Texts in Conversation
Deuteronomy's picture of God protecting and feeding Israel may echo El's care for his children in KTU 1.23, making a nation's survival a parent's responsibility.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
KTU 1.23:68
Cuneiform Texts from Ugarit
Ancient Near East
O sons whom I have begotten, raise up a dais in the midst of the holy desert: there you will make your dwelling among the stones and trees. For seven whole years, for eight periods of time, the gracious gods went to and fro on the steppe; they roamed the edge of the desert. And they met the guardian of the sown land. And they cried out to the guardian of the sown land: O guardian, guardian! Open up! And he made an opening for them, and they entered. If there is food for us, give some that we may eat. If there is wine for us, give some that we may drink. And the guardian of the sown land answered them: There is wine: whoever enters let him come! Here is his measure of wine And his companions let him fill with wine.
Deuteronomy 32:10
Hebrew Bible
10 The Lord found him in a desolate land, in an empty wasteland where animals howl. He continually guarded him and taught him; he continually protected him like the pupil of his eye. 11 Like an eagle that stirs up its nest, that hovers over its young, so the Lord spread out his wings and took him, he lifted him up on his pinions. 12 The Lord alone was guiding him, no foreign god was with him. 13 He enabled him to travel over the heights of the earth, and he ate of the produce of the fields. He provided honey for him from the cliffs, and olive oil from the hardest of rocks, 14 butter from the herd and milk from the flock, along with the fat of lambs, rams and goats of Bashan, along with the best of the kernels of wheat; and from the juice of grapes you drank wine.
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Notes and References
“... A much better Ugaritic text for underscoring the connection between ʾIlu and
fields or steppe lands is KTU 1.23 (see Lewis forthcoming a). In this text, the
multivalent word šd can designate both fertile fields (KTU 1.23.13, 28) as well as
steppe lands (parallel to pʾat mdbr in KTU 1.23.68). Steppe lands, though lacking
in rainfall, provided seasonal “shrub steppe” and “dry” vegetation that led to
the predominance of sheep and goat pastoralism, supplemented by hunting ac
tivity. Such a scenario is depicted in KTU 1.23.67b–68, which has the ravenous
“gracious gods” roaming the steppe lands and desert fringes in their hunting ac
tivity only to find hunting insufficient when compared to sustainable agricul
tural production. Coming to the rescue is ʾIlu as the guardian of the sown land
(nǵr mdrʿ), who provides bounty to his children. KTU 1.23 is an ʾIlu-centric text
that celebrates how ʾIlu is the provider of cultivated agriculture, even viticulture.
Arable fields are divine fields (cf. šd ʾilm in KTU 1.23.13).126 Analogously, one ...” “... could call to mind the Deuteronomic tradition—noted for its father/mother
birthing language (see pp. 110–111)—whose vocabulary echoes that of KTU
1.23, with El protecting (nṣr) his child in the wilderness (midbār) as he nurses
(ynq) him with honey and feeds him with the produce of the field (śādāy), where
he drinks fine wine (tišteh ḥāmer) made of grapes (ʿēnāb) (Deut 32:6, 10, 13–14). ...”
Lewis, Theodore J.
The Origin and Character of God: Ancient Israelite Religion through the Lens of Divinity
(pp. 103-104) Oxford University Press, 2020
* 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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