Ugaritic and Ancient Near Eastern Parallels

"It can hardly be doubted that the author of Proverbs was acquainted with the Egyptian work and borrowed from it." — Miriam Lichtheim, Egyptologist, 1976¹

"We might for our purposes define parallelomania as that extravagance among scholars which first overdoes the supposed similarity in passages and then proceeds to describe source and derivation as if implying literary connection flowing in an inevitable or predetermined direction." — Samuel Sandmel, 1962²

Summary

Since 1929, when French excavators found the first clay tablets at Ras Shamra in Syria, the site of the ancient city of Ugarit, scholars have set Old Testament passages beside older texts from Canaan, Egypt and Mesopotamia.³  Some of the likenesses are close.  A skeptic reads them as proof that the Bible is ordinary borrowed literature.  Some apologists answer that the parallels are thin or that the Bible came first.  Both answers fail when the cases are checked one at a time.

This article applies one rule to every case.  A parallel shows that one writer used another only when four things are true:  the same words come in the same order or a rare word is shared;  the shared detail is odd, not something the subject forces;  the source is older by its manuscripts, not by theory;  and there is a plausible way the later writer could have met it.  When a likeness fails these tests, it shows a shared world:  the same language, poetry, law and diplomacy across one region.

1. Proverbs 22:17-23:11 drew on the Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope. This is the clearest literary dependence in the Old Testament. Proverbs promises "thirty sayings," and Amenemope has thirty numbered chapters. Its opening, its boundary-stone saying, its riches that grow wings and fly to the sky, and its table manners before a ruler all appear in this short block of Proverbs, though in a different order. The oldest copies of Amenemope date from about 1000 BC and the work was composed earlier, so the Egyptian is older. Even John Ruffle, the Egyptologist who most doubts direct copying, grants a relationship "closer than coincidence" and proposes an Egyptian scribe at Solomon's court.⁴
2. Isaiah 27:1 uses a Canaanite formula. "Leviathan the fast-moving serpent, Leviathan the squirming serpent" matches a Ugaritic myth word for word in two of three lines. The Hebrew word for "squirming," ʿaqallaton, appears nowhere else in the Bible. Ugarit was destroyed shortly after 1200 BC, so Isaiah did not read those tablets. He used poetic stock that Canaanite poets had used for centuries.
3. Psalm 29 uses Baal's storm language, but no one has shown it began as a Baal hymn. The "voice of the LORD," Hebrew qol YHWH, sounds seven times over waters, Lebanon's cedars and the wilderness, and the LORD sits enthroned over the flood. In the Ugaritic texts Baal's "holy voice" shakes the earth, and Baal sits enthroned "like the flood." H. L. Ginsberg proposed in 1935 that the psalm was a Phoenician hymn with the name changed, and Frank Moore Cross called the case "conclusive." John Day calls it "possible, but cannot claim to be proved," and Peter Craigie reads the psalm as a deliberate taunt that gives Baal's titles to the God who defeated him.⁵
4. The treaty form points early, and some of the curses point late. The covenants of Exodus and Deuteronomy have the shape of Hittite vassal treaties of about 1400-1200 BC: a preamble, a history of past favors, laws, the deposit and public reading of the text, witnesses, and blessings set against curses. First-millennium Assyrian treaties lack the history and the blessings. But a run of curses in Deuteronomy 28:26-33 follows the order of a run in Esarhaddon's succession treaty of 672 BC: skin disease, then blindness and groping in darkness, then a wife taken by another man and goods taken by foreigners. Kenneth Kitchen argues for a long-shared pool of curses; Hans Ulrich Steymans argues for direct copying. Neither side has shut the other out.
5. The law codes share legal problems, not proven texts. Exodus 21:28-32 handles a goring ox in the same three cases as Hammurabi's laws 250-252: the first goring, the ox known to gore, and the slave killed. David Wright argues that the Covenant Code was written directly from Hammurabi between 740 and 640 BC. But Exodus's ox-kills-ox law matches the Laws of Eshnunna, which are known only from second-millennium copies, and Wright concedes there is no "smoking gun," no copy of Hammurabi from Israel or Judah.⁶ A common legal tradition explains the evidence at least as well.
6. Job and the Song of Songs share genres, not texts. Babylon has its own righteous sufferer and Egypt its love songs in which lovers call each other "my sister." No verbal sequence links them.
7. The theology was not borrowed. The differences are pointed. In the Ugaritic myth, Death reminds Baal that he killed the dragon and then swallows him; in Isaiah, the LORD will kill Leviathan and "swallow up death permanently." Genesis 1 has no battle at all; on that point Day, who thinks the background is Canaanite myth, and David Toshio Tsumura, who denies it, agree. The Proverbs block adds the LORD as the reason for its sayings. Where Hammurabi pays a slave's owner for an injured slave, Exodus makes the injured slave's freedom the payment.
8. On dates, the parallels pull both ways. Amenemope allows a Solomonic date for Proverbs 22-23 but does not prove it. Psalm 29's archaic features lead Cross and Craigie alike to date it to the tenth century or earlier. The treaty form favors an old covenant core. Esarhaddon's curses are the strongest case for seventh-century wording in Deuteronomy 28.

Verdict:  the Old Testament was written inside its world, in its world's genres, and in places it uses its neighbors' words.  That much the skeptic has right.  The parallels do not show that its theology was copied.  The texts that use the most foreign material are the ones that most plainly turn it against its source.

Part 1: How to tell borrowing from a shared world

Two ways to go wrong

In 1961 Samuel Sandmel, a Jewish scholar of early Judaism and the New Testament, used his presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature to name a habit.  He called it "parallelomania":  overstating how alike two passages are, then assuming that one copied the other in a direction fixed in advance.²  He did not deny borrowing.  "I am not denying that literary parallels and literary influence, in the form of source and derivation, exist," he wrote.  His test was close reading:  "Two passages may sound the same in splendid isolation from their context, but when seen in context reflect difference rather than similarity."²

The field has a standard cautionary tale.  Exodus 23:19 and Deuteronomy 14:21 forbid cooking a young goat "in its mother's milk."⁷  The medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides guessed that the rule opposed some pagan rite.  In 1933 the first editor of a Ugaritic tablet, Charles Virolleaud, restored a damaged line to read "cook a kid in milk," and H. L. Ginsberg cited it in 1935 as proof of Maimonides' guess.  Peter Craigie, who later wrote Ugarit and the Old Testament, found that "almost all scholars" had followed for forty years.  Then he checked the readings.  The verb was a restoration with little room for it, two of the three key words were uncertain, and the line said "milk," not "mother's milk."⁸  A consensus parallel had rested on a guess written into a gap.

