritual practices through “four features of human activity.”61 The first feature is the situational aspect of practice, in which the practice will not, indeed cannot, be understood outside of the “specific context in which it occurs.” Moreover, when the activity is discussed or displaced from its specific context, the activity is no longer exactly the same activity.62 Not much needs to be said concerning this feature as it is a basic tenet of observation. Bell is suggesting that the study of ritual must be continually aware of the danger in displacing the ritual activity from its immediate environment. Doing so changes the very nature of the act and thus an understanding of the act is compromised. The second feature is the strategic aspect of practice, in which the activity is placed within the practicality of an achieved end. There are a variety of strategies that a body may use to perform the activity. Necessary to understanding this feature is the development of schemas within the body. It is Bell’s contention that these schemas consist of binary oppositions, an aspect of ritual noted as far back as Durkheim’s distinction between the profane and the sacred,63 which are not necessarily balanced, but are placed within a hierarchy, some distinctions being more dominant than others. She uses as an example the Catholic mass which incorporates binary oppositions of centered–dispersed (the separate members vs. the communal nature of mass), which is subordinate to the opposition of higher–lower (the raised altar and host, the kneeling and standing, and finally the higher reality, or the spiritual, and the lower, or profane realm), and which is itself

60

Ibid., 101. Ibid., 81. 62 Ibid. 63 Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Rodney Needham (New York: Free Press, 1965). 61

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subordinate to the opposition of internal–external as the “higher” reality is eaten and internalized within the individual.64 The third feature of practice is the essential “misrecognition” of what the activity is doing.65 In fact, much of the effectiveness of the ritual act comes as a result of seeing the purpose of the ritual as something other than what its purpose actually is. For instance, Bell examines the general ritual structure surrounding traditional gift-giving. As she states, “To work effectively, the practice of traditional gift-giving presupposes a deliberate oversight of the fake circulation of fake coin” which makes up symbolic exchange.66 Misrecognition is what “enables the gift or counter-gift to be seen and experienced as an inaugural act of generosity. . . . What is experienced in gift-giving is the voluntary, irreversible, delayed, and strategic play of gift and counter-gift; it is the experience of these dimensions that actually establishes the value of the objects and the gestures.”67 In other words, misrecognition creates ritual effectiveness by helping to create an environment where the ritual act itself will seem natural, inevitable, instead of being perceived as a foreign process which actively creates the ritual environment. To Bell, the purpose of ritualization is to create an environment that continues, perpetuates, and enhances the schemes that make up the environment itself.68 This circularity69 is what is misrecognized by the ritual

64 Bell, Ritual Theory, 102: “Ultimately, the inner-outer scheme comes to dominate the oppositions of higher–lower and centered–dispersed, generating an experience of a higher spiritual authority as an internalized reality.” 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., 82. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., 109: “It is a way of acting that sees itself as responding to a place, event, force, problem, or tradition. It tends to see itself as the natural or appropriate thing to do in the circumstances. Ritualization does not see how it actively creates place, event, force, and tradition, how it redefines or generates the circumstances to which it is responding. It does not see how its own actions reorder and reinterpret the circumstances so as to afford the sense of fit among the main spheres of experience—body, community, cosmos.” 69 Ibid., 140: “Ritualization, the production of ritualized acts, can be described, in part, as that way of acting that sets itself off from other ways of acting by virtue of the way in which it does what it does. Even more circularly, it can be described as the strategic production of expedient schemes that structure an environment in such a way that the environment appears to be the source of the schemes and their values.”

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agents, therefore empowering the agents with the schemes provided by the ritual event.70 The last feature is what she terms “redemptive hegemony.” This refers to the motivation behind the ritual action. Picking up on Kenhelm Burridge’s concept of the redemptive process,71 Bell identifies the efficacy of ritual in its power to enable individuals to “perceive the truth of things” and to guarantee that “they are indeed perceiving the truth of things.”72 This, in turn, allows individuals to find their place within the greater cosmos.73 According to Bell, every individual carries a “symbolic framework”74 that creates a system of a more or less unified moral order.75 Moreover, this framework presents a hierarchical order of power as perceived by the individual. Thus it is made up of “the dominance and subordination that exist within people’s practical and unself-conscious awareness of the world.”76 Ritual then is the process by which the hierarchical order of the cosmos is

70 Ibid., 110: “Ritualization sees the goal of a new person. It does not see how it produces that person—how it projects an environment that, reembodied, produces a renuanced person freshly armed with schemes of strategic reclassification. The complex and multifarious details of ritual, most of which must be done just so, are seen as appropriate demands or legitimate tradition. They are not seen as arbitrary producers of distinctions.” 71 Kenhelm Burridge, New Heaven, New Earth: A Study of Millenarian Activity (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 6: Burridge defines the redemptive process as individuals’ “attempt to discharge their obligations in relation to the moral imperatives of the community.” 72 Bell, Ritual Theory, 84, quoting Burridge, New Heaven, New Earth, 6–7. 73 Bell, Ritual Theory, 141: “The goal of ritualization as a strategic way of acting is the ritualization of social agents. Ritualization endows these agents with some degree of ritual mastery. This mastery is an internalization of schemes with which they are capable of reinterpreting reality in such a way as to afford perceptions and experiences of a redemptive hegemonic order. Ritualization always aligns one within a series of relationship linked to the ultimate sources of power. Whether ritual empowers or disempowers one in some practice sense, it always suggests the ultimate coherence of a cosmos in which one takes a particular place. This cosmos is experienced as a chain of states or an order of existence that places one securely in a field of action and in alignment with the ultimate goals of all action.” 74 David B. Laitin, Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change among the Yoruba (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 19. Quoted in Bell, Ritual Theory, 83. 75 Bell, Ritual Theory, 83. 76 Ibid.

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constructed.77 By using the schemes created by the ritual process, individuals have the means to make a coherent picture of their place in the cosmos, in the community, and within the body itself78 and therefore find purpose within the larger scheme of life.79 By noting these four features of ritual activity, Bell suggests that ritualization is a unique activity of which the sum result is to create ritual masters who can then manipulate, even if unknowingly, the perceived environment, thereby enhancing the ritualized environment by which the understanding of the cosmos was originally perceived. Such an individual would possess what Bell terms a ritual sense80 which she describes as almost a “sixth sense” allowing one to determine what requires ritual and what does not. The four steps mentioned above create the ritual sense possessed by ritual masters and thereby answer her question posited above: “How is it that ritual is perceived as the appropriate response?” In this manner, then, ritual may be still understood as transformative,81 a creative force used by society 77

Ibid., 104: “In sum, ritualization not only involves the setting up of oppositions, but through the privileging built into such an exercise it generates hierarchial schemes to produce a loose sense of totality and systematicity. In this way, ritual dynamics afford an experience of ‘order’ as well as the ‘fit’ between this taxonomic order and the real world of experience.” 78 For Bell, ritualization is concerned with the ritual environment and the immediate body of the ritual agent since it is the body that is the foundation of most, if not all, of the schemes by which the general environment is experienced. Ibid., 107: “The specific strategies of ritualization come together in the production of a ritualized social body, a body with the ability to deploy in the wider social context the schemes internalized in the ritualized environment.” See also 107–8: “Ritual mastery also indicates something of the ‘work’ of ritualization, specifically, the production of a ritualized social agent in whose body lies the schemes by which to shift the organization or significance of many other culturally possible situations.” 79 Ibid., 208: “It is by virtue of these schemes that agents also orchestrate and appropriate for their own purposes the hegemonic order reconstituted in ritual. They do so in ways that open up for them some personal and provisional understanding of how the immediate universe works and how they as individuals fit into it.” 80 Ibid., 98: “The implicit dynamic and ‘end’ of ritualization . . . can be said to be the production of a ‘ritualized body.’ A ritualized body is a body invested with a ‘sense’ of ritual. This sense of ritual exists as an implicit variety of schemes whose deployment works to produce the sociocultural situations that the ritualized body can dominate in some way. . . . This ‘sense’ is not a matter of self-conscious knowledge of any explicit rules of ritual but is an implicit ‘cultivated disposition.’” 81 Ibid., 109–10: “What ritualization does is actually quite simple: it temporally structures a space-time environment through a series of physical movements (using

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to enact change without destroying the larger social fabric and engendering chaos.82

RITUAL STUDY SINCE MYTH-AND-RITUAL (UGARIT) While the above section clearly demonstrates the maturation and depth of ritual theory since the formation of the myth-and-ritual approach, the use of these approaches for the Ugaritic texts has been virtually non-existent. Since the late 1950s and early 1960s, few studies dealing with rituals, either as specific examples or as a concept based on ritual theory, have been presented in the ancient Near Eastern fields of study. This does not mean, however, that ritual has ceased to be an object of study. In Ugaritic, a second stage of ritual study began with the discovery of new ritual texts in 1961 and their publication in 1968 and 1978. These texts, unlike the mythical texts, presented the actual sacrificial rituals to be performed at the various cultic installations. With their publication, a new avenue for research was opened, for they not only provided much new information but also permitted a better understanding of similar texts that had been discovered earlier, often in very fragmentary condition. In 1980, J.M. de Tarragon published Le culte à Ugarit, a descriptive study of the Ugaritic cult based on the ritual texts,83 followed by P. Xella’s collection of the texts themselves, with translation and brief commentary, in

schemes described earlier), thereby producing an arena which, by its molding of the actors, both validates and extends the schemes they are internalizing.” 82 Ibid., 221–22: “Ritualized practices, or necessity, require the external consent of participants while simultaneously tolerating a fair degree of internal resistance. As such they do not function as an instrument of heavy-handed social control. Ritual symbols and meanings are too indeterminate and their schemes too flexible to lend themselves to any simple process of instilling fixed ideas. Indeed, in terms of its scope, dependence, and legitimation, the type of authority formulated by ritualization tends to make ritual activities effective in grounding and displaying a sense of community without overriding the autonomy of individual or subgroups. Ritualization cannot turn a group of individuals into a community if they have no other relationships or interests in common, nor can it turn the exercise of pure physical compulsion into participatory communality. However, ritualization can take arbitrary or necessary common interests and ground them in an understanding of the hegemonic order; it can empower agents in limited and highly negotiated ways.” 83 J.M. de Tarragon, Le culte à Ugarit (Paris: Gabalda, 1980).

