Literary Composition in the Hebrew Bible: The View from Ugarit

Abstract

This chapter illustrates the similarities that exist between the data from Ugarit and the next principal literary corpus, that to be found in the Hebrew Bible. The emphasis is not on the theology or the theological politics of the two corpora, but on their literary qualities. It stresses two aspects of the Ugaritic‐Hebrew parallels: first, the points of resemblance between the two corpora in the aesthetics of poetic structure and imagery; and, second, the evolution visible in the Hebrew Bible in the areas of literary genre, subject matter, and life setting of individual poems or collections of poems. The perspective is not that of a biblical scholar, but that of someone who has spent much of his career attempting to elucidate Ugaritic texts from the epigraphic and philological perspectives.