For those who would like to listen, I’m going to tell you a
long story, so you might as well grab a glass of pomegranate juice. Indeed this
story will take place in two parts with the second part provided later.
The Polytheists
This
story takes place in the sands of time, at least 3200 years ago, in a thriving
metropolis called Ugarit which although huge in its time is comparable to our
small towns of today. This is a time before Christianity, before Judaism, but
roughly about the same time as the Egyptian heretic Akhenaton. In this city of
Ugarit, scribes wrote of the deities and the heroes. We know the name of one of
the scribes: Ilimilku--whose name means “the god Ilu (El) is king.” He and his
fellow scribes wrote of gods and goddesses like Ilu (known later in Hebrew as
El), Athiratu (known later in Hebrew as Asherah), ‘Athtartu (known later in
Hebrew as “Ashtoreth”), and Baʻlu
Haddi (also known as “Baʻal”), and many more—a careful reading of the Torah
or the biblical Old Testament, and you will see their names sprinkled
throughout. Scholars consider Ugarit as indicative of a larger Canaanite
culture: the land of Canaan was never a cohesive whole nation or empire, but a
collection of sometimes affiliated/sometimes unaffiliated city states that
shared a common culture and similar languages.
Now the
Canaanites, and the Ugaritans in particular, weren’t a let’s-hold-hands-and-sing-kumbaya-bunch,
but they did alright considering the Hittites and Hurrians north of them vied for
power with the Egyptian empire in the south. Ugarit’s army, like most Canaanite armies, was small, but Canaanite cities made a great deal of wealth from their
strategic position and they managed to keep much of it through careful, often
contentious, diplomatic relations. Although primarily merchants, they would get
their hands bloody if the situation demanded it. The Ugaritans had their own
language, Ugaritic, which they wrote in an alphabetic cuneiform script: the
language is in the same language family as several little-known Canaanite
dialects and the lingua franca of the time and place—Akkadian—as well as Hebrew
and Phoenician, languages which came later. Scholars see in polytheistic
Ugaritic texts the very seeds of biblical narrative, from poetic techniques to outright
plagiarism. The Ugaritans, and the Canaanite culture they represent, are the ancestors
of the Israelites from whence both Judaism and Christianity sprang.
Ancient Canaanite Religion
We
understand Canaanite religion from the fifteen-hundred some-odd primary
documents preserved in the city of Ugarit—and this number grows with more
discoveries. Some texts tell narratives and epics about the deities and heroes, while other texts describe seasonal rites and offerings. The state-wide religion
focused on offerings and ensuring the peace and continuity of the royal
dynasty, but also involved honoring the dead. The Ugaritans documented many offering
types intended to serve different purposes: two of the most important included
those for the expiation of misdeed, and those for strengthening of the soul/vitality
(napshu) of the deities, the ancestors, or even other living people.
The temple had areas of graduated sanctity,
with the inner holy-of-holies room being the most sacred, through the outer sanctuary,
then to the courtyard: Canaanite temples usually had a bipartite or tripartite
floor plan with a courtyard. The design of Solomon’s legendary temple comes from
Canaanite tradition. Temple complexes acted as centers not just of religious
importance, but administrative and financial importance. These temple complexes held a large
portion, if not all, of a city’s wealth, and the temple’s administration often spearheaded
the collection and the redistribution of wealth when necessary. The Christian tale of Jesus’s
rage at the money-changers demonstrated an abhorrence of a polytheistic
Canaanite economic institution which had changed over time and had begun in days
no one in Jesus’s time could remember clearly.
The Bronze Age’s End
Around
the end of the Bronze Age, a roving band of people called the Habiru caused
problems for settled cities and travelers. These nomadic Habiru and highwaymen
came from various cultures, often exiled from their cities for crimes, or were people
who found themselves homeless for reasons like crop failure. The Egyptians in
the Amarna letters complained about the Habiru nuisance and yet the Egyptians of
the Nineteenth Dynasty caused more of them to roam as a result of Egyptian
foreign policy. The Egyptians fortified and sustained cities strategic to their
own interests, but caused other cities to languish. These Habiru, often of
mixed ancestry from all around the Near East, Middle East, and Egypt,
nonetheless had a strong representative population of Canaanite ancestry. Scholars
debate whether or not the Hebrew people had beginnings in the Habiru, but at
the very least we can say that the Habiru are a cultural element in the
Israelite population.
During
the end of the Bronze Age, a series of events sometimes called the Aegean
Apocalypse befell: an era of natural disaster, fire, destruction, war, famine,
plague, and invaders. When the dust and ashes settled, the resulting
cultures—although carrying on in the footsteps of their ancestors—had forever
changed. For this time period, scholars begin to refer to the Canaanites less,
and speak more of the emergence of the Israelites and the Phoenicians. Both are
daughter-cultures to the Canaanites. The Phoenicians lived along the coast of
the Mediterranean, and managed to put their cities back together. They became
strong and metropolitan again, and gained wealth through trade and their good
agricultural situation: it rained more on the coasts than it did inland or in
the southern deserts. The Phoenicians maintained their polytheistic religion
for a long time—a religion based on and evolving from Canaanite polytheistic
tradition. Later, the Carthaginian religion evolved from the Phoenician
religion, and can claim Canaanite religion as its grandmother.
The rest of the tale will continue in Part Two coming soon.
An envisioning of the "Golden Calf" tale in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.
From Providence Lithograph Company, 1901. Found at Wikimedia.
Image is public domain.
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