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1981.84 Both of these studies were philological in scope, providing information on the language and wording of the rituals themselves, and, though up to date at the time of the publishing, now are incomplete with the discovery of new texts. In 1999, Del Olmo Lete published his updated study on the ritual texts, Canaanite Religion According to the Liturgical Texts of Ugarit,85 in which he explored the ritual and administrative texts that are concerned with the cult, specifically the royal cult.86 Highly informative in nature, del Olmo’s study attempts to explain the purpose and setting, and therefore the meaning, behind the rituals and their application to the larger picture of Ugaritic religion in general. Much of the book is devoted to the funerary cult that del Olmo believes to be reflected in the royal rites. In the last chapter of the book, entitled “The Religion of Everyday Life” (324–88), he groups the incantations, extispicies, prayers, astrological, and mythical texts together, with special attention given to the incantation and omen texts, which he refers to as magic. The religious and ritual material presented in the myths he covers in only twelve pages. More recently, Dennis Pardee has provided the most comprehensive study to date of the ritual texts. Unlike his Spanish colleague, Pardee has not organized the texts according to functional categories but has presented them seriativ, seeking primarily to provide a philological foundation allowing further study of the texts. This two volume study provides the most complete collection of texts having to do with the cultic life of Ugarit, with translation, commentary, and structural analysis of each text and extensive

84 P. Xella, I testi rituali di Ugarit-I: Testi, La Civiltà Fenicia e Punica 21, Studi Semitici 54 (Rome: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 1981). 85 G. del Olmo Lete, Canaanite Religion According to the Liturgical Texts of Ugarit (Bethesda, Maryland: CDL Press, 1999). As he explains in his forward, the updated English version was supplemented by new texts and a revised bibliography up to 1997. The original study was in Spanish, La Religión Cananea Según la Liturgia de Ugarit, Aula Orientalis Supplementa 3 (Sabadell, Barcelona: Editorial AUSA, 1992). 86 For lack of data regarding the non-royal cult at Ugarit, it is difficult to say what may have distinguished the royal cult from that practiced outside the royal sanctuaries—other than, of course, the active participation of the king in person. As Dennis Pardee states in Ritual and Cult at Ugarit, Writings from the Ancient World Volume 10 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2002), 2: “The vast majority of texts . . . arise from royal concerns, either from the sacrificial cult, where the king himself was the primary actor, or from various groups that surrounded the king himself and who were the guardians and the transmitters of the royal ideology and its accompanying theology.”

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appendices and indices which facilitate access to the textual data.87 This was followed up in 2002 by Ritual and Cult at Ugarit.88 This collection, intended for a broader audience, contains only the better preserved texts, which are transliterated and translated. Pardee also includes a section titled “Ritual Activity Outside of the Cult,” which covers a selection of historiolae, incantations, and even administrative texts reflecting perceived ritual activity. Though not denying that the ritual activities described in the mythological texts are worthy of study, Pardee states that the value of the texts examined in his studies is that while the ritual function of the mythological texts themselves is unknown, the texts presented in his volumes “all have an explicit or an implicit immediate link with daily religious practice in the kingdom of Ugarit.”89 Recently, David Clemens’ Sacrifice and Ritual at Ugarit Vol. 1 reviewed all of the cultic, specifically sacrificial, terminology as found in the administrative, legal, and epistolary texts of Ugarit, as well as miscellaneous texts such as scribal exercises, inscribed objects, and the Akkadian texts—in other words, all the textual material outside of the ritual and mythical texts.90 Almost as important as the above research for understanding the role of sacrifice in Ugaritic society is his extensive bibliography on Ugaritic ritual studies to date. His comprehensive bibliography is extremely useful for anyone seeking for more information on the methodologies used in the study of Ugaritic religion. Finally, one other source should be mentioned. In 2001, Mark S. Smith published his history of Ugaritic studies from the beginning to the end of the 20th century. Though Untold Stories is more the history of a field than an actual study of Ugaritic phenomena, its utility is found in Smith’s presentation of the historical approaches and his updates on current research including the ritual studies presented above. Though great work has been done on linguistic analysis of the ritual texts, little has been done using ritual theory for any part of the Ugaritic corpus. In fact, only two recent studies have attempted to do this. The first is Wyatt’s Myths of Power: A Study of Royal Myth and Ideology in Ugaritic and Biblical Tradition in which the author suggests that two principal elements characterize the study of myths: 1) their “intrinsic and internal significance,” 87

Dennis Pardee, Les Textes Rituels 1-2, Ras Shamra-Ougarit XII (Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 2000). 88 Dennis Pardee, Ritual and Cult at Ugarit, Writings from the Ancient World Series, vol. 10 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2002). 89 Ibid., 1. 90 David M. Clemens, Sources for Ugaritic Ritual and Sacrifices, vol. 1, Alter Orient und Altes Testament 284 (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2001).

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which, Wyatt states, is not known; and 2) the “extrinsic significance,” or those patterns imposed on the texts by scholarship, such as the seasonal pattern suggested by de Moor.91 This second element is similar to Bell’s criticism that ritual study is too often a reflection of the scholar’s worldview and not necessarily providing insight on the specific culture. Wyatt argues that if the seasonal pattern were really the “intrinsic” meaning of the myth, this should be reflected in all versions of the Yamm vs. Baal account, including the Greek and Hebrew versions. That it does not in these versions is proof to Wyatt of the dominant, “extrinsic significance[s]” of modern scholarship, not the actual myth’s significance to Ugarit. Myth, to Wyatt, is the primary means of communicating “memes,” or self-replicating cultural units of information,92 suggesting that the older form of meme communication was ritual: “Even older than the myth as the communicator of memes would be the rite, of prelinguistic origin.”93 Born out in later studies, Wyatt has suggested these rituals would have been the older, royal rituals of kingship, the myths reflecting these rituals in specific political incidences.94 The other recent study is Dennis Wright’s Ritual in Narrative: The Dynamics of Feasting, Mourning, and Retaliation Rites in the Ugaritic Tale of Aqhat, which explores the rituals associated with feasting, mourning, and retaliation as found in the story of Aqhat.95 Of special interest is his understanding of the ritual imagery perceivable in these texts, even if no similar ritual practice is actually attested among the other literary genres. According to Wright, the ritual narratives have value within the text, not merely as explanations for ritual activity outside of the text. As he states,

Nicolas Wyatt, Myths of Power: A Study of Royal Myth and Ideology in Ugaritic and Biblical Tradition (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 1996), 124: “The first is the 91

intrinsic and internal significance, of which we cannot really say very much, beyond a literary analysis of its structure, the power of its imagery, and so forth.” 92 Ibid., 125. 93 Ibid. 94 Nicolas Wyatt, “Ilimilku the Theologian: The Ideological Roles of Athtar and Baal in KTU 1.1 and 1.6,” in “There’s Such Divinity Doth Hedge a King”: Selected Essays of Nicolas Wyatt on Royal Ideology in Ugaritic and Old Testament Literature (Ashgate, 2005), 221–30, 228–29; originally published as Ex Mesopotamia et Syria Lux: Festschrift fur Manfried Dietrich zu seinem 65. Geburtstag am 6.11.2000, AOAT 281, ed. O. Loretz, K. Metzler, H. Schaudig (Munster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2002), 845–56. 95 David P. Wright, Ritual in Narrative: The Dynamics of Feasting, Mourning, and Retaliation Rites in the Ugaritic Tale of Aqhat (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2001).

