Ugarit

In 1928 a farmer working the land near the Syrian coast struck a stone slab that turned out to be a tomb, and excavation of the mound behind it began the following year. The site was Ugarit, a wealthy port destroyed around 1200 BCE and never reoccupied, which meant its archives lay where they had fallen.

The tablets were written in several languages, but the surprise was a script nobody had seen: cuneiform wedges used not as syllables but as an alphabet of about thirty signs, cut for a West Semitic language. It was deciphered within about a year. Among the finds were small tablets listing the signs in order, and that order matches the sequence later found in Hebrew and Phoenician and, through them, in Greek and Latin. The alphabet as a fixed series of letters in a memorised order is attested at Ugarit in the thirteenth century BCE.

The archives themselves contain everything a palace and its temples generated: mythological poems, ritual and sacrifice texts, lists of gods with their offerings, incantations, letters, legal deeds and administrative accounts, along with correspondence with Egypt, Hatti and Cyprus. Some of the last letters found in the city describe enemy ships offshore and troops absent in Hittite territory; a batch of them was still in the kiln, unbaked, when the city burned, which is how they survived.

At the head of the Ugaritic pantheon stands El, an aged and remote father of the gods who lives at the source of the rivers, with his consort Athirat. The active figure is Baal, the storm god, and the long poem about him turns on his struggle to obtain a palace and thereby a recognised kingship. He defeats Prince Sea, wins permission for a house, at first refuses windows in it for fear of what may come in, and is then swallowed by Mot, Death, so that the land dries; his sister Anat kills Mot, splitting and winnowing him like grain, and Baal returns.

The effect on the study of the Hebrew Bible was immediate and permanent. The poetry of the Psalms and of Job turned out to share not only imagery but whole phrases with this literature: the rider of the clouds, the twisting serpent Leviathan, the council of the gods, the dividing of the sea. El is a name for God in the Bible; Asherah, the object of prophetic denunciation, is Athirat under another spelling. A biblical writer describing his God enthroned above the flood is using the vocabulary of the surrounding culture, sometimes borrowing it and sometimes arguing with it, and before 1929 that context had to be reconstructed from the polemics of the people rejecting it.

Ugarit was not Israel, and the two are separated by centuries and by geography. What the tablets supply is the religious language of the region, in its own words rather than in its opponents'.