The opposite error is just as common.  It treats every likeness as accidental, or insists that the Bible must be the older text.  A defender of the Bible who rejects a parallel without checking it is making Sandmel's mistake in reverse.

William Hallo of Yale proposed the method most comparative scholars now use.  He called it the "contextual approach":  set a biblical text in its "geographical, historical, religious, political and literary setting," and "recognize such contrasts as well as comparisons."⁹  A difference is evidence too.  If Israel took a form and changed it, the change shows what Israel meant.

The rule this article applies

David Wright, who argues for the strongest borrowing thesis tested below, states the core of the rule himself:  "similarity by itself does not definitively demonstrate the dependence of one text on another," and similarities point to a genetic relationship "only when evidence for an opportunity of cultural exchange exists."⁶  This article uses four tests.

1. Verbal match. The same words in the same order, or a shared rare word. A shared topic does not count: every law code has thieves and every wisdom book warns against anger.
2. Unusual detail. A feature the subject does not force. A seven-headed sea serpent, a book of exactly thirty sayings, or a list of curses in the order of an Assyrian god list.
3. Date order. Which text is older, judged by dated manuscripts or datable events, not by a theory of how literature develops.
4. Route of contact. A plausible way for the later writer to have met the earlier text or its tradition.

A case that passes all four shows dependence.  A case with shared language or form but no clear verbal sequence, or no date order, shows a shared culture.  A case that rests on a general theme or a restored gap is coincidence or nothing at all.  Dependence can be on a text or on a living tradition that carried the same words.  The table in Part 7 grades every case.

What borrowing would and would not show

If a biblical writer used an older text, three conclusions follow and three do not.

It follows that the biblical writer knew foreign literature, that his wording is not independent evidence for the older text's ideas, and that the older text gives a floor for his date.  The Bible says as much about itself.  Proverbs presents 22:17-24:22 as "the words of the wise" and 24:23 adds "These sayings also are from the wise."⁷  It includes the words of Agur and of King Lemuel, neither of them Israelite.  First Kings says Solomon "was wiser than all the men of the east and all the sages of Egypt."⁷  Paul quotes Greek poets in Acts 17:28.

It does not follow that the biblical writer shared the older text's theology, that the biblical text is false, or that it is late.  Those need separate evidence.  The way to test whether a theology was borrowed is Hallo's:  read what the biblical text does with the borrowed material.

What this article does not cover

The Babylonian creation and flood stories, Enuma Elish, Atrahasis and Gilgamesh, are weighed in Genesis and Ancient Near Eastern Parallels, which finds the flood parallel close, the creation parallel thin, and literary dependence in either direction unproven.  The raqia and the shape of the cosmos are in Ancient Cosmology and Genesis.  The god El, the name Yahweh, Baal imagery as a stage in Israel's religion and the divine council belong to Did Israelite Monotheism Evolve?.  Asherah, figurines and household religion belong to Israelite Religion on the Ground.  Whether Leviathan and Behemoth in Job were dinosaurs is in Dinosaurs in Ancient Art and Text.  The composition of Deuteronomy is argued in Deuteronomy and the Pious-Fraud Charge and Moses and the Composition of the Pentateuch.

Part 2: Leviathan and the sea dragon

The two texts

Isaiah 27:1 reads:  "At that time the Lord will punish with his destructive, great, and powerful sword Leviathan the fast-moving serpent, Leviathan the squirming serpent; he will kill the sea monster."⁷

The Ugaritic Baal cycle survives on clay tablets from Ras Shamra.  On the fifth tablet, Death, the god Mot, sends a message to Baal.  H. L. Ginsberg's translation reads:  "If thou smite Lotan, the serpent slant, / Destroy the serpent tortuous, / Shalyat of the seven heads".¹⁰  John Day, whose 1985 book God's Conflict with the Dragon and the Sea is the standard study, prints the Ugaritic as ktmḫṣ ltn btn brḥ / tkly btn ʿqltn / šlyṭ d šbʿt rašm:  "Because you smote Leviathan the twisting serpent, (and) made an end of the crooked serpent, the tyrant with seven heads."⁵  The goddess Anath boasts of the same victory in an earlier tablet:  "Did I not, pray, muzzle the Dragon? / I did crush the crooked serpent, / Shalyat the seven-headed."¹⁰

Set side by side, the words line up:

Two Hebrew phrases are the two Ugaritic phrases, word for word, in the same order and joined to the same name.⁵  Nicolas Wyatt, who translated the Ugaritic religious texts for Sheffield Academic Press, notes that the lines are "remarkably close to the Heb. text of Isa. 27.1."¹¹

The four tests

Verbal match:  passed.  The match is a sequence, not a topic.

