Texts in Conversation
Isaiah 63 shares the Baal Cycle's image of Anat covered in an enemy's blood, using the grape harvest to make God's defeat of hostile nations a picture of severe judgment.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
KTU 1.3 II:27
Cuneiform Texts from Ugarit
Ancient Near East
but she was not sated with her fighting in the vale, her battling between the two cities. She arranged chairs for the warriors, she did arrange tables for the soldiers, stools for the heroes. Anat fought hard and looked, she battled and surveyed the scene; her liver swelled with laughter, her heart was filled with joy, the liver of Anat with triumph, as she plunged her knees in the blood of the guards, her skirts in the gore of the warriors, until she was sated with fighting in the house, with battling between the tables. The blood of the guards was wiped from the house
Isaiah 63:3
Hebrew Bible
1 Who is this who comes from Edom, dressed in bright red, coming from Bozrah? Who is this one wearing royal attire, who marches confidently because of his great strength? “It is I, the one who announces vindication, and who is able to deliver!” 2 Why are your clothes red? Why do you look like someone who has stomped on grapes in a vat? 3 “I have stomped grapes in the wine press all by myself; no one from the nations joined me. I stomped on them in my anger; I trampled them down in my rage. Their juice splashed on my garments and stained all my clothes. 4 For I looked forward to the day of vengeance, and then payback time arrived. 5 I looked, but there was no one to help; I was shocked because there was no one offering support. So my right arm accomplished deliverance; my raging anger drove me on.
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Notes and References
“... Third, the battle produces heaps of corpses (Isa. 34:2) or skulls (Deut.
32:43; Ps. 110:6). The image of harvest appears in Anat’s “gleaning” and in
some biblical scenes of divine war (Joel 3:13; Rev. 14:14-20; cf. secular
examples in Judg. 8:1-2; 20:44-46; Jer. 6:9; cf. Jer. 49:9; Obadiah 5). Fourth,
like the second part of the Ugaritic passage given above, the aftermath of war
is described as a feast, a feature attested in Isaiah 34:6-7, 49:26 and perhaps
presupposed in the sacrificial language of Deuteronomy 32:43. This feast
includes feeding on the flesh of captives (Deut. 32:42), drinking the blood of
the victims (Isa. 49:26; LXX Zech. 9:15; cf. Num. 23:24), called “captives” in
Deuteronomy 32:42 (as in KTU 1.3 II), and wading in the blood of the
vanquished (Pss. 58:11; 68:24). Isaiah 49:26 alters the motif of feeding on the
captives. In this verse, the enemies will cannibalize themselves: “I will make
your oppressors eat their own flesh, and they shall be drunk with their own
blood as with wine.” The image of wading in the blood may be related to the
theme of the battle as bloody harvest. Because of its blood red color, the
image of the wine harvest appears in biblical descriptions of divine war (Deut.
32:42-43; Isa. 49:26; 63:3; Ezek. 39:19; Joel 4:13; Lam. 1:15; Rev. 19:15). ...”
Smith, Mark S.
The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel
(p. PDF 116) William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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