Brain 15 T&MP
Haggai Section Headings
1. A Call to Rebuild the Temple (1:1-11)
2. Zerubbabel and the People Obey (1:12-15)
3. The Coming Glory of God’s House (2:1-9)
4. Blessings for a Defiled People (2:10-19)
5. Zerubbabel the LORD’s Signet Ring (2:20-23)
(00:01) 🎵
Dan McClellan: Hey, everybody. I’m Dan McClellan.
Dan Beecher: And I’m Dan Beecher.
Dan McClellan: And this is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same.
I am roasting. What is it—95 degrees right now? In a house with no A/C, because our A/C crapped out a couple of days ago, and we’re working on getting it repaired.
Dan Beecher: Yikes.
Dan McClellan: How are you, Dan? You had a very similar problem a couple of weeks ago with your A/C in your apartment.
Dan Beecher: Yeah, but now I’m basking in the joys of modern technology, and I’m fine.
Dan McClellan: All right. Well, I was—
Dan Beecher: All of you watching at home who see Dan particularly glowy this episode—there are two reasons for that, and don’t worry about them.
Dan McClellan: Yeah, don’t. It’s none of your business how Dan’s face looks. You just stick with the data.
And the data that we’re going to be mining today—we’re going to do a “What’s That?”
Dan Beecher: What’s that?
Dan McClellan: We’re going to do the Baal Cycle.
Dan Beecher: Mm-hmm.
Dan McClellan: And that’s all I’m going to say.
Dan Beecher: It’s a setting on my dryer.
Dan McClellan: Nope. Nope. Absolutely not.
So, let’s just dive into “What’s That?”
🎵
The Baal Cycle
(01:19)
Dan Beecher: Okay, so the Baal Cycle—it sounds like a, uh…
I can’t even say what it sounds like.
Dan McClellan: It sounds like an exercise bike at the gym that you don’t want to use.
But talk to me about this. We’re talking about Baal. We’re talking about—
Dan Beecher: Yes. Or Baal, as some folks prefer to call him, because in spelling it’s usually B-A-A-L, or B-A and then you’ve got some kind of indication of an ayin and an L.
So, it’s the name of a deity.
Dan McClellan: Right. And we’re not about to get pedantic about how you pronounce it.
Dan Beecher: You pronounce it however you want—however it’s easy for you to understand and pronounce. As with maybe the word “want.”
Dan McClellan: If that happens to be your “want,” or happens to be your “wants”—whatever your own personal “want.”
Dan Beecher: You want to “want,” we won’t want to correct you.
But this comes to us courtesy of the Ugaritic literature.
Dan McClellan: We have to have talked about Ugarit to some degree.
Dan Beecher: We have mentioned Ugarit. We’ve talked a little bit about it. The word Ugaritic comes up from time to time, but I think we should start with a quick brush-up on what Ugarit is, where it was, and all that sort of stuff.
Ugarit
(02:33)
Dan McClellan: Okay, to lay our scene: It’s 1929. A French farmer—or a farmer in French-occupied Syria—is plowing a field, hits a rock, cannot move the rock, and uncovers what turns out to be the top of an ancient stone doorway—or sarcophagus, actually. I think it is a sarcophagus, not a doorway.
Anyway, he calls some archaeologists. They come out and discover a whole damn city called…?
Dan Beecher: And we did not know where this city was. It is called Ugarit. We know that now. At the time, they didn’t know what city this was.
I think there were some scholars who were like, “Could this be Ugarit?” because this was a city mentioned in some other literature.
We found a bunch of texts written in cuneiform, but we didn’t know that it was something no one had ever seen before.
Dan McClellan: Cuneiform is just thumbtack writing.
Dan Beecher: Well, it’s made with little wedge-shaped impressions in clay or carved in stone. People went to work trying to figure out what was going on here.
They counted up all the different signs and realized there were only 30 of them.
The thing with cuneiform is that it usually has well over 100 different signs because they’re usually reflections of a syllable—a consonant plus a vowel.
Dan McClellan: Mm-hmm.
Dan Beecher: But you can’t write in a syllabic script that only has 30 characters. There are a lot more than 30 syllables, which means it has to be alphabetic.
So, we went: It’s alphabetic, it’s close to the coast of Syria, and it probably dates to between the 1500s and 1200s B.C.E.
Dan Beecher: Okay.
Dan McClellan: So, then we said, “Okay, this must be cuneiform alphabet, and it’s probably a Northwest Semitic language.”