Unusual detail:  passed.  The Hebrew word ʿaqallaton occurs once in the whole Hebrew Bible, in this verse.  A search of all 23,213 verses of the Westminster Leningrad Codex finds no other.  Its only known match anywhere is Ugaritic ʿqltn.  The phrase nachash bariach occurs only here and in Job 26:13.  The name Leviathan occurs in five verses:  Job 3:8, Job 41:1, Psalm 74:14, Psalm 104:26 and Isaiah 27:1.¹²  The seven heads are also unusual.  Psalm 74:14 says God "crushed the heads of Leviathan," plural, without a number.  Day points out that "There is no evidence that Tiamat had seven heads, as is sometimes still claimed";  the seven-headed serpent is Canaanite.⁵

Date order:  passed.  The tablet's colophon names its scribe, Ilimilku, and the king who sponsored the copy, Niqmaddu of Ugarit.¹⁰  Ginsberg put that king in the fourteenth century BC;  either way the tablets cannot be later than the fall of the city, which Craigie, citing the excavations, puts "shortly after 1200 B.C."³  No one dates Isaiah 24-27 that early.  Traditional readers assign it to Isaiah of Jerusalem in the eighth century BC.  Day reports that critics once put it as late as about 250 BC, and he himself places it in "the exilic, or more probably post-exilic period."⁵

Route of contact:  passed, but not to these tablets.  Ugarit was a ruin centuries before any date proposed for Isaiah 27.  No Judean writer read these clay tablets.  The route must be a living tradition:  Canaanite poetry that kept the same formula alive long after Ugarit fell, in the coastal cities and in Israel itself.  Wyatt draws the same conclusion:  the match shows "the close affinity between the forms of Ug. and Heb. poetry."¹¹

Grade:  dependence on a shared Canaanite poetic tradition.  Isaiah 27:1 is not a copy of the Ugaritic text.  It is a use of the same old formula, as an English poet might quote a nursery rhyme without having read its first printing.

What Isaiah does with it

The Ugaritic lines come from a myth with a plot, and the plot runs against Baal.  Death recalls Baal's victory over the dragon in order to announce Baal's defeat.  In Wyatt's translation Death goes on, "You will indeed go down into the throat of divine Mot, into the maw of the Beloved of El, the hero."¹¹  A later column describes Death's jaws stretching from earth to the stars, and then:  "Baal enters his mouth".¹⁰  The dragon-slayer is swallowed.

Isaiah uses the formula inside a section of his book that reverses that plot.  The killing of Leviathan is not in the past but "at that time," on the day of judgment, and the one who kills it is the LORD alone.  Two chapters earlier, in the same section, Isaiah says of the LORD:  "he will swallow up death permanently."⁷  The Hebrew word for death there is mawet, the same word as the Ugaritic god's name, Mot.  In Ugarit, Death swallows the god who killed the dragon.  In Isaiah, the God who kills the dragon swallows Death.

The other Leviathan texts point the same way.  Psalm 74:13-14 sets the sea monster's crushed heads among God's acts "from ancient times."⁷  Job 26:12 says God "cut Rahab the great sea monster to pieces" and 26:13 that "his hand pierced the fleeing serpent."⁷  Psalm 104:26 calls Leviathan a creature God made to play in the sea;  the NET translates it "the whale."⁷  None of these texts has a rival god, a divine assembly in danger, or a hero who dies.

Genesis 1 and the "Chaoskampf"

In 1895 the German scholar Hermann Gunkel argued that the dragon texts of the Old Testament, and Genesis 1 behind them, came from the Babylonian myth in which Marduk kills the sea-monster Tiamat and builds the world from her body.  Day sums up Gunkel's thesis:  "the Old Testament references were an Israelite version of the conflict between Marduk and Tiamat contained in Enuma elish."⁵  Gunkel's own section on Genesis 1 is headed "Babylonischer Ursprung der Schöpfungsgeschichte von Gen 1," the Babylonian origin of the creation account of Genesis 1.¹³  The German word for this divine battle with chaos, Chaoskampf, stuck to the theory.

The Ugaritic tablets moved the debate west.  Day:  "Since the discovery of the Ugaritic texts from 1929 onwards, however, it has become clear that the immediate background of the Old Testament allusions to the sea monster is not Babylonian but Canaanite."⁵  On Genesis 1 itself, Day is more cautious than Gunkel.  He rejects the old claim that the Hebrew tehom, "deep," was taken from the name Tiamat, and writes that "the deep" of Genesis 1:2 "is not a divine personality hostile to God."⁵  He judges it "improbable that the account of creation in Gen. 1 is dependent on Enuma elish at all."⁵  What he does hold is that Genesis 1 is the last stage of a Canaanite conflict theme from which "all thought of conflict has disappeared":  "a process of demythologization has taken place and Yahweh's control of the waters has simply become a job of work."⁵

David Toshio Tsumura argues in Creation and Destruction (2005) that there was never a conflict to remove:  "the background of the Genesis creation story has nothing to do with the so-called Chaoskampf myth of the Mesopotamian type, as preserved in the Babylonian "creation" myth Enuma elish. In Gen 1, there is no hint of struggle or battle between God and this tehôm-water."¹⁴  He also notes that in the Ugaritic myths Baal "is not a creator-god."¹⁴  The poetic dragon texts, on his reading, use conflict as metaphor.

The two scholars disagree about where Genesis 1's language came from.  They agree on what Genesis 1 says:  no battle, no rival, waters that obey.  That agreement is the point that matters here.  Whatever the history of the language, the text as it stands does not contain the myth.  The full comparison with Enuma Elish is in Genesis and Ancient Near Eastern Parallels.

Part 3: Psalm 29 and the voice of Baal

The psalm and the Ugaritic texts

Psalm 29 calls on the "heavenly beings," in Hebrew bene elim, to acknowledge the LORD's glory.  Then the voice of the LORD, the thunder, sounds seven times:  over the waters, breaking the cedars of Lebanon, making "Lebanon and Sirion" skip like a young ox, shaking "the wilderness of Kadesh."  The psalm ends:  "The Lord sits enthroned over the engulfing waters; the Lord sits enthroned as the eternal king."⁷

Each element has a counterpart at Ugarit.  The council of the gods is the bn ilm, "sons of El."¹⁵  Baal is the storm god whose voice is thunder:  "Ba[al gives] forth his holy voice, ... His h[oly] voice [convulses] the earth, . . . the mountains quake".¹⁰  Another Ugaritic text, in Day's translation, says "Baal sits enthroned, like the sitting of a mountain, Hadad (the shepherd) like the flood," and goes on to Baal's seven thunders and lightnings.  Day sets it "just as Ps. 29:10 states, 'The Lord sits enthroned over the flood, the Lord sits enthroned as king for ever.'"⁵  Sirion is Mount Hermon, and Craigie notes that the psalm's northern places were part of Ginsberg's case.¹⁵

