Aaron Tugendhaft's Baal and the Politics of Poetry studies the Ugaritic mythological poem of Baˁlu for what it can reveal about the relationship between poetry and politics in its ca. thirteen-century BCE Syrian coastal context. Ugaritic is a Northwest Semitic language closely related to Hebrew, Phoenician, and Aramaic and is known primarily from alphabetic cuneiform tablets discovered since 1928 at the tell of Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit) and other sites. Baˁlu narrates on six clay tablets the exploits of the eponymous local storm god, who battles and overcomes the sea god Yammu (tablets 1–2) and the god of death Môtu (tablets 5–6); between these contests he is granted a palace by the high god ˀIlu (tablets 3–4). The work under review comes amid an upsurge of attention to Baˁlu and other ancient Middle Eastern myths of divine combat. Contemporary contributions sharing Tugendhaft's interest in defining the political context and aims of these texts include Debra Ballentine's The Combat Myth and the Biblical Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2015), Noga Ayali-Darshan's Treading on the Back of the Sea (Bialik, 2016), and Joanna Töyräänvuori's Sea and the Combat Myth: North West Semitic Political Mythology in the Hebrew Bible (Ugarit-Verlag, 2018). Within this subfield, Tugendhaft's study is distinguished by his hypothesis that Baˁlu disrupts rather than fortifies the traditional link between terrestrial kingship and divine favor. The substantiation for this is to be found in the second half of the book (chaps. 4–6), where Tugendhaft engages in close and perceptive textual analysis to show how Baˁlu depicts its protagonist as a neglected upstart who is embroiled in intragenerational conflict and must claw his way to a fragile relevance.
Tugendhaft's first chapters form a powerful two-pronged treatise on method. Chapter 1, “Baal and the Modern Study of Myth,” documents how Baˁlu and other Ugaritic texts were assumed, from their discovery, to represent a mythological phase of culture that was of value chiefly for elucidation of the Bible. Expanding the discussion beyond ancient Middle Eastern studies, Tugendhaft shows how allowing myth to be a universal mode—with Heidegger and Barthes, inter alia, rather than it being temporally or culturally specific, with Cassirer—introduces the possibility that myth and its dereification can be sought in any historical context, such as at Late Bronze Age Ugarit. Chapter 2, “The Baal Cycle and Bronze Age Politics,” queries a scholarly habit of separating the study of Ugaritic mythological poetry from that of contemporary but mostly Akkadian-language documentary texts (letters, treaties, etc.) from the same site; this situation has resulted from practicalities of scholarly specialization but also from a penchant to assume that myth is by definition archaic and therefore unmoored from mundane history. In meticulously attending to documentary texts, Tugendhaft reveals not only an ancient environment in which “a small cadre of literate individuals … simultaneously engaged in political, economic, and scholarly activities” (35) but also the possibility that one such individual, the ˀIlîmilku who signed the Baˁlu tablets and other mythological texts, may be identical with a homonymous operator involved with international affairs and royalty. This possibility seems both less necessary than the evidence suggests (compare, e.g., 37n43) and less necessary for the literary argument than is implied by the frequency of Tugendhaft's references to ˀIlîmilku's position and/or to Baˁlu having originated with his authorship.
Chapter 3, “Divine Combat as Political Discourse,” centers on a text from eighteenth-century BCE Mari, a city on the Euphrates just inside the modern Syrian border. An Akkadian letter found at this site reports a prophecy in which the storm god Adad reminds Mari's king, Zimri-Lim, that he once gave this king weapons “with which I [Adad] fought with Sea.” Tugendhaft goes beyond the widespread observation that divine combat is invoked to support kingship to show that the attribution of Zimri-Lim's royal success to Adad—a god more venerated in nearby interventionist Yamḫad than at Mari itself—rhetorically binds Zimri-Lim to that neighboring kingdom. Through this cogent demonstration, Tugendhaft illustrates that ancient Middle Eastern combat myths aim at a variety of specific political ends, and he opens the way to a more context-specific evaluation of Baˁlu than is usually countenanced.
Chapters 4–6 contain the substance of this evaluation. Chapter 4, “The Politics of Time,” contrasts Baˁlu’s focus on contemporary historical time and intragenerational conflict with the cosmogonic and intergenerational preoccupations of the Babylonian Akkadian epic Enūma eliš. Once again, the Ugaritic text has often been assimilated to the Akkadian text owing to preconceptions about mythological texts. Chapter 5, “Unsettling Sovereignty,” unites epigraphic and lexico-semantic observations on tablet 2 of Baˁlu to argue that Baˁlu's defeat of Yammu is not so final as traditionally understood. Furthermore, the complex envoy scene and its aftermath witness both Yammu and Baˁlu rhetorically or implicitly challenging ˀIlu, the ostensible sovereign. Finally, Chapter 6, “Kinship Contested,” suggests that references to violence against brothers, especially in the final two tablets of the epic, problematize the kinship language on which ancient Middle Eastern metaphorical diplomatics rest. The fact that Baˁlu's victories are always dependent on martial prowess rather than kinship obligations uncovers the artificiality and contingency of the diplomatic metaphor. Taken together, these chapters represent a fresh and compelling reading of a complex text that has too often been made to serve biblical ends and claimed to simply mirror Mesopotamian patterns.
Baal and the Politics of Poetry began as a 2012 New York University dissertation, but to call the final product an edited dissertation would hardly do justice to the clearly considerable efforts undertaken in the intervening years. The work has been thoroughly restructured and refined. An impressive number of publications that appeared between 2012 and 2017 are engaged. There are places in which the reader may want to refer to additional sources for deeper understanding of other combat myth texts or the twentieth-century CE historical contexts with which Tugendhaft frequently introduces his chapters. In a note to chapter 4, Tugendhaft correctly observes that “Doing justice to the complexities of Enuma elish, and how they operated in mediating political meanings for the poem's audiences over a long history, would require an entire study in itself” (75n6); interested readers might find recent volumes by Gösta Gabriel (“Enūma eliš”: Weg zu einer globalen Weltordnung [Mohr Siebeck, 2014]) and Thomas Kämmerer and Kai Metzler (Das babylonische Weltschöpfungsepos “ Enūma elîš” [Ugarit-Verlag, 2012]) helpful. The Babel und Bibel lectures of Friedrich Delitzsch, with which Tugendhaft introduces the same chapter, are studied in their German imperial context in two insightful and detailed monographs: Reinhard G. Lehmann, Friedrich Delitzsch und der Babel-Bibel-Streit (Universitätsverlag / Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994) and Klaus Johanning, Der Bibel-Babel-Streit (Lang, 1988).
The strengths of the present work are its modeling contextualization of mythological texts by reference to documents illuminating contemporary sociopolitical realia and its productive dismantling of scholars’ sneakiest tendencies when characterizing the political import of ancient Middle Eastern myths. Tugendhaft's innovative perspective on what one such myth is really doing is a thoughtful and detailed counterbalance to those tendencies, and it is therefore warmly welcomed.