We went about deciphering it based on that assumption. One of the assumptions that helped us was: In Northwest Semitic, the most common letter is mem. So, we’re going to catalog how many times all the different characters occur, and whichever occurs most, we’re just going to say that’s a mem.
Dan Beecher: That’s our best guess: mem.
Dan McClellan: Then we’re going to say, “Where are all the two-letter words that have a mem?” There are only a handful of words that can be that.
Then the other letter has got to be one of two, three, or four different letters. If we do that, we can decipher this Northwest Semitic language.
It is Ugaritic, and we found a bunch of receipts, a bunch of letters, a bunch of ritual texts, and a bunch of mythology. One of those texts happens to be this thing called the Baal Cycle.
(05:42)
What fascinates scholars like me about Ugaritic is that it basically stops and is lost about the same time that the people of Israel first show up on the scene, many miles south of there.
The languages are very closely related. In fact, if you want to learn Ugaritic, you should start with biblical Hebrew, and then you have a foundation.
People can say, “Okay, this is just like Hebrew, with this word over here and this word over here.”
It helps us fill in our understanding of the development of Northwest Semitic languages and helps us better understand what’s going on in Hebrew. It has revolutionized our study of the Hebrew Bible in a lot of different ways.
But the Baal Cycle has a lot of language, terminology, titles, and deities that are very closely related to what we see in the Hebrew Bible.
We’re going to talk about a few of those points of contact and why this is such a boon for the study of the Hebrew Bible.
Dan Beecher: As I was reading this and looking at it, even I was like, “Uh-oh. I’ll bet that is a cognate to this person.”
Dan McClellan: Yeah.
Dan Beecher: I’m catching them too.
Dan McClellan: Yeah.
Dan Beecher: And I’m just the ding-dong in the show.
Dan McClellan: So, that’s kind of fun.
The Deities of the Baal Cycle
(06:50)
Dan McClellan: It’s called the Baal Cycle because there are three different main storylines. These are narrative arcs, and there are three of them.
They have to do with kingship, and they have to do with Baal, obviously.
Dan Beecher: Wagner’s Ring Cycle.
Dan McClellan: Or, yeah, whatever.
You have three different main storylines. They have to do with kingship and Baal.
One of the cool things is that Baal is not the head of the pantheon. Baal is one of the second-tier deities.
The head of the pantheon is a dude named El.
Dan Beecher: Yeah.
Dan McClellan: Now, we know El.
Dan Beecher: Yeah.
Dan McClellan: Because El is all over the Bible. El is God. El means “God,” and El is the pater familias.
Dan Beecher: Point of order. El isn’t always “God” in the way that the Bible refers to God, right?
Like El Elyon—“High El”—is the guy who gives Adonai dominion over Israel.
Dan McClellan: Right.
Dan Beecher: So, they become conflated later.
Dan McClellan: Yes. Initially, El and Adonai were distinct deities.
At one point, they were conflated and became the same deity. But when we look at the way that El is represented separately from Adonai, El is elderly, benevolent, has seniority, and is basically the ruler over the pantheon.
He is essentially a patriarchal high deity.
What do we find in the Baal Cycle? An elderly, patriarchal high deity who ruled over the pantheon.
Dan Beecher: Yeah.
Dan McClellan: Then, when we look at the way Adonai is represented distinct from El—when it’s just Adonai on their own—Adonai is a youthful, violent warrior associated with storm imagery.
And guess what we find in the Baal Cycle?
Dan Beecher: A youthful, violent warrior associated with storm imagery in the character of Baal, who is a second-tier deity.
Dan McClellan: In other words, one of the sons of El.
When we look throughout all the Ugaritic literature, Baal is sometimes the son of Dagon and sometimes the son of El.
It’s not consistent.
What do you know? Just like the Bible.
Asherah, Anat, and Other Deities
(09:31)
You also have a couple of other characters who are important: Asherah, which is cognate with Asherah.
Dan Beecher: That was the one where I thought, “Hey, I caught one.”
I had to look it up. Is this basically the same thing?
Dan McClellan: Yes. Baal and all these other second-tier deities are the offspring of Asherah. She is the creatrix of the gods. She is the mother of the 70 sons of El.
Dan Beecher: Is she the consort of El, or is she just—?
Dan McClellan: Yes, she’s the consort.
But when you look in the literature, it has a very odd kind of royal state of affairs. There’s a part where Asherah is going to go to El to butter El up so that she can request that Baal be given a palace.