Three positions

A Baal hymn with the name changed.  H. L. Ginsberg proposed in 1935 that Psalm 29 began as "a Phoenician hymn, which found its way into the Hebrew psalter after suitable modification."¹⁵  Frank Moore Cross, in Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (1973), wrote that Ginsberg had given "conclusive evidence that Psalm 29 is an ancient Ba'l hymn, only slightly modified for use in the early cultus of Yahweh."  Cross added that "In its Israelite form it is no later than tenth century B.C. and probably was borrowed in Solomonic times."¹⁶  In 1974 Aloysius Fitzgerald argued that if "Baal" is restored where the psalm says "Yahweh," the sounds of the psalm form striking patterns.¹⁵

Baal language, Israelite poem.  Day, after collecting the parallels, concludes:  "There can thus be no doubt that Ps. 29 stands remarkably close to the circle of mythological ideas surrounding Baal as they are attested in the Ugaritic texts."  But of the claim that the psalm was "a Canaanite psalm taken over wholesale" he writes:  "This is possible, but cannot claim to be proved."⁵

A Hebrew hymn that mocks Baal.  Peter Craigie, in the Word Biblical Commentary, grants that "there are sufficient parallels and similarities to require a Canaanite background to be taken into account," but finds that "it is not clear that those parallels and similarities require one to posit a Canaanite/Phoenician original of Ps 29."¹⁵  He answers the two newest arguments for a Baal original.  The word pairs shared with Ugaritic "are not distinctive, having further parallels in Akkadian, Arabic and Egyptian poetry."  And Fitzgerald's sound patterns appear because "the consonants of the name Baal" are also "those of three common Hebrew prepositions which are used frequently in the psalm."¹⁵  His own reading is that the poet "has deliberately utilized Canaanite-type language and imagery in order to emphasize the Lord's strength and victory, in contrast to the weakness of the inimical Baal."¹⁵  Tsumura goes further, calling Psalm 29 "a purely Hebrew hymn of praise to Yahweh, using "storm" language in metaphorical expressions."¹⁴

The four tests

Verbal match:  partial.  Psalm 29 shares phrases and pairs with Ugaritic poetry, but no Ugaritic or Phoenician hymn has been found that runs parallel to it line by line.  The "Baal hymn" behind it is a reconstruction.

Unusual detail:  passed in part.  A sevenfold thunder and a god enthroned over the flood are specific.  But storm language for a warrior god is common across the Near East.  Craigie points to the Song of the Sea and the Song of Deborah, where Israel's God fights with wind and storm.¹⁵

Date order:  passed.  The Ugaritic texts are older than any date proposed for the psalm.

Route of contact:  passed.  Israel lived beside Phoenicians and Canaanites, and the psalm names their mountains.

Grade:  shared culture, with deliberate use of Baal's language.  The psalm borrows a vocabulary.  Whether it began as a Baal hymn depends on a source text that has not been found.  That is a hypothesis, not a demonstrated parallel.

What the psalm does with Baal's language

Even on Cross's reading, what Israel kept is telling.  The heavenly beings do not fight, plot or feast;  they are told to give glory to one God.  There is no battle with the sea.  The waters are where the LORD's voice sounds and the flood is what he sits on.  The word for flood in 29:10 is mabbul.  It occurs thirteen times in the Hebrew Bible:  twelve in the flood story of Genesis 6-11, and here.¹²  Craigie notes that this ties the psalm to Israel's own story:  "It is the Lord, not Baal, who is enthroned victoriously "over the flood," ... But the Hebrew background draws upon the flood traditions of the Genesis flood story".¹⁵  The last verse turns from the storm to the LORD's people:  he "gives his people strength."

The council of gods in 29:1 raises a separate question:  did Israel once believe in many gods?  That question belongs to Did Israelite Monotheism Evolve?.

On the date, both sides of the Baal-hymn debate put the psalm early.  Cross dates its Israelite form "no later than tenth century B.C.," and Craigie calls it "one of the earliest psalms in the Psalter, to be dated provisionally in the eleventh/tenth centuries B.C."¹⁵  The Canaanite features are an argument for antiquity, not for late composition.

A second formula: Psalm 92

The Baal cycle contains a closer verbal formula than anything in Psalm 29.  When the craftsman god hands Baal his weapons, he says:  "Now thine enemy, O Baal, / Now thine enemy wilt thou smite, / Now wilt thou cut off thine adversary. / Thou'lt take thine eternal kingdom, / Thine everlasting dominion."¹⁰  Psalm 92:9 reads:  "Indeed, look at your enemies, O Lord. Indeed, look at how your enemies perish. All the evildoers are scattered."⁷  Psalm 145:13 has:  "Your kingdom is an eternal kingdom, and your dominion endures through all generations."⁷

The pattern is the same:  name the god, repeat "your enemies" with a new verb, then end with an eternal kingdom paired with everlasting dominion.  This is a stock form of Canaanite praise, as the Leviathan lines are a stock description.  It shows that Hebrew poets wrote in the same poetic language as their northern neighbors.  It does not show that any psalm was copied from a Ugaritic tablet.

Part 4: Proverbs and the Instruction of Amenemope

Grade:  dependence shown, Egyptian to Hebrew.  The full case is in Did Proverbs Copy an Egyptian Book?  In short, D. C. Simpson's 1926 table, which John Wilson reprints in Ancient Near Eastern Texts, finds an Egyptian parallel for every unit of Proverbs 22:17-23:11 except 22:23 and 22:26-27, and for only one verse of 23:12-24:22.¹⁰  The opening call to listen, the angry man, the boundary stone, the meal before a ruler and the riches that "make wings" all pass the test of verbal match.  The number thirty is the unusual detail:  Amenemope has thirty numbered chapters, and the troubled word of Proverbs 22:20 is best read "thirty sayings."  The earliest copies of Amenemope are school exercises of about the 21st or 22nd Dynasty, so the Egyptian is older than any date proposed for Solomon.⁴  The theories that the Egyptian copied a Hebrew book rested on a late date for Amenemope that these copies removed.

