Texts in Conversation
Numbers' picture of the ground swallowing rebels recalls the hungry Death of Ugaritic stories, making the manner of their death express God's judgment.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
KTU 1.5 II:2
Cuneiform Texts from Ugarit
Ancient Near East
[…] He extends a lip to the earth, a lip to the heavens, he extends a tongue to the stars. Baal must enter his belly, down into hs mouth he must go, since he scorched the olive, the produce of the earth, and the fruit of the trees. Valiant Baal was afraid of him; Valiant Warrior was in dread of him. Depart, say to divine Mot, declare to the Beloved of El, the hero: Message of Valiant Baal, word of Valiant Warrior: Greetings, O divine Mot, your servant am I, and forever. The gods departed and did not stay. Then they set their faces towards divine Mot (death), towards his city Muddy, a pit the seat of his enthronement, a crevice the land of his inheritance. They lifted lip their voices and cried: Message of Valiant Baal, word of Valiant Warrior: Greetings, O divine Mot, your servant am I, and forever so.
Numbers 16:30
Hebrew Bible
28 Then Moses said, “This is how you will know that the Lord has sent me to do all these works, for I have not done them of my own will. 29 If these men die a natural death, or if they share the fate of all men, then the Lord has not sent me. 30 But if the Lord does something entirely new, and the earth opens its mouth and swallows them up along with all that they have, and they go down alive to the grave, then you will know that these men have despised the Lord!” 31 When he had finished speaking all these words, the ground that was under them split open, 32 and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them, along with their households, and all Korah’s men, and all their goods. 33 They and all that they had went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed over them. So they perished from among the community.
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Notes and References
“... 51 For depictions of “death” as a swallower, in the Hebrew Bible, see Numbers 16:30; Isaiah
5:14; Habakkuk 2:5; Proverbs 1:12; etc. In the Baal Cycle, see KTU 1.4 VIII 14–20; 1.5
I 6–8, 14–19; II 2–6. For a fuller discussion, see Paul Kang-Kul Cho and Janling Fu,
“Death and Feasting in the Isaiah Apocalypse (Isaiah 25:6–8),” in Formation and
Intertextuality in Isaiah 24–27 (eds. Todd Hibbard and Paul Kim; SBLAIL 17; Atlanta:
SBL, 2013), 117–42.
188
Myth, History, and Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible ...”
Cho, Paul K. K.
Myth, History, and Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible
(p. 188) Cambridge University Press, 2018
* 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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