Dan Beecher: Right. She advocates for Baal.
Dan McClellan: Right. One reason Asherah has to do it is because another goddess, Anat, went and threatened Baal.
Dan Beecher: Right.
Dan McClellan: And that didn’t work.
Dan Beecher: So Asherah says, “I’ll take care of it.”
Dan McClellan: “Let me smooth this over.”
Then you’ve got some other deities: Yam, who is also referred to as Nahar.
In Hebrew, yam would be “sea.”
Dan Beecher: Oh, okay. From sea to shining sea.
Dan McClellan: From Yam to shining Yam.
Dan Beecher: So, that’s when you go to the grocery store and see yams. That’s where they come from etymologically.
Dan McClellan: It’s not important.
Dan Beecher: Is it really?
Dan McClellan: No.
Nahar means “river.”
Dan Beecher: Okay.
Dan McClellan: So, Nahar is another way to refer to Yam. This is basically the waters.
This deity represents chaotic waters, because the sea is dangerous, my friends.
Dan Beecher: Yeah.
Dan McClellan: It was angry that day.
You never know what you’re going to get when you go out on the sea. It consumes a lot of lives.
You also have Mot, and Mot literally means “death” in ancient Northwest Semitic languages—in Hebrew as well as in Ugaritic.
So, there is a deity named Mot.
Then you have Kothar wa-Hasis, a craftsman deity.
Dan Beecher: Not in the television-and-film version. “Crafty” is the craft station where you get your food.
Dan McClellan: Right, right. Not a craft-services deity.
Dan Beecher: Not craft services.
Dan McClellan: No, a craftsman—a builder and maker of things.
Dan Beecher: So, this is the deity you go to when you need supplies, weapons, or when you need to build a palace.
Dan McClellan: Or some fancy clubs to beat somebody up.
Dan Beecher: Yeah.
Dan McClellan: “Try this one.”
Dan Beecher: “That didn’t work.”
Dan McClellan: “Okay, try this other one.”
Dan Beecher: The equivalent of the guy who made Thor’s hammer.
Dan McClellan: Yeah. Wasn’t that Peter Dinklage?
Dan Beecher: Peter Dinklage. That’s right. He can play that guy too.
Dan McClellan: And then Shapash is the Semitic word for “sun,” so you have the sun goddess, who functions as a mediator deity as well.
These are the main characters, and they are cognate or parallel to what’s going on in a lot of parts of the Bible.
Baal and Yam
(12:58)
In the first cycle, Yam says, “Hey, everybody. I’ve been doing really well lately. I’ve been racking up a lot of wins, and I want to be king over the divine council.”
The divine council is another thing we see a lot in the Ugaritic literature that had scholars saying, “Oh, this is in the Bible too.”
Dan Beecher: Yeah. Ooh, okay.
Dan McClellan: This is helping us, just like the frog DNA helped create dinosaurs in that documentary I saw back in the ’90s.
All the other deities are bowing down: “We’re not worthy! We’re not worthy!”
Except for Baal. Baal says, “Mm, I don’t think so.”
Interestingly, this has a lot to do with geography and the environment.
There are parts of ancient civilization where the river is what makes civilization possible. Mesopotamia—that’s the river. Egypt—that’s the river.
The predictable flooding of these rivers every year allows you to plan agriculture around them and manipulate the rivers for irrigation.
If you’re in Mesopotamia or Egypt, then the Nahar—the Yam—is what’s responsible for civilization. That is the bedrock of your civilization.
The deity who represents that would be the most high.
But we’re talking about a part of the Levant where rainfall is what makes agriculture possible, particularly when you get into the mountains.
Ugarit is close to the coast. It’s more coastal than mountainous, but these deities are all operating far to the north or south in the more mountainous regions, where rain is what you count on.
This is also the case in the central and northern hill countries of Israel and Judah.
It was not rivers and seas that made their civilization possible. It was rain.
And who’s responsible for the rain?
Dan Beecher: Not Yam.
Dan McClellan: The storm deity is responsible for the rain.
So, the storm deity stands up and says, “No, I’m more important.”
El is kind of like, “Yeah, sure, Yam. You can take over.”
El is represented as an elderly, back-nine deity who is—
Dan Beecher: King Lear. He’s ready to turn over his rule.
Dan McClellan: Yeah. He’s treated as a lame duck.
There are sometimes occasions when he will throw down if he needs to, but here he doesn’t oppose Yam’s kingship.