The use was free.  The Hebrew writer rearranged the material, left out the Egyptian gods, and wrote the LORD into the reasons.  Even John Ruffle, the Egyptologist who most doubts direct copying, grants a relationship "closer than coincidence."⁴  The parallel sets a floor of about 1000 BC for the Hebrew section, fits both a Solomonic and a Hezekian date, and decides between neither.

Part 5: Treaties, covenant and the date of Deuteronomy

Israel described its relationship with God as a covenant, and the covenant texts of Exodus and Deuteronomy are shaped like ancient treaties between a great king and a vassal.  That much is agreed.  The dispute is over which treaties:  Hittite treaties of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC, or Assyrian treaties of the seventh.  The answer bears on when Deuteronomy was written.  This article reports the comparative evidence;  the composition argument as a whole is in Deuteronomy and the Pious-Fraud Charge and Moses and the Composition of the Pentateuch.

The Hittite form

In 1954 George Mendenhall, working from the Hittite archives, argued that Israel's covenant followed the Hittite vassal treaty.  He noted that "we have adequate source material for studying international covenants only from the Hittite Empire, 1450-1200 B.C.," and listed six elements:  preamble, historical prologue, stipulations, deposit and public reading, witnesses, and blessings and curses.  "Nearly always the following six elements will be found in the Hittite treaty texts," he wrote, "but it must be emphasized that the form is not an extremely rigid one."¹⁷

A Hittite treaty from this period shows the form.  The Hittite king Mursilis, son of Suppiluliumas, bound Duppi-Tessub of Amurru, in Syria.  It opens:  "These are the words of the Sun Mursilis, the great king, the king of the Hatti land".  A section headed "Historical Introduction" follows:  "Aziras was the grandfather of you, Duppi-Tessub. He rebelled against my father, but submitted again to my father."¹⁰  The treaty ends with curses and blessings in balance:  if Duppi-Tessub breaks the oath, "may these gods of the oath destroy Duppi-Tessub," and if he keeps it, "may these gods of the oath protect him".¹⁰  Another treaty of the same period records the deposit and reading of the tablet:  "A duplicate of this tablet has been deposited before the Sun-goddess of Arinna," and "At regular intervals shall they read it in the presence of the king of the Mitanni land".¹⁰

The biblical covenant has each part.  The Ten Commandments open with a title and a history in one sentence:  "I, the Lord, am your God, who brought you from the land of Egypt, from the house of slavery."  Deuteronomy 1-3 is a long historical prologue.  The tablets are deposited in the ark, and Moses orders the law read before all Israel every seven years at the Feast of Shelters.  Deuteronomy 28 sets blessings against curses.⁷

Kenneth Kitchen, an Egyptologist, developed the argument into a sequence of six phases of treaty and law across the whole Near East.  His conclusion:  "The other massively striking result of juxtaposing phases V, VI, and Sinai is the glaring contrast between Hittite phase V plus Sinai on the one hand and both variants of the later phase VI on the other. In VI there is no historical prologue, no blessings to match with curses, no deposition, no reading arrangements."  Sinai and its renewals, "especially the version in Deuteronomy," "belong squarely within phase V, within 1400-1200, and at no other date."¹⁸  He adds that "out of eighty or more documents, all known prologues (historical and otherwise) precede the twelfth century, and none is attested in the first millennium."¹⁸

The Assyrian counter-case

In 672 BC the Assyrian king Esarhaddon made his vassals and subjects swear to support his son Ashurbanipal as heir.  The treaty survives in many copies.  In 2009 excavators at Tell Tayinat, capital of the Assyrian province of Kullania in the west, found another copy in the inner room of a temple.  Hans Ulrich Steymans argues that it "confirms the Assyrian application of this text on western vassals," and suggests that Judah's king Manasseh received one too.¹⁹  No copy has been found in Judah.

Two passages of Deuteronomy track this treaty closely.

Deuteronomy 13 orders Israel to put to death a prophet or dreamer who urges the worship of other gods, and not to cover for a brother, son, daughter, wife or friend who does the same.⁷  Esarhaddon's treaty, section 10, requires a vassal to report any evil word against the crown prince "from the mouth of your brothers, your sons, your daughters, or from the mouth of a prophet, an ecstatic, an inquirer of oracles".²⁰

Deuteronomy 28:26-33 runs through a sequence of curses.  The treaty's sections 39-42 run through a sequence of curses, each sent by a different god:

The treaty is quoted from the State Archives of Assyria edition of Simo Parpola and Kazuko Watanabe;²⁰ Deuteronomy from the NET.⁷  Leviticus 26:19 has the same image the other way round:  "make your sky like iron and your land like bronze."⁷

What each side argues

Steymans argues that "the impressive similarities between Deuteronomy 28:20–44 and curses from § 56 of the EST are due to direct borrowing from the EST," and draws the date:  "This implies that these Hebrew verses came to existence between 672 BC and 622 BC".¹⁹  He claims that "In Deuteronomy 28:20–44 and EST § 56, however, the sequence of motifs is identical."¹⁹

Kitchen answers that the order is not identical.  "Of forty-eight verses covering twenty-five curses (or curse paragraphs) in Deut. 28, only seven connect with the Esarhaddon treaties," and "the parallel even shows varying order of items in a pair of cases: verse 26 (and 25?) would have to come between verses 29/30 to keep the same topic sequence".  The table above shows the same thing:  Deuteronomy puts the birds before the skin disease.  Kitchen counts "ten links with Hammurabi and five with Mari/ZL, namely, fifteen links between Deut. 28 and the early second millennium."¹⁸  His conclusion:  "a direct link between Assyrian treaty expressions of the seventh century and Deut. 28 is a theoretical possibility (7 + 6 = 13 correlations), but pales into almost insignificance alongside the forty correlations with earlier periods (thirty before 1200)."  He prefers "the broad pool of traditional curse topics and formulae that had long existed and grown up through many centuries".¹⁸

Carly Crouch, in a 2014 monograph, tests the claim that Deuteronomy deliberately echoes Esarhaddon to subvert Assyria.  She does not deny the link.  She argues that if Deuteronomy borrowed the sequence, it borrowed it badly:  "The remarkable clumsiness with which Deuteronomy must be supposed to have borrowed this sequence from VTE ... makes it difficult to view the order of Deuteronomy's curse material in Deut 28:26–33 as a deliberate allusion to a VTE source text."²¹  In a note she reports C. Koch's point that a curse order based on "the respective remits of the deities of the Assyrian pantheon" could have reached Deuteronomy through "other texts" than Esarhaddon's treaty.²¹  Her overall finding on Deuteronomy 13 and 28:  "it contains no more such material than that which might be expected of any Hebrew text."²¹

The reply to Steymans on Deuteronomy 13, Joshua Berman's argument for a Hittite source, Bernard Levinson and Jeffrey Stackert's rejoinder, and Aaron Koller's assessment of the exchange are summarised in Moses and the Composition of the Pentateuch.