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FILLETS OF FATLING AND GOBLETS OF GOLD The ritual motifs and scenes . . . are not simply selections from actual ritual texts or records of practice mechanically inserted into a text. The scenes have been composed, apart from whatever relationship they have to actual practice, to serve the specific narrative context. 96

Wright explores the ritual imagery in the Aqhat Epic using Ronald Grimes’s theory of “felicitous” (or in other words, successful) and “infelicitous” (unsuccessful) rituals.97 It is Wright’s hope that, by exploring the ritual imagery of the text, the “views and attitudes towards ritual” in the general time and place of the text’s origin will be revealed. He also suggests that the text provides clues as to why ritual may fail and ultimately to the positive use of ritual within a society, especially as a means to create an equal footing between subordinates and superiors.98 This last theme relies on the theoretical approaches of the social anthropologists, particularly Turner, who suggests that ritual becomes the means by which members of society can create a space by which interaction, even movement, between levels of social hierarchy can be enacted. What is particularly important in Wright’s study, and to a lesser extent of Wyatt’s, is that they broaden the use of ritual from strictly cultic texts that were actually performed to other textual genres, in which the rituals do not necessarily need to have been actually performed to demonstrate the transformative power of ritual events. Thus, literary texts may use ritual imagery to signify transformations and social change in the text. In the Aqhat Epic, whether or not the Danil, Aqhat, and Pughat are actual individuals is not important, but their ritualized actions resonate with the reader or listener because of the transformative nature of ritual understood by those who actually perform ritual.99 96

Ibid., 6. Ibid., 19. See also Ronald L. Grimes, Ritual Criticism: Case Studies in Its Practice, Essays on Its Theory (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990). 98 Ibid., 19: “With this, the story hints at some of the reasons that agents might give to explain away ritual failure. The story shows, too, that ritual is not necessarily a passive experience in which subordinates simply bow to superiors. Those of lesser status, even humans, might use ritual to fulfill their particular desires when they are in opposition to the desires of the powerful.” 99 Nicolas Wyatt, “Epic in Ugaritic Literature” in A Companion to Ancient Epic, ed. J.M. Foley (BCAW, Oxford, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 246–54, (reprinted in N. Wyatt, Word of Tree and Whisper of Stone: And Other Papers on Ugaritic Thought, Gorgias Ugaritic Studies 1 [Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2007], 143–53), 254: “Wright (2001) has examined the literary use of the ritual accounts in Aqhat. He notes that the ritual scenes in Keret are too fragmentary for a similar detailed study, 97

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RITUAL STUDY SINCE MYTH-AND-RITUAL (HEBREW BIBLE) Though this study is primarily concerned with the Ugaritic texts, the similarities between that corpus and the Hebrew bible necessitates a brief review of ritual study in the field of biblical studies as well. Biblical studies, following the backlash against the myth-and-ritual approach of the 1960s, have in recent years concentrated on the actual cultic practice presented in the ritual texts of Leviticus, Exodus, and Numbers, paralleling the work of Ugaritic scholarship, an approach that reflects the similar terminology characteristic of the sacrificial rituals of ancient Israel and Ugarit. The primary ritual practice that was the object of these cultic studies is animal sacrifice, no doubt because the extant texts concerning cultic ritual are preoccupied with sacrifice. Menahem Haran explains this emphasis on sacrifice in his own study: So far as the public was concerned these activities [religious acts] would be expressed for the most part in offering sacrifices; other activities such as prostrations, prayer, processions, or dances, belonged to the periphery of the cult and in Old Testament times were considered a kind of substitute for, or supplement to, the offering of sacrifices.100

Haran approached the cult by reviewing what was known about the temple precincts themselves; the rituals performed there did not receive the same attention. It was Haran’s contention that understanding the symbolism of the architecture would enhance the meaning of the rituals prescribed for those involved in the sacrificial rituals. Baruch Levine in his work, In the Presence of the Lord, explored the cultic terminology of ancient Israel, specifically the meaning of the Xlmm sacrifices and the sacrifices in connection with kpr, which he calls sacrifices of but mutatis mutandis, his conclusions probably fit both narratives, the surviving text of Aqhat devoting the surprisingly high figure of 82% of the total to ritual (Wright, 2001, 8). Baal is also well-endowed with ritual sequences, including two accounts of an enthronement (KTU 1.1, iv 1.6 i), and is thus also eminently suitable for such analysis, particularly with regard to royal ideology. This approach does not seek to reintroduce the old myth-and-ritual agenda by the back door: what it demonstrates fairly persuasively is the way in which the non-linguistic communication system of ritual parallels the role of language, thus reinforcing at every turn the literary tensions and dynamics of the text, and indeed constituting a subliminal reinforcement of any ideological agenda the text may have.” 100 Menahem Haran, Temple and Temple Service in Ancient Israel (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1985), v.

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expiation.101 He explored the role of the Xlmm offerings in comparison with the supposedly similar sacrifices, also designated by the term Xlmm, attested at Ugarit and sought to contrast the supposedly unique nature of the Israelite sacrificial system as compared to the Canaanite system (i.e., Ugaritic). In two appendices he explores the term zbH and its relationship with comparable terms in the related Semitic languages, specifically Ugaritic dbH and Xlmm kll in the Punic tariffs. As with many other studies which have emerged since the discovery of the Ugaritic texts, his study dealt with the comparative sacrificial material, with particular attention to similar terminology. The most comprehensive study to date on the sacrificial rituals of the Israelite cult is Jacob Milgrom’s impressive work for the Anchor Bible Commentary series on the Book of Leviticus.102 Milgrom devotes over one thousand pages to the rituals described therein. Though these chapters comprise more than just sacrificial rituals, it is these that receive the most attention, especially the purification offerings. This emphasis reflects his personal theory as to what exactly required purification. His study of the sacrifices makes up almost half of the volume. Very briefly, following his study of the data from Leviticus, Milgrom approaches the role of sacrifices in other biblical genres, specifically the prophetic material. This discussion is three and half pages long103 and does not discuss the rituals or ritual imagery found in those genres in any detail comparable to what is found in his study of Leviticus. Instead his focus is on whether the cultic practices were or were not repudiated in these texts. As was noted above, all of the studies discussed to this point have dealt with the material found in the legal and cultic texts of the Hebrew Bible and, other than Milgrom’s brief survey of prophetic attitudes towards the cult, none approaches the ritual material found elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. R. J. Thompson, in his study Penitence and Sacrifice in Early Israel Outside the Levitical Law, does attempt to discuss those sacrificial rituals outside of the legal texts, but this study is limited in scope as it only deals with animal sacrifices and not with other cultic rituals associated with the cult.104 Again, like Ugaritic studies, it has come about only recently that the concept of ritual, and theoretical approaches to ritual, outside of the cult 101

Baruch A. Levine, In the Presence of the Lord: A Study of Cult and Some Cultic Terms in Ancient Israel (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974). 102 Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16: a New Translation with Introduction and Commentary—Anchor Bible Commentary Series v. 3 (New York: Doubleday, 1991). 103 Ibid., 482–85. 104 R. J. Thompson, Penitence and Sacrifice Outside of Levitical Israel: An Examination of the Fellowship Theory of Early Israelite Sacrifice (Leiden: Brill, 1963).

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have been explored in Hebrew Bible scholarship. Ithamar Gruenwald has approached the topic of ritual in ancient Israel in his study, Rituals and Ritual Theory in Ancient Israel.105 Like Milgrom, Gruenwald notes that there is a lack of “sufficient interest in the detailed study of rituals”106 and mentions the need to study these rituals from the perspectives of new anthropological approaches (Gruenwald uses the term “behavioral” instead of “anthropological”). In his own approach, ritual is a “form of behavior that reflects the mind that generates them,”107 a definition reminiscent of Catherine Bell’s process of ritualization, specifically as he introduces his own form of Bell’s concept of schemata in the production of the ritualized environment. For Gruenwald, ritual is “an independent, autonomous, indigenous—that is sui generis—form of reaction, or expression to a specific condition or form of existence.”108 He approaches the rituals from the point of view of ritual theory without including theological considerations, stating that “people doing rituals, in their specifically religious configuration, do not necessarily have a theology that creates for them a required context.” He proves this by pointing out that “many rituals are done by religious people who have 105 Ithamar Gruenwald, Rituals and Ritual Theory in Ancient Israel. The Brill Reference Library of Judaism vol. 10 (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2003). His study is divided into six chapters, of which chapters 2 and 5 are concerned with ritual as found in the Hebrew Bible. Like Milgrom and others, Gruenwald focuses his study on the specific rituals of sacrifice. In chapter 2, he concludes that ritual is the result of ethos, or the way of life, of the individual. Using the rituals in Genesis, specifically the sacrifice rituals, he suggests that it is the economic ethos of ancient Israel, primarily semi-nomadic pastoralists vs. the urban agriculturalists, that have produced the rituals described and the literary stories that emerge. Thus, he contends that the rituals present in the Hebrew Bible (and the later Mishnah) constitute a formalized pattern of behavior designed to answer questions concerning proper economic relationships. Moreover, these rituals were formative to the structure of any society. In this sense, like the other scholars mentioned above, Gruenwald picks the rituals of sacrifice as his test cases, which he considers to be at the heart of ritual (see page 180). By studying the rituals of sacrifice he notes the transformative nature of sacrifice from a dangerous state of being to a safe state of being suggested by Turner and the social anthropologists (185): “It will be argued, here, that, as in the case of ritual in general, a major factor in the shaping of sacrifices is the intimation that a certain reality, or existence, is either under threat or actually undergoing disintegration. The sacrificial ritual is done to prevent this from happening or to repair the damage that has already been done.” 106 Ibid., x. 107 Ibid., ix. 108 Ibid., x.