There are a lot of different ways people try to explain that, but basically Baal and Yam are going to fight.
Baal goes to Kothar wa-Hasis and gets some weapons.
I wanted to read some of that, just so you can get a sense of what this language is like. It’s very fragmentary. This is one of the most frustrating parts of it.
There are a lot of lacunae. You get a sentence or two, and then a gap of maybe a letter or two—or perhaps 50 lines.
Dan Beecher: We should make it clear: What we have this from is clay tablets. The letters were impressed into the clay, and then the tablets were fired.
That’s why they’ve survived this long. But if the tablets are broken and you have a chunk missing, what are you going to do? You fill it in as best you can.
Dan McClellan: I’m reading from Religious Texts from Ugarit, Nicholas Wyatt’s translation of all these texts, which includes the Baal Cycle and a bunch of other texts.
Dan Beecher: It’s funny, because the cover of the book just says “Wyatt,” and I thought, “Ron Wyatt?”
Dan McClellan: It’s not Ron.
Nick was one of the readers for my doctoral dissertation, so I’ve always been a fan of Nick.
Baal’s Battle with Yam
(17:31)
There’s a part where Baal is getting angry:
I shall knock down his houses; into the underworld will fall my strength, and into the dust my power. From his mouth his speech barely went forth; from his lips his word, and he gave forth his voice in groaning beneath the throne of Prince Yam.
Baal is not looking good.
But then Kothar—this translation says “Kothar and Hasis,” which is what the wa means in Ugaritic—spoke:
Indeed, I say to you, O Prince Baal; I repeat, O Charioteer of the Clouds.
By the way, that’s a title that Adad and Adonai have in the Hebrew Bible.
Dan Beecher: Okay.
Dan McClellan: Yes, “Charioteer of the Clouds,” or “Rider of the Clouds,” because the storm deity goes around riding the clouds.
Now your foe, Baal—now your foe, you must smite. Now you must destroy your adversary. Take your everlasting kingdom, your eternal dominion.
Kothar fashioned two maces and pronounced their names:
Your name is Expeller. Expeller, expel Yam; expel Yam from his throne, Nahar from the seat of his dominion. You must leap from the hand of Baal like a falcon from his fingers. Strike the shoulders of Prince Yam, the chest of Ruler Nahar.
The mace leapt from the hand of Baal like a falcon from his fingers. It struck the shoulders of Prince Yam, the chest of Ruler Nahar.
But Yam was strong. He did not flinch. His joints did not tremble. His visage was not discomposed.
Kothar fashioned two maces and pronounced their names:
Your name is All-Driver. All-Driver, drive Yam away. Drive Yam from his throne, Nahar from the seat of his dominion. You must leap from the hand of Baal like a falcon from his fingers. Strike the skull of Prince Yam, the brow of Ruler Nahar. Let Yam collapse in a heap. Let him fall to the ground.
Then the mace leapt from the hand of Baal like a falcon from his fingers. It struck the skull of Prince Yam, the brow of Ruler Nahar.
Yam collapsed in a heap. He fell to the ground. His joints trembled, and his visage was discomposed.
Baal gathered up and drank Prince Yam to the dregs. He exterminated Ruler Nahar.
Dan Beecher: You know what? That is harsh. When you’ve defeated an enemy and then drink him, that’s pretty definitive.
Dan McClellan: That’s the flex over the sea. When you defeat the sea, you just slurp it up.
There are other examples in Enuma Elish, the Babylonian—or Neo-Babylonian—version of the creation account. Marduk defeats Tiamat, who also represents the chaotic waters of the sea.
When Marduk defeats Tiamat, he splits Tiamat’s body in two. One half becomes the waters of the heavens, and the other half becomes the earth.
Dan Beecher: Interesting.
Dan McClellan: If you’ve read Genesis 1, you may recognize that.
The depths are referred to as tehom, which is the Hebrew cognate term for Tiamat. It is no longer a chaotic deity; it is now simply inert water. But it is still split—the waters above and the waters beneath—to facilitate the creation of the earth.
So, you have a lot of parallels there.
Baal’s Palace
(21:13)
Baal fights Yam. Baal defeats Yam.
It’s the classic story: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, girl finds boy, boy forgets girl, girl dies in a blimp accident over the Orange Bowl.
Dan Beecher: Boy drinks girl.
Dan McClellan: Boy drinks girl.
The next part is that Baal wants a palace.
Dan Beecher: Because Baal gets the kingship, but he needs to be fully in charge.
