In 1928 a peasant in North Syria, when ploughing near the sea, found a long underground passage. Investigation showed that the passage led to a sepulchral vault. Syria was then under a French mandate, and when the find was reported M. Dussaud, Curator of Oriental Antiquities in the Louvre, Paris, sent Professor Claude F. A. Shaeffer with a team of experts to investigate further. Half-a-mile from the shore and the tomb there was an artificial hill. Round its base flowed a pleasant rippling brook. The hill had always been called by the natives “Ras es Shamra”, “Head of Fennel”, and fennel was still growing there. When the hill was excavated the remains of the old Phoenician royal city of Ugarit were revealed. Over 3,000 years ago it had been destroyed by peoples from the islands and shores of the Mediterranean Sea, an invasion mentioned in the Egyptian texts of the 13th century B.C.
The ruins were situated near Minet ElBeida, the White Haven, which is on the coast of Syria exactly opposite the east tip of Cyprus, about 140 miles north of Damascus. Shaeffer was sufficiently fortunate to find the house of the high priest of Ugarit and in the library there were a number of tablets or slabs inscribed with a peculiar and unfamiliar kind of cuneiform or wedge-shaped writing. At first the tablets, which are now in the Louvre in Paris, could not be read, but they were later found to be an ancient Hebrew dialect.
Ras-Shamra was a busy seaport, where people of many races congregated. Eight different languages were spoken in the city, and the forms of writing taught in the college, attached to the temple and the high priest’s house, included, among others, old Hebrew, Egyptian, Babylonian and Hittite. It is considered that the people who used the old Hebrew script came from Sinai and the extreme south of Palestine. The writers of the tablets, themselves, claim to be descendants of Arabs, hailing from the extreme south of Palestine in the neighbourhood of the Dead Sea. Some of the inscriptions refer to rites carried out in the wilderness of Kadesh,1 a place which lies between Sinai and the Dead Sea and figures in the journeyings of the children of Israel. Ashdod,2 later a city of the Philistines, is also mentioned. In the temple, explored at Ras Shamra, a sphinx of green stone was discovered, which was the gift of Pharaoh Amen-em-hat, a monarch of Abraham’s period. Thus Ras Shamra is linked with Sinai and the desert.
The tablets date to about 1400 B.C., which many scholars think was the date of Joshua’s invasion of Canaan. The writings are of a very idolatrous nature, with references to many gods, but there are some interesting things about them. The names of El, and its plural Elohim, and Yah (Yahweh) occur in them. Sacrifices are mentioned which duplicate the sacrifices offered under the Law of Moses. The names given to them are the same as the names given to those referred to in the Bible. The Trespass Offering, the Peace Offering, the Burnt Offering, the Whole Burnt Offering, the Wave Offering, the Oblation of the First Fruits, the New Moon Offering are all included. The expression, “the bread of the gods”, which seems to be a debasement of the Scriptural reference to the “bread of thy God”3 is found, and there is frequent mention of the “sacred” number “seven”. The Tabernacle and it furnishings are echoed in the tablets, e.g. “the courtyard of the tent” for the “Court of the Tabernacle”; “the Holy Place of the Holy Places” for the “Holy of Holies” and the “Table of Gold in the Sanctuary” for the “Table of Shewbread overlaid with pure gold”. The name for a priest in the religious rites prescribed in the tablets is Kohen, which is the name bestowed on Jewish priests, and also on Melchizidek, priest (Kohen) of the Most High God, and on Jethro, priest of Midian.
There is no suggestion that the Israelites obtained their ritual from the Arabs of Ras Shamra. Seeing that the latter were Semites of a related race and came from the Mount Sinai district, it seems most likely that they borrowed their ideas from the Israelites, military conquests proved the power of who receied their law there and whose their God, and later corrupted them to their own idolatrous worship.