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neither the language nor the mental capacity to create, or engage in theological activity.”109 While this approach is not without difficulties, particularly the concept that ritual emerges without the impetus of a hierarchy of perceived concepts,110 credit must be given to Gruenwald for emphasizing the transformative nature of ritual as found in the Hebrew Bible.111 Whether it is Bell’s creation of the ritual master, Victor Turner’s liminal community, Van Gennep’s initiate, Malinowski’s reintegrated minority, Radcliffe-Browne’s legitimated minority, or Durkheim’s created community, all of these theoretical approaches at heart are concerned with the transformation of the ritual participant. Thus, Gruenwald’s primary contribution to the field of ancient Near Eastern studies, and particularly to the biblical studies field, is the introduction of ritual as a means of transformation, which lies at the heart of the anthropological approach. Saul Olyan’s recent study, Rites and Rank, also approaches the study of ritual in the cult, specifically looking at the hierarchical distinctions in the cultic and the quasi-cultic rites, such as Passover.112 For Olyan, ritual is not just a “reproductive activity in which social distinctions are mirrored, but also a productive operation in which social distinctions are realized.” Like Bell, Olyan suggests that rituals “shape reality” while creating hierarchies “by bounding or restricting access to ritual contexts such as the temple, the Passover table, and the war camp feast.” This in turn creates “unequal social relations by limiting access to particular ritual space, actions, and items that are associated with high status, prestige, and honor.” 113 The distinctions are often found in dyadic (clean vs. unclean, holy vs. profane, inside vs. outside, etc.) or triadic (priests/Levites/Israelites, Israelites/ resident outsider/nonresident outsider, etc.) constructs, similar to Bell’s function of schemata in the ritualizing of an act. The usefulness of this study, beyond the bibliography, is the link between ritual and the social realm, particularly

109

Ibid., 3–4. Gruenwald himself notes this concern on page x: “I am fully aware of the fact that viewing rituals as behavioural expressions of the human mind, regardless of any ideology or pre-existing symbolism, is likely to elicit criticism.” 111 Ibid., vi–vii: “In any event, all rituals are conducive to creating desired changes, technically called ‘transformations.’” 112 Saul M. Olyan, Rites and Rank: Hierarchy in Biblical Representations of Cult (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 113 Ibid., 4. Interestingly, all three ritual activities are associated with the meal event. 110

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Olyan’s view that ritual, even the cultic ritual, creates the space to enact change as well as solidify social distinctions. More recently, Saul Olyan has published a study on the rituals associated with mourning.114 Like others, Olyan has noted the dearth of ritual approaches in biblical studies and therefore sought to address.that by highlighting a ritual form that is found outside of the cult and yet still a normative part of Israel culture, even integral to the community of ancient Israel.115 Hopefully familiar by now to the reader, Olyan suggests that the rituals associated with mourning in the Hebrew Bible created a “special society” between the mourners and the dead, which was situated in the new liminal state “between the realm of the living and the dead.”116 The second study is David Janzen’s study on sacrifice in the Priestly writings, the Deuteronomistic History, Ezra–Nehemiah, and Chronicles.117 By looking at these four literary groupings, Janzen explores different “worldviews” held by the writers and suggests that the role of those rituals associated with sacrifice changed depending on the “worldview.” In light of this, Janzen is indebted to Bell’s notion of “redemptive hegemony,”118 suggesting that the ritual of sacrifice brought about a ritual morality which differed from worldview to worldview, and that each of these ritual moralities was exercised and enhanced by the particular social group for the purpose of advancing its worldview. For instance, according to Janzen the worldview presented in the Priestly writings was one of gradations of holiness, beginning with the different separations depicted in Genesis of which was exemplified in the separations within the sacrificial system.119 Thus sacrifice was presented as natural and expected and the scheme of holy gradations was considered equally natural. The Deuteronomistic History, on the other hand, held a worldview concerned with the moral need for national 114

Saul M. Olyan, Biblical Mourning: Ritual and Social Dimensions (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 115 Ibid., 1: “Though groundbreaking work on specific aspects of biblical mourning rites has been published during the past fifteen years, no adequate paradigm has been developed for understanding the ritual dimensions of mourning as it is represented in biblical and cognate literatures. Nor have scholars investigated the social dimensions of biblical mourning in any serious way.” 116 Ibid., 13. 117 David Janzen, The Social Meanings of Sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible: A Study of Four Writings, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 344 (Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2004). 118 Ibid., 41. 119 Ibid., 92–119.

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obedience. In this worldview, the king lies at the heart of the ritual, not because the ritual benefits the king, but because the king exists to “rightly arrange sacrifice” between God and Israel.120 Though Janzen looks only at the rituals of sacrifice and examines these four groups of texts, his study is of value for understanding how Bell’s process of schemata and production of ritual masters can be used in interpretation of ancient Near Eastern ritual. Also important is Janzen’s recognition that other worldviews may have existed in ancient Israel’s culture that can be of value in future studies concerning Israel’s ritual practices.121 Finally, in 2007 Gerald A. Klingbeil’s study, Bridging the Gap: Ritual and Ritual Texts in the Bible, was published providing a brief, but useful history of ritual studies along with explorations into different ritual approaches to biblical ritual.122 Among its useful elements, is its synopsis of approaches to biblical ritual (and religious ritual in general) throughout Western history. Particularly helpful is the appendix listing every ritualized action, as recognized by Klingbeil, in the Pentateuch. While this study is not a comprehensive volume of all biblical ritual, a point that Klingbeil acknowledges, its importance lies in its familiarizing the reader with the concept of ritual and of the need to explore biblical ritual behavior to truly understand the text. As Klingbeil himself states: I can see a future theological seminary training for the 21st century. In its curriculum, students encounter ritual right in their first year of study. Their familiarity with ritual will enable them to understand better the cultural and religious processes that shape our present world.123

COMMENSALITY AND RITUAL THEORY One of the primary ritualized acts that Bell exploits in her discussion of the concept of ritual is that of the meal event, which includes the act of 120

Ibid., 244, 253. Ibid., 252: “One might well imagine that a study of the sacrificial system of a social group defined by Zion theology, wherein the king is YHWH’s son (Ps. 2:7), invested by the divine with special earthly powers which mimic those of YHWH, king of the gods (Ps. 89:20–38 [ET 89:19–37]), might show that for this group sacrifice could indeed say something quite different about the relation between God, king and people.” 122 Gerald A. Klingbeil, Bridging the Gap: Ritual and Ritual Texts in the Bible, Bulletin for Biblical Research Supplements 1 (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2007). 123 Ibid., 244. 121

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commensality, or the act of eating and drinking together.124 Because of the universal nature of the meal event (which includes the provision of food, the invitation or non-invitation of guests, the utensils, etc.), it has been a primary object of study within the larger fields of social anthropology and sociology. As many have noted, meals are one of the primary ways in which social interactions are defined.125 Often, relationships are made, maintained, or destroyed through the ritualized actions associated with the meal.126 The first, and still among the most respected, collection of studies concerning the meal event is the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Noting that societies were both the products of nature and culture. Moreover, LéviStrauss suggested that this binary composition was understood by most, if not all, societies and that tension within any individual community was the result of the interaction between these two forces. Like others before him, Lévi-Strauss noted that linguistic binary opposites mirror the opposition of the nature and culture and therefore were useful tools in exploring the condition of mankind.127 124

Bell, Ritual Theory, 90–91. E.N. Anderson, Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture (New York and London: New York University Press, 2005), 125: “Food as communication finds most its applications in the process of defining one’s individuality and one’s place in society.” See also Susan Pollock, “Feast, Funerals, and Fast Food in Early Mesopotamian States,” in The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires, ed. Tamara L. Bray (New York, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers), 17–38, 19: “The ways that food and drink are prepared, presented, and consumed contribute to the construction and communication of social relations, ranging from the most intimate and egalitarian to the socially distant and hierarchical.” See also Arjun Appadurai, “Gastropolitics in Hindu South Asia,” in American Ethnologist 8 (1981), 494–511, 494: “The ubiquity and necessity of eating and drinking, along with the multitude of foods and beverages one can consume and ways one can consume them, contribute to rendering food and drink ‘a peculiarly powerful semiotic device’ capable of ‘bear[ing] the load of everyday social discourse.’” 126 Tamara L. Bray, “The Commensal Politics of Early States and Empires,” in The Archeaeology and Politics of Food, 1–16, 9: “Ethnographic, ethnohistoric and contemporary evidence indicates that commensal activities are one of the primary arenas of social action. Indeed food, feasts, and banquets have been implicated in significant ways in processes of social change and historical transformations. It is clear, too, that social identity and status are handily constructed and communicated via food-related practices and preferences.” 127 Roy C. Wood, The Sociology of the Meal (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 9. 125

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Nowhere was this binary composition more explicit to Lévi-Strauss then in the preparation of meals. In his most famous study, The Raw and the Cooked, he sought to demonstrate that the binary relationship between cooked food and raw food was, at root, the culmination of the tense relationship between culture (cooked) and nature (raw).128 Later, keeping the same basic binary relationship between culture and nature in mind, he included another binary relationship, normal and transformed, that coincided with the other relationship. Between these two binary structures he created the culinary triangle in which cooked food stood at one corner (culture and transformation) and raw food at another (nature and normal), with rotted food at the third (nature and transformation). Between each of these three points lay a continuum for other modes of food preparation. Smoking, for instance, created a “cultural” good, in that smoked food was now preserved longer than other natural foods. Boiling, on the other hand, also created a transformed product, but boiling, to Lévi-Strauss, reflected a rotting process more than the cooking process, so boiling lay closer to the natural, transformative side of the continuum.129 Similar to the myth-and-ritualists, Lévi-Strauss’s generalist viewpoint has led to much criticism, and yet those who study the ritual of meals today still appreciate his influence. After Lévi-Strauss, the work of Mary Douglas is perhaps the most influential in the study of commensality. A cultural anthropologist, Mary Douglas began her work studying the Lele people in Congo and she has conducted a variety of other studies, including a study of the eating habits of contemporary Britain.130 Like Lévi-Strauss, Douglas has devoted much of her academic career to the study of meals. Unlike the generalists however, Douglas believes that meals, like other elements of human society, are best studied from small-scale observations. Foremost among her observations has been that the meal is primarily a social event, filled with symbolic meaning through which the particular society communicates, particularly within the institution of the family:

128 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper & Row, 1969). First published as Cru et le Cuit (Paris: Plon, 1964). 129 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Culinary Triangle,” Partisan Review 33 (1965), 586–95. 130 Mary Douglas and M. Nicod, “Taking the Biscuit: The Structure of British Meals,” in New Society 30/637 (1974), 744–47; also Mary Douglas, Culture and Food, Russell Sage Foundation Report 1976–77, (1976), 51–58.