You can’t be king if you don’t have a castle.
Dan McClellan: Right. We see something very similar in the Hebrew Bible when David says, “We’ve got our capital city. We have everything we need, but God is still dwelling in a tent. We need a home. My boy needs a home, Jerry. We need a temple for our God.”
In order for Baal to be truly the leader of the gods, Baal needs to have a temple.
Kothar wa-Hasis is going to help, but first they need permission.
This is where Anat goes to Baal and says, “Give my boy a temple.”
That doesn’t work out. Instead—
Dan Beecher: She threatens him—threatens to bloody his beard or something.
Dan McClellan: Yeah. Chunks of his brain are going to be scattered on his gray beard.
Dan Beecher: If I’m not mistaken, she might be Baal’s sister. She keeps referring to him as “brother,” is that right?
Dan McClellan: Yes. Although there are some places where their relationship is a little more amorous.
Dan Beecher: Okay.
Dan McClellan: It’s a messed-up system, but it’s also very inconsistent.
Interestingly, there is a text from the late fifth or early fourth century B.C.E. from a Jewish garrison in Egypt, in Elephantine, that refers to the Jewish God as “Anat-Adonai.”
This is widely understood to refer to a divine pair. Asherah is not the only consort of Adonai. At least in Egypt, at the end of the fifth century or beginning of the fourth century, we have an Anat-Adonai divine pairing.
Dan Beecher: Interesting.
Dan McClellan: Yes, very interesting.
Athirat negotiates with El. Permission is granted. El remains supreme, but Kothar wa-Hasis builds the palace.
There is a debate about whether or not it should have windows.
This is something you always have with contractors. They say, “We can’t do it.”
Dan Beecher: “We didn’t get the permits.”
Dan McClellan: “I got three bids; it’s going to be out of the budget. I don’t know what you want to do.”
If I had a thousand dollars right now, maybe I could do something with that.
I assume everybody works with contractors who extort you.
Dan Beecher: Corrupt contractors.
Dan McClellan: Interestingly, windows in Baal’s palace—the palace of the storm deity—resonate with the idea of the “windows of heaven.” What comes out of the windows of heaven?
Dan Beecher: Rain.
Dan McClellan: Rain and storm clouds. That’s how they get you.
Baal begins to rule. The thunder rolls, as the great poet once sang. Rain falls, agriculture flourishes, and then the next cycle begins.
Baal and Mot
(24:43)
We have a problem, though. Somebody else shows up: Mot.
Dan Beecher: Yes.
Dan McClellan: Mot—death—sends Baal an invitation.
This is like in the movies, where death sends you a note. It says, “We have an appointment.”
That means you’re going to die.
When you get an invitation from Mot, that means you’re going to die.
Something fascinating about the Ugaritic literature is that you have a bunch of angels running around.
In Ugaritic literature, the angels don’t communicate between gods and humans. The angels communicate between gods and gods.
Dan Beecher: Divine messengers to other gods.
Dan McClellan: Right. We have a kind of parallel pantheon, but in the Bible it has been renegotiated and evolved to serve different functions.
Dan Beecher: Yeah.
Dan McClellan: I’m trying to speed this up a little because we’ve got to get through it.
Mot is characterized as having a great maw that swallows people whole. Death swallows you whole.
Baal doesn’t win this fight.
Dan Beecher: He dies.
Dan McClellan: He goes into the underworld, disappears, the rain stops, and the earth becomes barren—very much like the droughts we have in the Hebrew Bible that are Adonai’s responsibility.
El mourns, tears his clothes, throws dust on himself, and cuts himself. This is conventional mourning behavior.
Anat is not going to take it and searches for Baal.
In the Ugaritic pantheon, the people you were most afraid of were the women. The men were warriors, sure, but when Anat was coming at you—
Dan Beecher: Anat seems vicious. Anat seems terrifying.
Dan McClellan: She hacks her fallen enemies to pieces. There are parts of the narratives where Anat has the hands of her fallen enemies strung together to create a sash, or hanging off her back as trophies.
Dan Beecher: Yeah.
Dan McClellan: She hacks Mot to pieces. Death itself is treated like harvested grain. She winnows him, burns him, grinds him, and scatters him in the fields.
That is the ultimate flex—not just to defeat him, but to do all that other stuff.
Dan Beecher: Yeah.
Dan McClellan: Baal returns. Rain returns. Life returns.
Many people say, “This is a cyclical agricultural cycle—the changing of the seasons.”
