A Primer on Ugaritic: Language, Culture, and Literature - enenuru

Letters 57
Rib-Haddu, mayor of Gubla, in which he answers imputations on
his credibility; this is analogous to the situation in our letter. in EA
102:11–13, Rib-Haddu complains, “Now you are going to come
into an empty house. Everything is gone. Iamutterly ruined
/tih˙ta®tˆä gabba/.” 13 This Amarna text not only fits the context but
also provides a contemporary and geographically close
etymological comparison.
This suggested meaning here seems to fit the use of the term in
parallel passages in the Ugaritic Baal Epic warning against the
dangers of Death’s rapacious appetite. Despite a variety of possible
interpretations, in both the first, Baal versus Mot (KTU 1.6:II, 23),
and the second, in Baal’s House (KTU 1.3:VIII, 20), the root h˙t}
seems to indicate “to swallow, to crush.”
With our suggestion that nh˙t}u be interpreted as an N-stem (cp.
Hebrew Niphal), we must pause to introduce another of the
augmented verbal forms of Ugaritic. The reciprocal/passive pattern
N, for the most part, has replaced the G passive in Hebrew, which
is only rarely attested in writing. The process of the replacement of
the G passive by the N-stem is, however, obscured by the fact that
it is not always possible to distinguish between the Gp, Dp, and N
patterns in alphabetic writing. We would suggest that this line
reporting the situation of two persons asking for help is awkwardly
translated as “the crushings by which they have been crushed,” or
“the defeats (by which) they have been defeated.” 14 This syntax
seems akin to the awat iqbu®, “the word (which) he spoke,” kind of
construction in Akkadian in which a noun is in a bound
relationship with a following verb marked by a subordinating, or
13 R. Cohen, “Intelligence in the Amarna Letters,” Amarna Diplomacy. The
Beginnings of International Relations (ed. R. Cohen and R. Westbrook;
Baltimore/London, 2000), 95.
14 Alternatively, Segert, BGUL, 187, analyzes h˙t}i as an infinitive “to
disappear(?)” and nh˙tu as a G or N impf 1cpl “to disappear(?)” or “to be
vanquished.” Cp. Sivan, Grammar, 118, 131; Gordon, UT, 117.