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 Exodus 9:3

Ancient Near East, Ugaritic · Hebrew Bible

Summary

Exodus 9 shares the image of disease as a god's hand, which the Ugaritic letter KTU 2.10 applies to an outbreak, making the plague a direct exercise of divine power in the struggle with Pharaoh.

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

Exodus 9:3

Hebrew Bible

1 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh and tell him, ‘This is what the Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has said, “Release my people that they may serve me! 2 For if you refuse to release them and continue holding them, 3 then the hand of the Lord will surely bring a very terrible plague on your livestock in the field, on the horses, the donkeys, the camels, the herds, and the flocks. 4 But the Lord will distinguish between the livestock of Israel and the livestock of Egypt, and nothing will die of all that the Israelites have.”’” 5 The Lord set an appointed time, saying, “Tomorrow the Lord will do this in the land.” 6 And the Lord did this on the next day; all the livestock of the Egyptians died, but of the Israelites’ livestock not one died.

750–400 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Exodus

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 Exodus 9:3

Summary

Passages

KTU 2.10:12

Exodus 9:3

References

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