The four tests

The treaty form.  Verbal match:  not claimed;  this is a match of structure, not wording.  Unusual detail:  passed if Kitchen's survey holds, since the historical prologue and balanced blessings are the features he finds only in the second-millennium group.  Date order:  passed.  Route:  the weakest point.  The Hittite empire fell about 1200 BC, and the route by which its treaty form reached Israel is disputed.  Mendenhall himself conceded that "it is to be expected that survival of the form outlasted the Hittite Empire," while holding that "the home of this form is in the second millennium B.C. and cannot be proven (outside Israel) to have survived elsewhere."¹⁷  Grade:  shared genre, and a real pointer to a second-millennium origin for the covenant structure.  A form can be inherited, so the form dates the structure better than it dates the present wording.

The curse sequence in Deuteronomy 28:26-33.  Verbal match:  partial.  The topics run in nearly the same order, but Crouch finds no sign of translation from the Akkadian.  Unusual detail:  passed.  Skin disease then blindness is the order of the moon god and the sun god in an Assyrian curse list, and Deuteronomy keeps the order without the gods.  Date order:  the treaty is fixed at 672 BC;  Deuteronomy's date is the question.  Route:  passed, since Judah was an Assyrian vassal and Tayinat shows western vassals received the text.  Grade:  possible dependence, and the strongest case for seventh-century wording anywhere in Deuteronomy.  Kitchen's common pool remains a live alternative, because the moon-and-sun order may be a convention of Assyrian curses in general, as Koch argues.

Deuteronomy 13.  A loyalty oath that orders subjects to report anyone, even family, even a prophet, says what any such oath says.  Grade:  shared genre.

What this means for Deuteronomy's date

The two parallels point in different directions, and they concern different things.  The covenant's overall shape, with a history of the LORD's past kindness and blessings set against curses, is the shape of the treaties of 1400-1200 BC.  A run of curses in chapter 28 may have taken its order from a treaty of 672 BC.  Both can be true.  A covenant document of the second-millennium kind could have been recopied and expanded in Josiah's day, and Kitchen raises the possibility that "an older version of Deuteronomy was updated in about 622," though he doubts that Josiah's reformers would take curses from the empire they were trying to throw off.¹⁸  The comparative evidence does not settle Deuteronomy's date.  It rules out the claim that the whole book must be seventh-century because of its treaty form, and it rules out the claim that no line of it could be.

Part 6: The law codes

Hammurabi's laws and the Covenant Code

Hammurabi of Babylon had his laws carved on a diorite stela "topped by a bas-relief showing Hammurabi in the act of receiving the commission to write the law-book from the god of justice, the sun-god Shamash."¹⁰  Raymond Westbrook and Bruce Wells, specialists in ancient law, date the collection "to around 1750" BC.²²  It is centuries older than any date proposed for Exodus.  The Laws of Eshnunna, another collection known only from second-millennium copies, cover some of the same cases.⁶

The closest set of parallels is the goring ox.

The Mesopotamian laws are quoted from the translations of Theophile Meek and Albrecht Goetze in Ancient Near Eastern Texts;¹⁰ Exodus from the NET.⁷

The law of retaliation is the second famous parallel.  Hammurabi:  "If a seignior has destroyed the eye of a member of the aristocracy, they shall destroy his eye."  "If a seignior has knocked out a tooth of a seignior of his own rank, they shall knock out his tooth."¹⁰  Exodus 21:24:  "eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot."⁷

Wright's thesis

David P. Wright of Brandeis University argues the strongest form of dependence.  "It contends that this law collection, the pinnacle of the revelation at Mount Sinai according to the story of Exodus 19-24, is directly, primarily, and throughout dependent upon the Laws of Hammurabi."⁶  He dates the borrowing "between 740 and 640 BCE," when Israel and Judah were under Assyrian rule and Hammurabi's laws were copied in Assyrian scribal schools, and he reads the Covenant Code as "a symbolic counterstatement to the Assyrian hegemony prevailing at the time of its composition."⁶  On the goring ox he writes that "the main source text of Exodus 21:28—32 is LH 250-252."⁶

Wright is candid about the gap in his evidence.  "Unfortunately, we do not have a smoking gun—a copy or even a fragment of LH from Israel or Judah dating to the first millennium. Nor do we have during this period a scribe using Akkadian who can specifically be identified as an Israelite or Judean".⁶  He also reports the objection his critics press hardest:  "The Laws of Eshnunna and the Hittite Laws, however, are attested only in the second millennium. Otto and Wells use this fact to argue against a theory of textual dependence."  His answer is to posit "minor or miscellaneous law collections in the Neo-Assyrian period" that carried similar laws.⁶

Westbrook and Wells hold the third view, a common legal tradition.  They describe the alternatives:  "The literary model therefore posits a much closer dependence, in which texts like the Laws of Hammurabi were copied and imitated by Hebrew scribes. The difficulty with this approach lies in the details: the Hebrew scribes appear to draw upon all the known codes, which would have required a truly exceptional library at their disposal."  Their own model sees the codes "as part of an intellectual tradition, part oral and part written, that spread by diffusion from Mesopotamia".²²  They are equally hard on the view that Israel's law grew up on its own:  for it, "the strong affinities of form and content with the cuneiform codes are an embarrassment that needs to be explained away."²²

The four tests

Verbal match:  passed for the goring ox.  The same three cases come in the same order, with similar wording.  The ox-against-ox ruling is almost word for word.