There is a degree to which it’s related to that, but the dying-and-rising-god motif, which many people like to latch onto, is an outdated nineteenth-century framework.
It’s not so much dying and rising as dying and returning, because dying is geographic rather than ontological. To die is to travel to the underworld.
Dan Beecher: It is interesting to me. You mentioned the seasonal idea, but what makes more sense to me is what you referred to before: There may periodically be droughts in any area.
If a period of drought was particularly devastating, people would ask, “Where is our god? Where is our storm deity that we’ve been worshipping? Who has been providing for us all this time?”
Coming up with a way in which he was eaten by death is an interesting explanation. Then, a few years later, back he comes after his sister has rescued him.
Dan McClellan: After she has committed some violent crimes.
Dan Beecher: Interestingly, when death is killed, death also comes back eventually.
Dan McClellan: Yeah. This is an interesting part of the Hebrew Bible because you have, in a sense, the death of the gods.
Psalm 82 consigns the gods of the divine council—the patron deities of the nations—to mortality:
You will fall like men. You will die like any prince.
But then they all come back. They get reduced to angelic or demonic status, but they come back.
I think that reflects a fascinating feature of this literature: The literature sticks around, even the older material. You’re always having to renew your engagement with the text.
It’s kind of like The Simpsons. How old is Bart Simpson by now?
Dan Beecher: He’s—
Dan McClellan: Every season starts over.
Dan Beecher: He’s deep in his forties—probably his fifties at this point.
Dan McClellan: I think I’m supposed to be the same age as Bart Simpson, because the first time I saw The Simpsons, when it first came out, I thought, “Hey, I’m also a ten-year-old blond kid who is kind of stupid.”
This is a feature of this literature. Because the literature and the stories establish the foundation of things, you can’t move away from them. You can’t depart from them. They have to be there.
If you have an anvil falling on Wile E. Coyote, Wile E. Coyote has to come back.
Dan Beecher: Yeah.
Dan McClellan: I think that’s an interesting feature of all this, and that’s what’s going on in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament as well.
By the time you get to the New Testament, a lot has changed—but nothing has changed, because all these things still have to be there. Their exact nature is just a little different.
They’re dismissed as powers, dominions, thrones, angels, demons, and so on, but they’re the same patron deities. They’re simply described as—
The Importance of Ugaritic
(31:03)
Dan Beecher: This whole thing has been so interesting. It’s funny, because as I’ve been present while you’ve had discussions with other scholars about this stuff, it’s clear that studying Ugaritic has become integral to understanding Bible studies.
This isn’t considered biblical by any means, but everybody is clamoring: “Where can I study Ugaritic? Where can I study all this Ugarit material?”
I think that’s really interesting.
Dan McClellan: Yeah, it sheds a lot of light on where this material came from. This definitely precedes everything biblical, right?
Dan Beecher: Everything.
Dan McClellan: In fact, it probably—
When Ugarit was destroyed in the Late Bronze Age Collapse—and Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed is far and away the best discussion of that. If you want a book on the Late Bronze Age Collapse, that’s what you should check out.
That was probably the demise of Ugarit. Most of these texts were written in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries B.C.E.
Our earliest reference of any kind to a people group known as Israel dates to about 1208 B.C.E., right around the time—just before Ugarit is going to fall.
Everything written in the Bible comes from a couple of hundred years after the fall of Ugarit, when the language had changed a little more.
We’ve lost case endings and things like that.
The Ugaritic literature is essentially the grandfather of biblical Hebrew.
Dan Beecher: You have to study it if you want to dig down to the bedrock of what’s going on in biblical Hebrew.
Dan McClellan: So cool. So interesting.
Dan Beecher: All right. That’s really interesting stuff.
Dan McClellan: I’m really glad we got into it. If you, friends, are really interested—and glad we got into it as well—you can become one of our patrons at patreon.com/dataoverdogma.
There, you can get early and ad-free versions of all our episodes, as well as access to the pregame, after-party, or whatever we’re calling it—the patrons-only content that patrons of a certain level get every week.
There are so many other things. You’ll be the first to know when we have announcements. It’s always good to be a patron, and they’re our favorite people anyway.
Go over there if you’re willing to and help make this show go.
Otherwise, you can also help by giving us five stars on your various platforms, liking, commenting, and subscribing here.
We deeply appreciate all of you, and we’ll talk to you again next time.
(34:19) Bye, everybody. 🎵