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Food is . . . the medium through which a system of relationships within the family is expressed. Food is both a social matter and part of the provision for care of the body. Instead of isolating the food system, it is instructive to consider it frankly as one of a number of family body systems.131

Douglas saw the meal event as a ritualized act displaying the microcosm, or model of the universe, upon which the community is established. She suggested that these models are based on “established similarities,”132 which are themselves based on analogies, which, for Douglas, are cultural constructions. For instance, the likeness between the majesty of a lion and the majesty of a king are not natural but culturally created. There is nothing in the natural world that produces the similarity and in fact another society may not see such an analogy at all. Thus, like other aspects of society, analogies are learned. Douglas suggested that rituals organize “space and time in conformity with established cosmic analogies, and in doing so, stabilize and reinforce volatile thoughts that would otherwise be quickly dispersed.”133 These microcosms, made up of cultural analogies, seek to reduce the ambiguity of communication.134 Thus good communication is a result of a proper microcosm and the meal, as a form of ritualized communication, can also be a microcosm of the family structure itself. She has applied these ideas in her studies concerning the dietary laws instituted in ancient Israel. Attracted to them by her work on the Lele dietary rules, they have been one of her central concerns over the past thirty years beginning with her book Purity and Danger135 to her latest, Leviticus as Literature.136 Though she admits to not being a trained biblical scholar, her work has been influential to those in biblical studies concerned with the dietary laws in Leviticus and cultic pollution in general.

131

Mary Douglas, “Food as a System of Communication,” in In the Active Voice, ed. Mary Douglas (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982 [1974]), 86. 132 Mary Douglas, Jacob’s Tears: The Priestly Work of Reconciliation (Oxford: Oxford Claredon Press, 2004), 134. 133 Ibid., 135. She goes on to say, “A dominant microcosm collects, organizes, and absorbs knowledge as providing elements of a world scheme. This is one of the ways in which ambiguity is reduced. . . . The microcosm concentrates meaning, and by that means helps to hold it steady.” 134 Ibid., 136. 135 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (New York: Praeger, 1966). 136 Mary Douglas, Leviticus as Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 66–152.

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Of particular interest to this study are her insights into the role of the meal event and the political structure of a community. As mentioned above, Douglas believes that the meal demonstrates the social hierarchy that exists in a given community. Therefore, status and power differences are accentuated in the meal event by virtue of the ritual activities associated with the meal event. Observations including who is invited, where they are to be seated, and what is being offered all provide clues to the structures within the society and the means by which the different participants interact within that society. Thus, the meal becomes not just a display of social status but the means to actually stabilize the society itself and one of the primary ritualized means by which a community may perpetuate itself. Since Douglas, different aspects to the political nature of meals have been the subject of rich and varied work. For instance, Jack Goody concentrated on the role that meals play in maintaining social hierarchies by demonstrating the control and access to food137 while Carol Counihan and Steven Kaplan gathered a group of scholars to explore relationships between gender, food, and power.138 Particularly useful is Michael Dietler’s study “Feasts and Commensal Politics in the Political Economy” in which he distinguishes the role of feasts as ritualized events that have political results and are differentiated from daily eating habits.139 Dietler suggests that feasts, or representations of commensal hospitality, act as a “specialized form of gift exchange that establishes the same relations of reciprocal obligation.”140 In the larger context of hospitality, the consumption of food and drink highlights the abilities and responsibilities of the different ritual actors, or specialists. Thus, the interaction of these participants becomes what Dietler terms “commensal politics.”141 Like Douglas, Dietler notes that the 137 Jack Goody, Cooking, Class, and Cuisine: A Study in Comparative Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 138 Carole Counihan and Steven Kaplan, eds., “Food and Gender: Identity and Power,” in Food and Gender: Identity and Power (New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998). 139 Michael Dietler, “Feasts and Commensal Politics in the Political Economy,” in Food and the Status Quest, ed. Polly Wiessner and Wulf Schiefenhövel (Providence, Oxford: Berghahn Books), 87–126, 89: “Feasts are, in fact, ritualized social events in which food and drink constitute the medium of expression in the performance of what Cohen has called ‘politico-symbolic drama’. As public ritual events, in contrast to daily activity, feasts provide an arena for the highly condensed symbolic representation of social relations.” 140 Ibid., 90. 141 Ibid.

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power to maintain the social hierarchy is experienced within the meal event; however, he also notes the “potential for manipulation by individuals or groups attempting to alter or make statements about their relative position within that social order,”142 often occurring during “rites of passage.”143 Dietler also incorporates the theories of Marcel Mauss and the act of gifting, suggesting that the meal is fundamentally a form of gift exchange, with all the attendant social obligations that gift-giving brings with it.144 In particular, Dietler emphasizes Mauss’s theory that giftgiving is at heart a symbolic, often ritualized process of reciprocity, in which a return in some form is expected when giving a gift, which can include loyalty and solidarity.145 Dietler suggests that feasts, as a form of gift-giving, fall into three primary types, each demonstrating its own form of commensal politics. The first feast type is the “entrepreneurial” feast, in which the commensal hospitality of an individual is manipulated for the acquisition of “symbolic capital” recognized as informal political power and/or economic power among the community. More specifically, the power sought is the ability to influence group decisions or actions by means of the relationships that are created and/or maintained through the commensal act. Often this form of feasting becomes the means to acquire political power and move upward in the community’s hierarchy. It may also be a way in which those in power demonstrate their own status by reaffirming the relationships that exist among the participants in the feast, thus the primary characteristic of this 142

Ibid. Ibid., “Feasts are very often intimately embedded in rites of passage or life-crisis ceremonies, such as funerals.” 144 Marcel Mauss, The Gift, trans. W.D. Halls (New York, London: W.W. Norton, 1990). First published as Essai sur le Don (Presses Universitaires de France, 1950). See pages 28–30 for examples of meals as gifts. See also Aafke E. Komter, Social Solidarity and the Gift (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Dietler, “Feasts,” 90: “Commensal hospitality may be viewed as a specialized form of gift exchange that establishes the same relations of reciprocal obligation between host and guest as between donor and receiver in the exchange of other more durable types of food.” 145 Mauss, Gift, 47–83. See also J. Frow, Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity (Oxford: Claredon, 1997), 124: “There is nothing inherent in objects that designates them as gifts; objects can almost always follow varying trajectories. Gifts are precisely not objects at all, but transactions and social relations.” See also David Cheal, The Gift Economy (London: Routledge, 1988), 21: “The social significance of individuals is defined by their obligations to others, with whom they maintain continuing relationships. It is the extended reproduction of these relationships that lies at the heart of a gift economy.” 143

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feast type is the continual renegotiation of power among the ritualized parties, in particular the movement within the social hierarchy. The second feast type is the “patron-role” feast. This feast “is the formalized use of commensal hospitality to symbolically reiterate and legitimize institutionalized relations of assymetrical social power.”146 This feast is characterized by the lack of expectation that equal reciprocation will be coming. Instead, the feast “symbolically expresses the formalization of unequal relations of status and power”147 and yet emphasizes the unity of the different members of the hierarchy. The role of host is seen as a duty of the one who holds a prominent or elevated position within the community, while the guests symbolically acknowledge their role as dependents and thus, the feast is the political means to institutionalize the authority linking unequal participants, while bonding the community’s members together.148 The third feast type Dietler labels the “diacritical” feast. Similar in many ways to the patron-client feast, Dietler suggests that this feast also serves to legitimize the inequality existing among different social statuses. Yet unlike the patron-client feast, this feast differs in “symbolic force,” emphasizing the style of the meal event versus the quantity, and therefore the commensal bond that exists between the unequal participants in the patronclient feast is not exemplified, but rather it is the “exclusive and unequal commensal circles” existing among members of the society, particularly 146 Michael Dietler, “Rituals of Consumption, Politics, and Power in African Contexts,” in Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power, ed. Michael Dietler and Brian Hayden (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institute Press, 2001), 82–83. See also pages 65–114. 147 Cheal, The Gift Economy, 97. 148 Joan M. Gero, “The Practice of Stately Manners,” in The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires, ed. Tamara L. Bray (New York, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers), 285–88, 287: “Feasts present a unique occasion to celebrate together and experience a commonality, all the while asserting the distinctions of social identity that are increasingly dividing the commonality. Feasts provide common social experiential references in time and space for an increasingly dispersed, segmented, and hierarchically arranged social body. Feasts create and intensify the microcosm of social and political and economic complexity that agriculturalists, producers, kin and neighbors must grow accustomed to under conditions of intensifying social complexity and power consolidations. One gets used to what it means to be a citizen.” See also Thomas M. Bolin, “The Role of Exchange in Ancient Mediterranean Religion and Its Implications for Reading Genesis 18–19,” in Journal for Study of the Old Testament 29/1 (2004), 37–56, 45: “Hospitality was the creation of a temporary patronage relationship with the host as patron and the guest as client.”