Unusual detail:  passed, but it points the wrong way for Wright.  Splitting both the live ox's price and the dead ox between the two owners is a specific ruling.  It is in Eshnunna, not in Hammurabi, and Eshnunna is not known to have been copied after the second millennium.

Date order:  passed.  Both Mesopotamian collections are older than Exodus on any dating.

Route:  not shown for a text.  No copy of Hammurabi has been found in Israel or Judah, and no Israelite scribe of Akkadian is known.  Wright concedes both.

Grade:  shared legal tradition, shown;  copying from Hammurabi, not shown.  The Covenant Code works on the problems that ancient Near Eastern legal scholarship had been working on for a thousand years.  Whether a Judean scribe had Hammurabi's text open, or whether the tradition reached Israel through other channels, the evidence cannot yet decide.  Wright's late date depends on the copying hypothesis.  It is not independent evidence for it.

Where the laws differ

Hallo's rule says to look at the contrasts.  These are differences of value, not of wording.

Class.  In Hammurabi, retaliation applies between equals.  For a commoner's eye or bone the penalty is "one mina of silver," and for a slave's, "one-half his value."¹⁰  Exodus 21:23-25 names no classes, and Leviticus 24:22 adds:  "There will be one regulation for you, whether a resident foreigner or a native citizen".⁷

Slaves.  In Hammurabi, the payment for an injured slave is set by the slave's value.  Exodus 21:26-27 makes the slave's freedom the payment:  if a master destroys his servant's eye or knocks out a tooth, "he will let the servant go free as compensation."⁷  Hammurabi puts to death anyone who helps a slave escape through the city gate or hides a fugitive slave.¹⁰  Deuteronomy 23:15-16 says:  "You must not return an escaped slave to his master when he has run away to you."⁷

Vicarious punishment.  If a builder's house collapses and kills the owner's son, Hammurabi says, "they shall put the son of that builder to death."  If a man causes the death of another man's pregnant daughter, "they shall put his daughter to death."¹⁰  Exodus 21:31 applies the ox law unchanged when the victim is a son or a daughter, and Deuteronomy 24:16 says:  "Fathers must not be put to death for what their children do, nor children for what their fathers do".⁷

Life and property.  Hammurabi treats the killer ox as property and fines its owner.  Exodus stones the ox, forbids eating its meat, and puts the negligent owner's own life at stake.  Human death is not settled like damage to goods.

The weakness.  The contrast must not be overstated.  Exodus also ranks slaves below the free.  A slave killed by an ox is worth thirty shekels to the master, and a master who beats a slave who survives "one or two days" goes unpunished, "for he has suffered the loss."⁷  These texts are discussed in Slavery in Ancient Israel, and the Torah's death penalties are compared with Hammurabi's in Harsh Penalties in Old Testament Law.  What the differences show is a legal system that shares its neighbors' vocabulary but ranks people differently:  no aristocratic class, no punishment of children for parents, and a slave's injury that buys the slave's freedom rather than a payment to the owner.

Wright's own reading points the same way.  He calls the Covenant Code "a symbolic counterstatement" to Assyrian power:  a revision of its source, not a copy of its values.⁶

Part 7: Wisdom, lament and love poetry

Job.  Babylon had poems about a righteous man who suffers without cause.  W. G. Lambert, the editor of Babylonian Wisdom Literature, names the two great ones, Ludlul bel nemeqi, "I will praise the lord of wisdom," and the Babylonian Theodicy.  He dates them:  "The first is certainly Cassite period, the Theodicy may be a little later."²³  The Ludlul sufferer complains, "My god has forsaken me and disappeared," and asks, "Who can know the will of the gods in heaven?"¹⁰  Job asks the same question about where wisdom can be found.⁷  The Theodicy is a dialogue between a sufferer and a friend, and its acrostic spells "I, Saggil-kinam-ubbib, the incantation priest, am adorant of the god and the king."²³  The likeness is a shared theme and a shared form, the dialogue.  No verbal sequence links Job to either poem.  The answers differ too.  Lambert reads Ludlul's answer as "the sufferings of the righteous are only temporary," and its sufferer is healed by Marduk.²³  Job is restored only after God speaks from the storm and gives no reason for the suffering.  Grade:  shared culture.

The Song of Songs.  Egypt's New Kingdom produced love songs.  Wilson:  "The later Egyptian Empire (1300-1100 B.C.) has provided us with several collections of love songs. ... As in the Song of Songs, the lovers are called "my brother" and "my sister.""¹⁰  The Song calls the bride "my sister, my bride."⁷  A shared genre and a shared term of affection are all that is shown.  Grade:  shared culture.

The cases side by side

Objections and responses

"If Proverbs copied an Egyptian book, it is not inspired."

This objection is answered in Did Proverbs Copy an Egyptian Book?

"Yahweh is just Baal with a new name. Israel borrowed the Canaanite storm god and his myths."

Israel borrowed the language.  The texts that borrow the most turn it against its source.  In Ugarit, Death swallows the dragon-slayer;  in Isaiah, the dragon-slayer swallows Death.  In Ugarit, Baal must fight the sea for his throne;  in Psalm 29, the flood is already the LORD's throne and no rival appears.  In Genesis 1, the waters do as they are told, which Day and Tsumura both grant.  Whether Israel's religion went through a stage of many gods is a separate question, tested in Did Israelite Monotheism Evolve?.

"The Bible came first; the Egyptians and Canaanites borrowed from it."

Not for these texts.  Ugarit was destroyed shortly after 1200 BC, and the Baal tablets were copied before that.  The oldest copies of Amenemope date from about 1000 BC and the work is older still.  R. O. Kevin argued in 1931 that Amenemope depended on Proverbs, when the papyrus was thought to be late.  The Cairo ostracon and the Ramesside dating ended that argument.  A defender who still makes it is ignoring dated manuscripts.

