Letter of Iwrdr to Pilsiya

KTU 2.10

Message of Iwrdr.
To Pilsiya
say:
May it be well with you.
To Trgds
and to Kalbiya:
I have heard of the defeat.
They are defeated. Now
if they have not
been defeated, then send
to me. And the hand⁠
of the gods here is like death,⁠
very strong.
If they have been overcome,
your answer […]
And whatever
word you hear
there, put
in a letter to me.

Texts in conversation

Compare KTU 2.10:12 and 2 Samuel 24:14

Ancient Near East, Ugaritic · Hebrew Bible

Summary

In 2 Samuel 24, David's choice to fall into God's hand shares the Ugaritic image of divine action through disease, linking his hope for mercy to the power that brings the plague.

Passages

KTU 2.10:12

Ancient Near East, Ugaritic · Cuneiform Texts from Ugarit

Message of Iwrdr. To Pilsiya say: May it be well with you. To Trgds and to Kalbiya: I have heard of the defeat. They are defeated. Now if they have not been defeated, then send to me. And the hand of the gods here is like death, very strong. If they have been overcome, your answer […] And whatever word you hear there, put in a letter to me.

1350–1185 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in KTU

2 Samuel 24:14

Hebrew Bible

14 David said to Gad, “I am very upset! I prefer that we be attacked by the Lord, for his mercy is great; I do not want to be attacked by human hands!” 15 So the Lord sent a plague through Israel from the morning until the completion of the appointed time, and 70,000 people died from Dan to Beer Sheba. 16 When the angel extended his hand to destroy Jerusalem, the Lord relented from his judgment. He told the angel who was killing the people, “That’s enough! Stop now!” (Now the angel of the Lord was near the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite.) 17 When he saw the angel who was destroying the people, David said to the Lord, “Look, it is I who have sinned and done this evil thing! As for these sheep—what have they done? Attack me and my family.”

600–501 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in 2 Samuel

References

“... These sources are highly relevant for understanding biblical notions of disease and deﬁlement, with “touch” ﬁguring prominently. First of all, like the usage of the Akkadian verb lapātu, the Bible employs the verbal root n-g-ʿ (whose basic sense is literally “to touch”) to describe disease. The derivatives of this verb include the piel (causative) verbal form used to describe God afﬂicting people and lands with disease (e.g., Genesis 12:17; 2 Kgs 15:5) and the nominal form negaʿ, used to describe illnesses, especially the skin disease ṣaraʿat. Second, like the Mesopotamian sources, the Bible refers to mass afﬂictions as manifestations of the “hand” of God. It is important to stress that these semantic parallels, as opposed to etymological ones, do not imply intercultural contact or inﬂuence, but rather the independent emergence of similar conceptions in both cultures. ...” “... 55 E.g., Exodus 9:3; 1 Sam 5:6, 9; 2 Sam 24:14–15. A comparable idiom (yd ʾilm) is also attested in Ugaritic texts (e.g., CAT 2.10 11–13). ...”

Yitzhaq Feder, Purity and Pollution in the Hebrew Bible: From Embodied Experience to Moral Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 42.

References are not endorsements of their contents. Read each reference in full to understand its author's intentions in using these texts.

Letter of Iwrdr to Pilsiya

KTU347 chapters

Compare KTU 2.10:12 and 2 Samuel 24:14

Summary

Passages

KTU 2.10:12

2 Samuel 24:14

References

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