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those of the upper classes of society, that is embodied.149 This is reflected primarily in a shift of emphasis from quantity to style in the event. This meal, by its nature, is intra-class, meaning the significance comes not from social or communal parties outside but from within the same social class. Thus Dietler states these meals are often competitive between members of the same class and serve to define the elite status as well as demonstrate the competition that exists within this class. Rarely does this feast become the means by which one moves from one class to another, unlike the entrepreneurial feast. Instead, this meal may be emulated by lower social classes and reflect changes in the style of the elite. Though Dietler is concerned specifically with the act of the feast,150 his presentation can be applied other types of meal events. As Dietler himself acknowledges, all meals are ritualized events, highly structured sequences of action that serve to shape the “habitus” of individuals, inculcating dispositions guiding practice and naturalizing the social order. They differ from more formal ritual events [feasts] mainly in being less consciously public performances. 151

In other words, the only real distinction between feasts and other meals is the overt public nature of the feast. Thus the ritual nature of the meal event is one of the primary means to depict the social structure as well as provide the mechanism for change within that community.152 These changes are 149

Dietler, “Feasts,” 98. Ibid.: “care must be taken not to confuse these [feasting practices in the archaeological record] with the kinds of practices that may be used to differentiate feasts in general, as public ritual events, from everyday informal consumption.” 151 Ibid., 117. 152 Turner’s liminality and the liminal power to transform community have been evoked in recognizing the importance of meals in the restructuring of divorced families. See Jacqueline Burgoyne and David Clarke, “You are What You Eat: Food and Family Reconstitution,” in The Sociology of Food and Eating, ed. Anne Murcott (England: Gower Publishing Company, 1983), 152–63. Since meals are the primary symbol of the family structure, crises are found in or associated with meal events. Moreover, since meals often symbolize the relationships of members within the family structure, gender roles, as well as familial ones, are often found within the meal event. See also Paul Fieldhouse, Food & Nutrition: Customs & Culture (London, Sydney, New Hampshire: Croom Helm, 1986), 75: “The major transitional crises of the life myth, the rites of passage, are marked in almost all societies by ritual or ceremonial distribution and consumption of food. Cohen hypothesizes that these important life events signify changes in socioeconomic relationships and 150

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then reflected in the greater social and political schemata of the community. Thus commensality is one of the most common and most important of ritualized actions observed.153

COMMENSALITY IN UGARITIC AND BIBLICAL STUDIES While commensality has enjoyed strong interest within the field of GrecoRoman study, including New Testament studies,154 and even, to some responsibilities; as food usages commonly symbolize social relationships, changes in the latter are noted symbolically by displays, exchanges, and consumption of food.” 153 See Food and the Status Quest for the role of meal events in political hierarchy. For a modern example of this idea see Warren Belasco, “Food and the Counterculture: A Story of Bread and Politics” in Cultural Politics of Food and Eating: A Reader, Blackwell Readers in Anthropology 8, ed. James I. Watson and Melissa I. Caldwell (Malden, MA, Oxford, Victoria, Aus.: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 217– 34, 219: “While postwar crusaders like Adele Davis and J.I. Rodale established some continuity between the earlier health food movement and the countercuisine, it is my argument that the latter was motivated less by concerns about personal vitality or longetivity (the traditional health food focus) than by radical politics and environmentalism. Or, just as much food scholarship is really about something other than food, the hip food rebellion was an expression of concerns that extended far beyond the kitchen and dinner table.” Belasco looks at bread in particular, noting the political significance (221): “When hip cooks began to experiment with soybean stroganoff, curried brown rice, or sesame-garbanzo latkes, they also started to bake the dark, heavy whole-grained loaves. . . . While the breads are not always very successful, they were a central part of the rebellion. By baking and eating these breads, you were signifying what you were against and what you were for. In short, bread was part of an oppositional grammar—a set of dichotomies between the devitalized, soft, suburbanized world of Wonder Bread and the vital, sturdy, nutrient-dense peasant world of whole grained breads.” This is also reflected in the growing popularity of “grub” parties, in which political and social activists gather for a communal meal creating an “intentional community,” see Heather Bourbeau, “Project Open Table: Supper Clubs (with a Conscience) Are Coming to a City Near You,” in ReadyMade 19 (Oct/Nov 2005), 52–57. 154 For examples of New Testament studies concerning meal events and commensality, see Hal Taussig, “Dealing Under the Table: Ritual Negotiation of Women’s Power in the Syro-Phoenician Woman Pericope,” in Reimagining Christian Origins (1996), 264–79; John Koenig, New Testament Hospitality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985); Kathleen Corley, Private Women, Public Meals: Social Conflict in the Synoptic Tradition (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1993); Dennis Smith, “Social Obligation in the Context of Communal Meals,” unpublished ThD thesis,

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degree, in the realm of ancient Mesopotamian studies,155 interest in commensal events is only just beginning to reveal itself in biblical scholarship and is very rare in Ugaritic studies. The first study to concern itself specifically with commensal activities in the Ugaritic material was Murray Lichtenstein’s piece, “The Banquet Motifs in Keret and in Proverbs 9,” in which Lichtenstein explored the literary similarities between the feast described in 1.15 iv and the feast Wisdom provides in Proverbs 9.156 This study was followed by E. Lipiński’s study, “Banquet en l’honneur de Baal, CTA 3 (V AB, A, 4-22),” which reviewed the different translations that have been proposed for the reference in question and briefly explored the first meal in which Baal is host.157 It took over twenty more years for the subject to be approached again, this time by J.B. Lloyd in his study, “The Banquet Theme in Ugaritic Narrative,”158 in which he recognized that the different feasts described in the texts have a similar formula in their descriptive structure. Since that time, two studies have explored the role of feasts within the mythical and epic literature. Dennis

Harvard University (1980); Jerome H. Neyrey, “Ceremonies in Luke-Acts: The Case of Meals and Table Fellowship” in The Social World of Luke-Acts: Models for Interpretation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers), 361–87. For examples of general Greco-Roman studies on meal events and commensality see Emily Gowers, The Loaded Table: Representations of Food in Roman Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Sympotica: A Symposium on the Symposium, ed. O. Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Dining in a Classical Context, ed. W. J. Slater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991); Andrew Dalby, Siren Feast: A History of Food and Gastronomy in Greece (New York: Routledge, 1996). 155 See Banquets D’Orient, Res Orientales IV, edit. R. Gyselen (Bures-surYvette: Group Pour L’Etude de la Civilisastion du Moyen-Orient, 1992); see also Jean-Jacques Glassner, “L’hospitalité en Mésopotamie ancienne: aspect de la question de l’étranger,” in Zeitrschrift für Assyriologie und vorderasiatische Archologie 80/1 (1990), 60–75; Jean-Jacques Glassner, “Women, Hospitality, and the Honor of the Family,” in Women’s Earliest Records from Ancient Egypt and Western Asia: Proceedings of the Conference on Women in the Ancient Near East, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, November 5–7, 1987, Brown Judaic Studies 166 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), 71–94. 156 Murray Lichtenstein, “The Banquet Motifs in Keret and in Proverbs 9,” in Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society of Columbia University 1 (1969), 19–31. 157 E. Lipiński, “Banquet en l’honneur de Baal, CTA 3 (V AB, 4-22),” in Ugarit-Forschungen 2 (1970), 75–88. 158 J.B. Lloyd, “The Banquet Theme in Ugaritic Narrative,” in UgaritForschungen 22 (1991), 169–93.

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Wright’s study has already been mentioned earlier, yet requires further comment here because of the role feasting plays within the Aqhat Myth. Recognizing the risk that one may encounter using theoretical approaches to analyze literary works written in the distant past, Wright nevertheless suggests that studying the ritual within a given storyline and using such approaches will provide a better understanding of the text overall.159 In particular, Wright stresses the “contrasts” and “echoes” of different meal events with one another.160 The contrast is highlighted by his use of Ronald Grime’s ritual categories of felicitous and infelicitous rituals. Thus, similar ritual meals are contrasted by their positive or negative results. He acknowledges that his study is not meant to explore the political or social ramifications of the meal event, but it is nevertheless significant in that one finds there an attempt to demonstrate that ritual was a means by which less powerful members of a community could achieve their desires in opposition to the powerful; in the case of the Aqhat story, mortals used ritual to fulfill their desires against the gods.161 Yet the meal events within the story are just one type of ritual event that Wright explores. In fact, the work studies ritual acts of all types that the author identified in the Aqhat text. The last study to be mentioned is Mark S. Smith’s recent work concerning the mythological text known as the “Feast of the Goodly Gods.”162 Like many in the biblical field, Smith relies on Catherine Bell’s theories on ritualization, particularly the role of schema in creating ritual environments. Though he does recognize that feasts play an important role in the text, he does not explore the ritual significance of those feasts in both Ugaritic society and within the divine hierarchy. To date, only the mythological texts

159 Wright, Ritual in Narrative, 6: “In contrast to the approaches . . . which are externally oriented, that is, interested in how a text relates in one way or another to actual ritual practice that exists outside the story—this approach looks at ritual within a story’s context to see how it contributes to the development of the story, advances the plot, forges major and minor climaxes, structures and periodicizes the story, and operates to enhance the portrayal of characters.” 160 Ibid., 15. 161 Ibid., 229: “The tale is primarily about the interaction of humans and deities. In the cultural world of the ancient Near East, these interactions were largely viewed as occurring in and being facilitated by ritual events. Thus, it would be natural for an author to employ ritual to describe the interaction of gods and humans in narrative.” 162 Mark S. Smith, The Rituals and Myths of the Feast of the Goodly Gods of KTU/CAT 1.23: Royal Constructions of Opposition, Intersection, Integration, and Domination, Resources for Biblical Study 51 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006).

