Texts in Conversation
In 1 Samuel 6, the Philistines' test shares Ugaritic language for disease as a god's hand, making the cause of an illness a question of divine action or chance.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
KTU 2.10:12
Cuneiform Texts from Ugarit
Ancient Near East
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.
1 Samuel 6:9
Hebrew Bible
7 So now go and make a new cart. Get two cows that have calves and that have never had a yoke placed on them. Harness the cows to the cart, and take their calves from them back to their stalls. 8 Then take the ark of the Lord and place it on the cart, and put in a chest beside it the gold objects you are sending to him as a guilt offering. You should then send it on its way. 9 But keep an eye on it. If it should go up by the way of its own border to Beth Shemesh, then he has brought this great calamity on us. But if that is not the case, then we will know that it was not his hand that struck us; rather, it just happened to us by accident.”
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Notes and References
“... 162 To list a few, Hebrew יד יהוה or the like in Exod 9:3; 1 Sam 6:9; Ps 38:3. For Ugaritic “yd ỉlm,” e.g., KTU
2.10:11–12; see Dennis Pardee, “As Strong as Death,” in in Love & Death in the Ancient Near East: Essays in
Honor of Marvin H. Pope, eds. John H. Marks and Robert M. Good (Guilford, CT: Four Quarters, 1987), 65–69,
esp. 67–68. For Akkadian “qāt DN” or the like, see KAR 44:r10 with Cynthia Jean, La Magie Néo-assyrienne En
Contexte: Recherches Sur le métier d’exorciste et le Concept d’āšipūtu, SAAS 17 (Helsinki: Neo-Assyrian Text
Corpus Project, 2006), 70; Ludlul Bēl Nēmeqi I:9, 11 and III:1 in Oshima, Babylonian Poems, 78–79, 94–95, 175;
and many diagnostic cases in Scurlock and Andersen, Diagnoses, 429–528. Cf. J. V. Kinnier Wilson, “Medicine in
the land and times of the Old Testament,” in Studies in the Period of David and Solomon and Other Essays: Papers
Read at the International Symposium for Biblical Studies, Tokyo, 5–7 December 1979, ed. Tomoo Ishida (Winona
Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1982), 337–365, esp. 349, 349n36; van der Toorn, Sin and Sanction, 78, 199n302, 199n304;
Magdalene, On the Scales, 17. ...”
Bae, Sun Bok
Ethics and Morality in the Priestly Law and Narrative
(p. 297) The University of Chicago, 2021
* 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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