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

6
Literary Texts
Most of the major literary texts from Ugaritic are in the form of
narrative poems. Included here are selections from the three most
famous poems: the Baal Cycle (§§6.2 and 6.5), the Keret Epic
(§6.3), and the Story of Aqhat (§6.6). In addition, we have
provided a selection from El’s Marzihu (§6.1), which can be read
with the legal text dealing with the Marzihu in Chapter 5 (§5.3).
The so-called Snake Bite Text (§6.4) has been the subject of
numerous studies and has been one of the more difficult texts to
understand; it seems to have been used in a ritual. The Birth of the
Goodly Gods (§6.7) describes the sexual activity of the god El with
much metaphorical language and the birth of two gods with
ravenous appetites.
Near Eastern literary texts, including Ugaritic texts, rely heavily
on parallelism and standard formulas. Parallelism involves the
juxtaposition of phrases using similar syntactic and semantic
structures. Standard formulas include the marking of time, the
introduction of direct speech, the entrance and exit of characters,
and the use of divine epithets. Although these can seem redundant,
they reflect the oral recitation of these literary texts (see S. Parker,
Stories in Scripture and Inscriptions). A main problem that the
student will face in studying these literary texts is their
fragmentary nature. Even where they are complete, there are many
obscurites in the vocabulary or in understanding the ancient
Ugaritic social context. As a matter of course, poetry plays with
words and relies on literary and social contexts; in the case of
ancient Ugarit, these are contexts that we do not fully grasp.
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