"Leviathan is a real animal, a dinosaur or marine reptile in Job 41, so the Ugaritic myth is irrelevant."

The two questions can be separated.  Whatever animal Job 41 describes, Isaiah 27:1's wording is the Ugaritic formula, and the Ugaritic Litan has seven heads.  A poet can name a real creature in words that have mythic overtones, as English writers use "dragon."  The case for and against a dinosaur reading of Job is in Dinosaurs in Ancient Art and Text.  This article only shows that Isaiah used a Canaanite poetic name.

"The treaty form proves that Moses wrote Deuteronomy."

It points to a second-millennium origin for the covenant's structure, and Kitchen's survey of eighty treaties is strong evidence for that.  It does not show who wrote the present text or when it reached its present wording.  Mendenhall, who started the argument, granted that the form may have outlasted the Hittite empire.¹⁷  The curses of Deuteronomy 28:26-33 may have been reworded in the seventh century.  An argument from form dates the form.

"Esarhaddon's treaty proves that Deuteronomy is a seventh-century forgery."

At most it dates a run of curses in one chapter, and even that is disputed by Kitchen and qualified by Crouch.  It does not touch the historical prologue, the deposit and reading of the law, or the balanced blessings, which are the features that tie the covenant to the older form.  Whether Deuteronomy's discovery under Josiah was a pious fraud is argued in Deuteronomy and the Pious-Fraud Charge.

"Wright has shown that the Covenant Code is a late scribal exercise based on Hammurabi."

He has shown that the Covenant Code works through Hammurabi's cases, often in Hammurabi's order.  He has not shown how a Judean scribe met Hammurabi's text, and he says so.⁶  The ox-against-ox ruling comes from Eshnunna, which is not known after the second millennium, and Wright must posit lost collections to keep his date.⁶  His seventh-century date follows from his copying hypothesis, so it cannot be used to support it.

"These are coincidences. People everywhere think alike."

Not the thirty sayings beside the thirty chapters, and not a word that occurs once in the Hebrew Bible and nowhere else except the matching Ugaritic line.  A defender who calls these coincidences makes Sandmel's error in reverse.  The honest position grants dependence where the four tests are passed and denies it where they fail.

"Hallo's 'contrast' is special pleading. Any difference can be spun as a theological correction."

The contrasts listed here are specific and checkable:  the name of the god, the reversal of the swallowing, the slave's freedom, the ban on punishing children for parents.  They also cut against the Bible in places, and this article states those:  Exodus values a slave below a free man and lets a master off when a beaten slave lingers.  A method that reports the unflattering differences is not spinning.

Issues and unanswered questions

1. The Ugaritic transliteration of KTU 1.5 i 1-3 is quoted as John Day prints it. The copy read is an OCR scan that damages the special letters. The words were recoverable, but the standard edition, KTU, was not read directly.
2. Proverbs and Amenemope. The fuller case, read from Fox's and Kidner's commentaries, Waltke's in snippets, Lange's edition and the papers of Kevin, Oesterley, Drioton and Williams, is in Did Proverbs Copy an Egyptian Book?, whose own list of issues says what was not obtained.
3. The Deuteronomy 13 debate. Jacob Lauinger's edition of the Tell Tayinat tablet, the articles of Joshua Berman and of Bernard Levinson and Jeffrey Stackert, and Kitchen and Lawrence's three-volume Treaty, Law and Covenant in the Ancient Near East were not read here. Whether Judah received a copy of Esarhaddon's treaty is Steymans's inference; no copy has been found in Judah.
4. A count that has not been made. Kitchen says Deuteronomy 28 shares thirteen curses with seventh-century texts and forty with earlier ones; Steymans says the topic order with Esarhaddon's section 56 is identical and unique. Laying out Deuteronomy 28:20-44 against every published curse list, motif by motif, and counting order agreements would settle which claim is right. Kitchen's Table 27 is the starting point and was not checked line by line.
5. Wright's critics were read through Wright's own summary and through Westbrook and Wells's textbook, not in Bruce Wells's 2006 response or Westbrook's review.
6. Psalm 29. Ginsberg's original papers of 1935-36 and Fitzgerald's 1974 note were read only through Cross, Day and Craigie. No Canaanite or Phoenician hymn that runs parallel to Psalm 29 has been found. If one is, the grade changes.
7. Tsumura was read through Google Books snippets. His sentences are quoted only where a snippet closes them.
8. Litan or Lotan. Emerton's 1982 article on the vocalization of the Ugaritic name was known only through Day and Wyatt.
9. The Song of Songs comparison rests on Wilson; Michael Fox's 1985 study of the Egyptian love songs was not read.

Verdict

The parallels are real, and in two places they show direct use of older material.  Proverbs 22:17-23:11 drew on the Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope, which is older and which the Hebrew writer rearranged and re-founded on the LORD.  Isaiah 27:1 uses a Canaanite formula for Leviathan that was already old when Ugarit fell.  Everywhere else, in Psalm 29, the covenant form, the law codes, Job and the Song, the evidence shows a shared world of language, genre, diplomacy and legal thought, and the claims of direct copying from Baal hymns, Hammurabi or Esarhaddon remain unproven.

The parallels do not show that Israel's theology was borrowed.  Where the Bible takes the most, it changes the most.  The dragon-slayer swallows Death instead of being swallowed.  The storm god's thunder praises a God who has no rival.  Creation has no battle.  A slave's injured eye buys the slave's freedom.  These are the differences Hallo's method looks for.  They run against the source's theology, though not every difference flatters the Bible:  Exodus still values a slave below a free man.

The parallels date some texts and leave others open.  Amenemope sets a floor of about 1000 BC for Proverbs 22:17-23:11.  Psalm 29's Canaanite features lead Cross and Craigie alike to date it to the tenth century or earlier.  The covenant form favors a second-millennium origin for the structure of Exodus and Deuteronomy.  Esarhaddon's treaty is the best evidence for seventh-century wording in Deuteronomy 28, and it is not decisive.  A skeptic who says the parallels prove the Bible is late borrowed myth has read only half the evidence.  So has a defender who says the Bible borrowed nothing.

Sources