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have been exhibited for the study of the role of commensality within Ugaritic society; in no small part because explicit references to meals and participation within these events are extremely rare of other genres, including the ritual texts. In biblical studies, the most recent study concerning commensality is Food and Drink in the Biblical Worlds, an anthology in which fifteen biblical scholars discuss aspects of commensality in the Old and New Testaments.163 Unfortunately, only seven of those articles are concerned with the commensal language and events in the Hebrew Bible. The remaining eight are oriented to the New Testament. As one of the editors states, “On food and drink, eating and drinking in the worlds of the Bible so-called, focused works are not to be found.”164 With that said, the primary focus of commensal events in the Hebrew Bible are those associated with the cult.165 Beyond the cultic material in the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, the other type of meal event discussed in any length has been the meal associated with the concept of covenants.166 It is here that the political aspects of the meal are explored in at some length, though the sociological aspects are usually neglected. Recently, however, two studies have sought to explore, in greater detail, the use of food and meal imagery throughout the Hebrew Bible. Seth D. Kunin’s study, We Think What We Eat: Neo-structuralist Analysis of Israelite Food Rules and Other Cultural and Textual Practices,167 and Diane M. Sharon’s 163 Food and Drink in the Biblical Worlds, Semeia 86, eds. Athalya Brenner and Jan Willem van Henten (Atlanta: The Society of Biblical Literature, 1999). 164 Athalya Brenner and Jan Willem van Henten, “Our Menu and What Is Not on It: Editors Introduction,” in Food and Drink in the Biblical Worlds, ix–xvi. 165 See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, and more recently, In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993); W. Houston, Purity and Monotheism: Clean and Unclean Animals in Biblical Law (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993). 166 See Hallvard Hagelia, “Meal on Mount Zion—Does Isa. 25:6–8 Describe a Covenant Meal?” in Svensk exegetisk arskbok 68 (2003), 73–95; David Elgavish, “The Encounter of Abram and Melchizedek King of Salem: A Covenant Establishing Ceremony,” in Studies in the Book of Genesis: Literature, Redaction, and History, ed. A. Wénin (Leuven: Uitgeverij Peeters; Sterling, VA: University Press, 2001), 495–508; Kathryn L. Roberts, “God, Prophet, and King: Eating and Drinking on the Mountain in First Kings 18:41,” in The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 62/4 (2000), 632–44. 167 Seth D. Kunin, We Think What We Eat: Neo-structuralist Analysis of Israelite Food Rules and Other Cultural and Textual Practices, Journal for the Study of Old Testament Supplement Series 412 (London, New York: T & T Clark International, 2004).

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study, Patterns of Destiny: Narrative Structures of Foundation and Doom in the Hebrew Bible,168 illuminate the frequent appearance of the meal event as a literary device demonstrating major breaks or shifts in the text and, therefore, of the social/communal change that is represented in these meal scenes. Yet the meal as a form of ritual, beyond those rituals associated with cult, has yet to be explored.

PURPOSE OF THIS STUDY This study will seek to illuminate aspects of the meal event, particularly in their ritual role both as mechanisms for social transformation and change and as events that defined a given social environment, as found in the Ugaritic mythological texts, with particular attention placed on the myth of Baal and the epics of Kirta and Aqhat. The study itself is divided into two sections of Ugaritic texts, the first of which is concerned with the meal events described in the Baal Myth. Specifically, Baal’s preparation, presentation, and provision of meals as a political and social mechanism for change within the divine hierarchy will be examined. The study will also explore the role of other divine meals within the mythological material, such as the meals presided over by El, as well as study the role of ritual failure in the Baal Myth. The second section is concerned with the meal events found in the Kirta and Aqhat Epics, emphasizing the role which mortals play in providing and hosting meals. Like the material concerning the Baal Myth, the role of the meal event in determining the social place of the participants will be examined, specifically how, as a ritualized event, the meal can become the means of moving from one social hierarchical level to another, will be explored.169 The relationship between mortal and divine worlds will also be examined through the meal events within these epics. Finally, ritual failures found within the epics of Kirta and Aqhat will also be discussed. Though the study is primarily concerned with the role of meal events in the Baal Myth and the Ugaritic epics, because of the large corpus of 168 Diane M. Sharon, Patterns of Destiny: Narrative Structures of Foundation and Doom in the Hebrew Bible (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2002). 169 Michael Dietler, “Feasts”, 87–126, 89: “Like all rituals, they [feasts] express idealized concepts, that is the way people believe relations exist or should exist rather than how they are necessarily manifested in daily activity. However, in addition to this idealized representation of the social order, they also offer the potential for manipulation by individuals or groups attempting to alter or make statements about their relative position within that social order as it is perceived and presented.”

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material in the Hebrew Bible and cultural similarities, meal events within this text will also be explored, particularly those associated with the creation of social structures or the maintenance of social position, such as those described in the patriarchal cycles and the kingship of David and Solomon. It should be noted that no one particular theoretical approach is used here. Rather, relying on the methodology of a number of ritual scholars (Turner, Grimes, Bell, etc.) it is hoped that all of these may provide insight into the meals described within the texts.

CHAPTER 2 THE FEASTS AND MEAL EVENTS OF THE BAAL MYTH

Ritual does not disguise the exercise of power, nor does it refer, express, or symbolize anything outside itself. In other words, political rituals do not refer to politics . . . they are politics. Ritual is the thing itself. It is power; it acts and it actuates.1

Ever since its discovery, the Baal Myth has been the subject of intense interest. The interpretation of the myth has fallen into three primary categories.2 The first is that the myth supposedly refers to the ritual background enacting out the seasonal weather pattern, renewed every autumn. According to this hypothesis, proposed primarily by myth-and-ritualists, the myths would have played a role in the cultic structure of the community. Though many myth-and-ritualists suggest that the “myth” remains even though the rituals are long forgotten, Gaster suggested that, at least in the case of the Baal Myth, the true role of the myth within the cultic structure was not forgotten.3 On the contrary, the written text provided the script for the 1

Bell, Ritual Theory, 195. See Mark S. Smith, The Ugaritic Baal Myth, Vol. I: Introduction with Text, Translation, and Commentary of KTU 1.1–1.2, Supplements to Vetus Testamentum LV (Leiden, New York, Köln: E. J. Brill, 1994), who discusses in depth the approaches to the myth. 3 See Petersen, The Royal God, who argues that the mythic texts of Ugarit present an anticultic ideology. He suggests that since the myth that describes the battles between Baal, Mot, and Yam “lie beyond the influence of man,” “cultic exertions are superfluous,” which, to Petersen suggests an “anticultic potential of the Baal cycle” (96). Petersen also finds this anticultic ideology in the other mythic texts, Aqhat and Kirta, stating that they “did not have their Sitz im Leben in the cult,” again, presumably because the epics demonstrate the futility of man’s influence against the divine world, though he does not state so. The weakness of 2

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autumnal renewal ritual complex which Gaster suggests was in fact a drama.4 More recent myth-and-ritual proponents, such as de Moor, continue to interpret the Baal Myth as evidence of this ritual theory. The second interpretive model is that the myth is a cosmological account.5 According to this interpretation, the interaction, tension, and combat between Baal and Yamm and Mot (the sea and death, respectively), represent the creative forces of order vs. the death and the sterility of chaos. Integral to this model is the account of the building of Baal’s house.6 Though useful, this model is not without problems. For this interpretation to be valid, the terms “creation” and “cosmogony” must be redefined to mean something other than primordial divine actions that led to the

Petersen’s argument is that it looks solely at myth-and-ritual interpretations of these texts. Interestingly, even while making this argument Petersen agrees with the myth-and-ritualists (particularly Gaster) in accepting that “climatic” themes provide the central structure of the myths. While there is no explicit mention of the cult in the mythic texts, except for the mention of a temple in the Aqhat Epic, this does not necessarily preclude an anticultic ideology. Within the Baal cycle, particularly, there are a number of rituals performed by divine beings that reflect ritual practices of the mortal realm, even cultic practices. See also Lowell K. Handy, Among the Host of Heaven: The Syro–Palestinian Pantheon as Bureaucracy (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1994), who proposes that the Baal epic mirrored the social structure of Syria– Palestine, 176–77: “Every level of the divine hierarchy had its counterpart in human society. While the first three levels shared with their human counterparts the malfunctioning typical of their positions in society, the messengers were portrayed in an ideal manner.” He continues: “The establishment of the religious cult was ascribed to El. In the texts from Ugarit it is shown that construction of temples had to be cleared through El. Repeated requests on behalf of Baal to El for consent to enlarge his house only make sense if it was well known that all changes in religious concerns were the concern of El” (85–86). 4 Jane Harrison had a similar approach to Greek myth, suggesting that the term “drama” came from the Greek root δρωμενα meaning “doing” versus “saying,” which she associates with myth. “Etymologically δρωμεν are of course, things done” (Jane Ellen Harrison, Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion and Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion [New York: University Books, 1962], 42–3, 45, 545). 5 Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel (Cambridge; London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 93, 116–20; see also Loren Fisher, “Creation at Ugarit and in the Old Testament,” in Vetus Testamentum 15 (1965), 313–24. 6 A.S. Kapulrud, “Temple Building: A Task for Gods and Kings,” in Orientalia 32 (1963), 56–62.