Heathen Abominations
The importance of these finds from the point of view of the Bible student is twofold. The first is the revelation which they make of the practices of the Canaanitish nations. Many have thought that the charge laid upon the Israelitish invaders of Canaan to destroy utterly their adversaries was a harsh one. The Ras Shamra discoveries, however, show not only what the “abominations of the heathen” really were, but also the intensity of the struggle of the Israelites to keep clear of them and the need for a stern moral law, constantly and powerfully urged by such forthright men as their prophets, to strengthen them in their fight against the seductive influences which were all around. Werner Keller writes strongly on this. He points out that Philo of Byblos, a Phoenician scholar, who lived 100 years before Christ, had collected material from his native land, which, in spite of the support of Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, who found and published the material in A.D. 314, people refused to accept, as too shocking and depraved to believe. He continues,
“In the Canaan of those days the cult of sensuality was regarded as the worship of the gods, temples took the place of brothels, men and women prostitutes ranked as ‘sacred’ to the followers of the religion, the rewards for their ‘services’ went into the temple treasuries as ‘offerings for the god’.”
The inscribed tablets which Shaeffer found included many concerned with the gods and religions of old Canaan, which the Israelites encountered for the first time when entering the Promised Land. Concerning these, Keller writes,
“The myths and practices described in this unique collection of documents reflect the most frightful barbarism and abound in magic rites of gods and demi-gods which are stupefying, primitive, gross and sensual. Particular significance is attached to the rites of the goddess of fertility. The other nations of the old world also worshipped goddesses of fertility, anchoring the cycles of growth and decay, birth and death to their ritual. But in Canaan they were openly shameless. Mother goddesses were for example branded as ‘holy whores’. Exactly as Philo of Byblos and, after him, Eusebius the Christian Father, had depicted it.”
“Gruesome and ferocious are Astarte and Anath, goddesses of fertility and of war alike. One of the Canaanitish poems, the Baal epic, depicts the goddess Anath, ‘With her might she mowed down the dwellers in the cities and she struck down the people of the sea coasts, she destroyed the men of the east. She drove the men in her temple so that no one could escape. . . . She waded up to the knees, up to the neck in blood. Human heads lay at her feet, human hands flew over her like locusts. She tied the heads of her victims as ornaments upon her back, their hands she tied upon her belt’.”
The goddesses of fertility were worshipped principally on hills and knolls. There their votaries erected for them Asherim, set out “sacred pillars”, trees under which the rites were practised.
The Bible condemns these practices and the Israelites for being lured into taking part in them. “For they also built them high places and pillars and groves (Asherim) on every high hill and under every green tree.”4 “And the high places which were before Jerusalem which were on the right hand of the mount of corruption,5 which Solomon, the king of Israel, had builded for Ashtaroth (Astarte), the abomination of the Zidonians, and for Chemosh the abomination of the Moabites, and for Milcom the abomination of the children of Amon.”6
It is clear from the Ras Shamra finds that the warning of Moses that, if the Israelites did not destroy the inhabitants of Canaan, break down their altars, hew down their images, cut down their groves and burn their graven images with fire, their enemies would turn them away from following God to serve other gods, thus bringing upon them the anger of the Deity, was thoroughly necessary.7 Unfortunately, the warning was not heeded and Israel paid for her folly as God had said.
The other point to note in connection with the finds at Ras Shamra is perhaps even more important. It is their effect on higher critical theories of the date of parts of the Mosaic Law. For long the view has been held by critics that the ceremonial part of the Law of Moses, i.e. the part that deals with sacrifices and offerings, was not introduced until the time of Ezra, after the return from the Babylonian captivity, more than 1,000 years after the time of Moses. It is supposed to be the work of a priest, in the interests of his caste, and the name “P” has accordingly been attached to him, his compilation being, called the Priestly Code. The theory has been destroyed by the discoveries at Ras Shamra. The ceremonial laws were known at least 1,000 years before the time of Ezra.
References
1—Numbers 20. 1.
2—1 Sam. 5. 1.
3—Lev. 21. $. 4-1 Kin. 14. 23.
5—Now known as the Mount of Offence.
6—2 Kin. 23. 13.
7—Deut. 7. 2-5.
A Perspective on how Archaeology can help us understand the Bible