KTU 1.19
Cuneiform Texts from Ugarit
Ancient Near East
Then Danel the man of healing, at once the hero, the devotee of Hrnm, arose and sat by the entrance to the gate, beneath the trees which were by the threshing-floor. He tried the case of the widow, he judged the cause of the orphan. On lifting up her eyes she saw that the fleece on the threshing-floor was dry, that the field was wilted, that the fruit of the orchard was shriveled. Over her father’s house some falcons hovered, a flock of hawks was watching. Pughat wept in her heart, she cried in her liver. She tore the garment of Danel the man of healing, the cloak of the hero, the devotee of Hrnm.
Date: 2300 B.C.E. (based on scholarly estimates)
Source
Deuteronomy 10:18
Hebrew Bible
16 Therefore, circumcise your hearts and stop being so stubborn! 17 For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, mighty, and awesome God who is unbiased and takes no bribe, 18 who justly treats the orphan and widow, and who loves resident foreigners, giving them food and clothing. 19 So you must love the resident foreigner because you were foreigners in the land of Egypt.
Date: 6th Century B.C.E. (Final composition) (based on scholarly estimates)
Source
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Texts in Conversation
The Ugaritic story of Danel in KTU 1.19 shows a ruler sitting at the gate to justly defend widows and orphans, a role later echoed in Deuteronomy 10:18, which praises God who upholds the cause of the orphan and widow. Both texts emphasize justice for the vulnerable, but Deuteronomy reshapes this older royal ideal into a divine attribute. The shift in the order of these groups across traditions hints at evolving priorities and literary borrowing between Israelite law and Canaanite culture.
Notes and References
"... Since these prophetic texts are from the late monarchy and early exilic period, as are the references in Deuteronomy and the Holiness Code, there is no need to tie concern for the ger to this particular historical event of the late eighth century. The combined concerns of Exodus 22:20–21 belong to the same horizon as the exilic prophetic texts and the other two law codes on which it is dependent. In recent traditio-historical discussions on the combination of these three, the stranger, orphan, and widow, much has been made of the order and arrangement of these groups. It has been observed that within the Deuteronomic tradition generally, there is a fairly fixed order of “stranger-orphan-widow”, which is also followed in Jeremiah 7:6; 22:3; Ezekiel 22:7 (but orphan-widow-stranger in Deuteronomy 10:18). The order in the Covenant Code, however, is different, with the sequence of widow-orphan. Lohfink takes from this the view that the Covenant Code does not yet reflect the fixed formula of Deuteronomy, but in Zechariah 7:10 and Malachi 3:5 the order corresponds to that of the Covenant Code ..."
Van Seters, John
A Law Book for the Diaspora: Revision in the Study of the Covenant Code
(pp. 131-132) Oxford University Press, 2003
* 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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