Biblia.com

This book is a revised edition of my prize essay which I delivered to the University of Copenhagen in January 1992. I have been able to include some, but not all, of the relevant scholarly literature which has appeared after that date. I especially regret not to have been able to include Mark S. Smith’s commentary on the Baal-cycle.

I wish to express my gratitude to a distinguished quartet of Old Testament scholars (or, as some would have it, the Copenhagen Gang of Four): Professor Niels Peter Lemche, from whom I learned Ugaritic, Aramaic and Akkadian, and with whom I have spent many a pleasant hour in small colloquia; Professor Thomas L. Thompson, whose friendly and useful criticism has much improved this book; Frederick Harris Cryer (Associate Professor for Research), who has had the unpleasant task of revising the English of my manuscript—unpleasant, not so much because of my English, but because I had not been aware that quotations from non-English scholarly literature should also be rendered in English; and Professor John Strange for having nourished my interest in archaeology—without him introducing me to archaeology, I would have missed many a detail of the excavation reports.

I am also very grateful to Associate Professor Mogens Trolle Larsen from the Carsten Niebuhr Institute, who has revised the Akkadian passages in this book. His corrections and ...

Content not shown in limited preview…

About The Royal God: Enthronement Festivals in Ancient Israel and Ugarit?

In this volume, Allan Rosengren Petersen tests Sigmund Mowinckel’s classical hypothesis about the enthronement festival of Yahweh and especially whether this theory, as urged by the followers of Mowinckel, finds any support in the epic literature of Ugarit. A careful study of the two corpora of texts, the Old Testament Psalms and the Ugaritic Baal-cycle, together with a discussion of the methodology of the cultic interpretation, shows the weaknesses of the hypothesis. In the history of scholarship, the idea of an enthronement festival of Marduk has been arbitrarily transferred from Babylon to Jerusalem and hence to Ugarit with little basis in the relevant texts. In fact, the method of ‘cultic interpretation’ is to be rejected, since its circularity of argumentation determines the result of the analysis beforehand.

Support Info

royalgodenth

Table of Contents