Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 40:1 (NA 1989)
Article: Ugaritic Poetry And Habakkuk 3
Author: David Toshio Tsumura

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TynBul 40:1 (1989) p. 24

Ugaritic Poetry And Habakkuk 3*

David Toshio Tsumura

A major methodological problem confronts anyone wishing to relate the Ancient Near Eastern texts to the Old Testament. control needs to be established over matters such as genre and the material’s purpose. Unfortunately, there is some evidence that scholars have tended to ‘biblicize ancient Near Eastern documents before they are compared with OT materials’.1 TheAssyriologist H. W. F. Saggs claimed ‘Old Testament form critics, from Gunkel himself to the present time, have made quite considerable use. . . of Assyro-Babylonian and other ancient Near Eastern material, without prior form-critical study of these sources’,2 while the Egyptologist K. A. Kitchen attempted to present a ‘genuine’ form-critical study of the Old Testament Book of Proverbs in the context of Ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature.3

J. M. Sasson has suggested that ‘it is imperative that the literature of each culture be appreciated on its own merits’ before it is compared with the biblical material.4 Whenever ‘relationship’, ‘connection’, ‘association’, ‘correspondence’, ‘parallelism’, ‘similarity’ etc. are discussed between them, as Kitchen notes, ‘it is necessary to deal individually and on its own merits with each possible or alleged case of relationship or borrowing by making a detailed comparison of the full available data from both the Old Testament and the Ancient Orient and by noting the results’.5

TynBul 40:1 (1989) p. 25

However, when we come to the matter of the relationship between Ugaritic literature and the Old Testament, the comparison is basically between different genres of literature. As the late Ugaritologist P. C. Craigie noted,

Ugaritic has provided no prophetic poetry. It has left us no unambiguous examples of psalmody, with the exception of those passages which might be identified as originally hymnic, but have survived only through integration within different and larger literary forms (myth or legend), and it has no extensive examples of literary narrative prose. This observation is important, for it means that virtually all Hebrew—Ugaritic comparative studies involve the comparison of different literary forms.6

Consequently, in assessing the relationship between Ugaritic poetry and Habakkuk, the same literary problem exists. It has bec...

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