to an ongoing bond with YHWH by obeying his commandments. Although it may seem strange to modern ways of thinking, divine speech in the biblical religious imagination also represents an event. There is something concrete about the act of address such that, in Hebrew, the same noun can mean both a spoken word and a thing: dābār. Figure 3. The picture above reproduces a portion of an inscription written in Phoenician that praises Kulamuwa, who reigned over ancient Sam’al (near Zinçirli in modern