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organization of the known universe.7 The battles between Baal and Yamm and Mot do not result in a new universe nor do they appear to result in the overthrow of El from the preeminent position in the pantheon (at least as seen in the mythological texts). Rather, they emphasize the sustaining and continuation of life within the created structure, thereby creating the conditions by which human society could continue to exist.8 The third interpretative approach is to see the myth as representative of historical or political views.9 As early as 1948, Obermann suggested that the Baal Myth retold an invasion of Ugarit.10 Marvin Pope, who saw the myth as describing the displacement of El by Baal, has surmised that such accounts of divine displacement themselves reflect both cultural and social migrations, peaceful or otherwise.11 Though Pope and others do not go so far as to state that these migrations occurred with the invasion of the Sea People attested elsewhere, they do see the myth emerging from the general social crises of the second half of the second millennium.12 Similarly, others have suggested that an influx of Amorites led to the creation of the Baal Myth in its Ugaritic form.13 7 Jakob H. Gronbaek, “Baal’s Battle with Yam—A Canaanite Creation Fight,” JSOT 33 (1985), 27–44. 8 Richard J. Clifford, Creation Accounts in the Ancient Near East and in the Bible, Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series 26 (Washington DC: The Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1994), 120–25; see also 126: “The question whether the Baal myth is a true cosmogony is unanswerable. Some of the elements of cosmogonies are there—the building of a temple, the bestowal of fertility and of kingship (hence of social order); on the other hand, Baal does not make anything and, more importantly, is not ultimately powerful. . . . As long as the relationship of El and Baal in the Ugaritic texts is not fully known, a satisfactory understanding of cosmogony in the Baal myth is not possible.” As Clifford himself notes elsewhere, the position described above, differs from that of Clifford’s earlier position in which he follows Cross believing that the Baal cycle is cosmogonic, see Richard J. Clifford, “Cosmogonies in the Ugaritic Texts and in the Bible,” in Orientalia 53 (1984), 183–201. 9 Smith, Baal Myth, 87–96. 10 J. Obermann, “How Baal Destroyed a Rival: A Magical Incantation Scene,” in Journal of the American Oriental Society 67 (1947), 195–208. 11 Marvin Pope, El in the Ugaritic Texts, SVT 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1955), 103–4. 12 M.D. Coogan, Stories from Ancient Canaan (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978), 81. 13 Baal’s battle with Yamm can be found in Amorite sites such as Aleppo, where the major sanctuary held the “weapon with which he smote the Sea.” See J.C. Greenfield, “Hadad”, and W. Herrmann, “Baal” in Dictionary of Deities and

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The myth has also been thought to explain the kingship of Baal within the pantheon, but, as Smith points out, it does not appear that Baal becomes the chief deity, or suzerain of the pantheon. That position or title is still held by El. Instead one reads of the “limited exaltation of Baal,”14 in which Baal becomes a king, just not the king (El), nor is he unlimited in power. In fact, as Smith points out, Baal is dependent on every major deity to gain that throne. He does so with the approval of El and Athirat, the help of Kothar-wa-Vasis and Anat, as well as by his victories over Yamm and Mot (note that in the latter’s case the victory is more of a stalemate ended by the intervention of Shapsh). As to why the limited exaltation of Baal would be important Smith suggests that the divine kingship of Baal would have paralleled the Ugaritic counterpart and thus described in part the challenges of the dynasty of Niqmaddu.15 Demons in the Bible, 2nd ed., ed. Karel Van Der Toorn, Bob Becking, Pieter W. Van Der Horst (Leiden; Boston; Köln: Brill and Grand Rapids: Eerdman, 1999), 132– 38, 377–82, for extensive bibliographies of these two names. Mark Smith points out recent evidence that the Ugaritic dynasty had an Amorite background, thus providing a rationale for the creation of Baal’s ascendancy. See ibid., 89–91. Also B.A. Levine and J.M. de Tarragon, “Dead Kings and Rephaim: The Patrons of the Ugaritic Dynasty,” in Journal of the American Oriental Society 104 (1984), 649–59. 14 Smith, Baal Myth, 96–114. 15 Ibid., 105–6. Smith suggests that the limited, even fragile, nature of Baal’s exaltation may have reflected the geopolitical reality of Ugarit in the late second millennium: “This limited exaltation of Baal may correspond in some manner to Ugarit’s limited political situation lying between the great powers of the ancient Near East” (105). With this said, one might wonder why any people would desire to see their chief deity restricted or less powerful than others around them. In other West Semitic cultures, the limited nature of their chief deity does not manifest itself in their literature. In the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh is all powerful over all other deities (Psalm 89). In the Mesha stele, Chemosh also appears to be the chief deity beholden to no one. Nicolas Wyatt, in his Religious Texts From Ugarit, Biblical Seminar 53 (London; New York: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002) 35, (referred to from now on as RTU) suggested that the composition of the myth provided legitimacy for Niqmaddu II when he switched allegiance from Egypt to the Hittite empire, thus providing the political impetus to have written a story concerning the struggle and ultimate exaltation of Baal (the royal divinity of Ugarit). Wyatt has revised this since it has been shown that Ilimilku, the scribe for the larger mythological texts, was a contemporary of Niqmaddu II-IV. He has cautiously suggested that the myth was written for the marriage of the Hittite princess EJli-Nikkal to the Ugaritic king and reinforced the vassal treaty, which recognized the rights of both the local king and the Hittite suzerain, see Nicolas Wyatt, “Ilimilku the Theologian” 221–30. For more on a general political application to the Chaoskampf recorded in the myth,

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Whether or not the third model reflects actual historical events, it does emphasize the political nature of the myth. This element is stressed by Smith, according to whom the Baal Myth depicts the universe “as a single political reality connecting different levels.”16 While the myth certainly describes the interactions of the divine beings within the cosmos, it is the political aspects throughout the myth that have bearing on human society.17 This model is especially useful to understand the ritual imagery found within the texts. The ritual actions performed by the deities do not emerge from a vacuum, even if they are literary creations. Therefore the ritual acts, as described in the texts, even if they are imaginary ritual acts, provide the hearer with insight into the creation and purpose of the narrative within the larger Ugaritic society. The meal events in the Baal Myth, as ritual acts, function as literary conduits for the political and social changes described in the texts, particularly as meals embody political and cultural means to create, maintain, or even destroy relationships. As Mary Douglas has stated, meals can be seen as microcosms of society at large, even of the cosmos, in the ritualized manners by which the meal is presented and partaken. Thus, in the Baal Myth, it is the meal event that becomes the primary ritual form of which the function is to present the interaction between the different divine parties. The images themselves are quite detailed and complex. Participation in the different meal events is reflected in the roles of hosting, serving, being served, and particularly in those who are invited or not. The food is also significant since the type of meal and food that is provided expresses the type of relationship between the participants in the meal (ritual specialists according to Bell). The instruments in which the food is served must also be explicated because the material from which the utensils are made represents a set of symbols which in turn reveal the nature of the host/hostess. While all of this may seem obvious, it has ritual and, therefore, social implications.18 Finally, the place in which the meal is served is also important in the analysis of the interactions within the feast.19 see N. Wyatt, “Arms and the King,” in “Und Mose schreib dieses Lied auf”: Festschrift fur Oswald Loretz, ed. Manfried Dietrich and Ingo Kottsieper, Orient und Altes Testament 250 (Munster: Ugarit-Verlag; 1998), 856–60. 16 Smith, Baal Myth, xxiv. 17 Ibid., xxv: “Indeed, the divine struggles represent life and death for Ugarit’s society.” 18 J.B. Lloyd notes a difference between meals and banquets in his article “The Banquet Theme.” He suggests that distinctions can be made by examining the textual length and the amount of detail given to the event: the greater detail and

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The myth itself revolves around three significant feasts described within the text: the feast of El for Yamm, the feast of Baal upon his defeat of Yamm, and the feast of Baal at the completion of his palace from which he excluded Mot. These meals lead to other meal events that move the storyline along. Included among these secondary meal events are the feasts of El at the divine council and in honor of his wife, Athirat, as well as the meal that Anat and Baal share with Athirat, and the private meal event that Athirat appears to have prepared as a feast for her husband. Finally, the myth ends with a hymn or refrain dedicated to Shapsh entreating her to eat and drink of the meal presented. Part II of this study will explore the rituals and ritualized meaning behind the meal imagery in the Baal Myth. Since Baal is the protagonist, we begin with his feasts first.

space given to the event, the more likely it is to be a banquet. He also suggests that banquets usually pertained “to a feast of the gods rather than humans,” though the descriptions of meal events in both the Kirta and the Aqhat Epics are significant textual passages. 19 Susan Pollock, “Feast, Funerals, and Fast Food,” 22: “Feasts, like other types of commensality, help to create and reinforce social connections and do so within a context in which distinctions among people can be emphasized and elaborated through the use of particular kinds of foods and beverages, serving equipment, and etiquette of seating, serving and eating.” See also Michael Dietler, “Clearing the Table: Some Concluding Reflections on Commensal Politics and Imperial States,” in The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires, 271–84, 279–80: “Such categorical boundary marking at feasts may be based upon various permutations of symbolic diacritica, including: spatial distinctions (i.e., segregation or other structured differential positioning of men and women while eating), (2) temporal distinctions (such as the order of serving or consumption), (3) qualitative distinctions (in the kinds of food, drink, or service vessels men and women are given or allowed to consume), (4) quantitative distinctions (in the relative amounts of food or drink served to women and men), or (5) behavioral distinctions (i.e., differences in expected bodily comportment between women and men during and after feasting, including such things as permissible signs of intoxication, talking while eating, reaching for food, serving or being served, withdrawing from the meal first, etc.). Obviously, such distinctions are often difficult to detect archaeologically; but an awareness of their significance may lead to their recognition in context where such evidence might have been overlooked. Moreover, the presence of pictorial or textual evidence, of the kind that is frequently available for imperial states, can present dramatically improved possibilities.”

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BAAL’S FIRST FEAST The first significant meal that one finds, depending on one’s reading of the Ugaritic texts (see below), is found in 1.3 i 2–17, in which the reader is presented with the following scene:20 2. pdrmn.ali[yn] 3. b