Texts in Conversation
Psalm 58 turns Anat's joy in bloody victory in the Baal Cycle into joy at the punishment of the wicked, giving a violent battle image a moral purpose.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
KTU 1.3 II:27
Cuneiform Texts from Ugarit
Ancient Near East
Anat fought hard and looked, she battled and surveyed the scene; her liver swelled with laughter, her heart was filled with joy, the liver of Anat with triumph, as she plunged her knees in the blood of the guards, her skirts in the gore of the warriors, until she was sated with fighting in the house, with battling between the tables. The blood of the guards was wiped from the house and oil of a peace-offering was poured from a bowl. The virgin Anat washed her hands, the sister-in-law of peoples her fingers; she washed her hands of the blood of the guards, her fingers of the gore of the warriors.
Psalm 58:10
Hebrew Bible
6 O God, break the teeth in their mouths! Smash the jawbones of the lions, O Lord. 7 Let them disappear like water that flows away. Let them wither like grass. 8 Let them be like a snail that melts away as it moves along. Let them be like stillborn babies that never see the sun. 9 Before the kindling is even placed under your pots, he will sweep it away along with both the raw and cooked meat. 10 The godly will rejoice when they see vengeance carried out; they will bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked. 11 Then observers will say, “Yes indeed, the godly are rewarded. Yes indeed, there is a God who judges in the earth.”
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Notes and References
“... Third, the battle produces heaps of corpses (Isa. 34:2) or skulls (Deut.
32:43; Ps. 110:6). The image of harvest appears in Anat’s “gleaning” and in
some biblical scenes of divine war (Joel 3:13; Rev. 14:14-20; cf. secular
examples in Judg. 8:1-2; 20:44-46; Jer. 6:9; cf. Jer. 49:9; Obadiah 5). Fourth,
like the second part of the Ugaritic passage given above, the aftermath of war
is described as a feast, a feature attested in Isaiah 34:6-7, 49:26 and perhaps
presupposed in the sacrificial language of Deuteronomy 32:43. This feast
includes feeding on the flesh of captives (Deut. 32:42), drinking the blood of
the victims (Isa. 49:26; LXX Zech. 9:15; cf. Num. 23:24), called “captives” in
Deuteronomy 32:42 (as in KTU 1.3 II), and wading in the blood of the
vanquished (Pss. 58:11; 68:24). Isaiah 49:26 alters the motif of feeding on the
captives. In this verse, the enemies will cannibalize themselves: “I will make
your oppressors eat their own flesh, and they shall be drunk with their own
blood as with wine.” The image of wading in the blood may be related to the
theme of the battle as bloody harvest. Because of its blood red color, the
image of the wine harvest appears in biblical descriptions of divine war (Deut.
32:42-43; Isa. 49:26; 63:3; Ezek. 39:19; Joel 4:13; Lam. 1:15; Rev. 19:15). ...”
Smith, Mark S.
The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel
(p. PDF 116) William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002
* 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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