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

Ancient Ugarit 25
The ocean sounds its pounding. (Ps 93:3)
The gods eat and drink,
They drink wine until sated,
Vintage until inebriated. (KTU 1.114, 4–6; see
exercise §6.1)
In these examples, a threefold parallelism is employed. This type
of parallelism is also found in the Amarna letters as, for example, in
the letter of Abdi-milku:
Behold, the ruler of Beirut served in one ship,
and the ruler of Sidon served in two ships,
I will serve with all your ships. (EA 155:67–69)
Also apparent in this last example is a parallelistic use of numbers
that is quite common in Ugaritic and Classical Hebrew but which
also occurs more generally in Akkadian and Sumerian. It is widely
discussed by scholars and a few choice examples will illustrate
this: 22
Hebrew: How could one have routed a thousand,
Or two put ten thousand to flight,
Unless their Rock had sold them,
The LORD had given them up? (Deut 32:30)
The span of our life is seventy years,
Or, given the strength, eighty years;
but the best of them are trouble and sorrow.
They pass by speedily, and we are in darkness. (Ps 90:10)
Ugaritic: Seven years may Baal fail,
Eight the Rider of the Clouds. (KTU 1.19 i, 42–44)
Sixty-six town he seized,
Seventy-seven villages. (KTU 1.4 vii, 9–10)
22 See S. Gevirtz, Patterns in the Early Poetry of Israel (Chicago, 1964); D.
Freedman, “Counting Formulae in the Akkadian Epics,” JANES 3 (1971),
65–81; W. Roth, “The Numerical Sequence x/x + 1 in the Old Testament,”
VT 12 (1962), 300–311.