Stories From Ancient Canaan

The texts from ancient Ugarit are among the most important modern discoveries for understanding the Bible. For more than thirty years, Stories from Ancient Canaan has been recognized as a highly authoritative and readable presentation of the principal Canaanite myths and epics discovered at Ugarit. This fully revised edition takes into account advances in the reading, understanding, and interpretation of these stories since 1978. It also includes two additional texts, expanded introductions, and illustrations. Coogan and Smith have collaborated to bring this classic up to date in order to provide accessible and accurate translations of these texts for a new generation of students.

The texts from ancient Ugarit are among the most important modern discoveries for understanding the Bible. For more than thirty years, Stories from Ancient Canaan has been recognized as a highly authoritative and readable presentation of the principal Canaanite myths and epics discovered at Ugarit. This fully revised edition takes into account advances in the reading, understanding, and interpretation of these stories since 1978. It also includes two additional texts, expanded introductions, and illustrations. Coogan and Smith have collaborated to bring this classic up to date in order to provide accessible and accurate translations of these texts for a new generation of students.

Contained on fifteen of the cuneiform tables uncovered at the ancient Canaanite city of Ugarit are the four major oral Ugartic myths of Aqhat, The Healers, Kirta and Baal. Stories from Ancient Canaan is the first to offer a one-volume translation of all four. This accessible book teaches the principal Canaanite religious literature, and will be useful to students of the history of religion, of the Bible, and of comparative literature.

The term Canaanite will be familiar to anyone who has even the most casual familiarity with the Bible. Outside of the terminology for Israel itself, the Canaanites are the most common ethnic group found in the Bible. They are positioned as the foil of the nation of Israel, and the land of Canaan is depicted as the promised allotment of Abraham and his descendants. The terms Canaan and Canaanites are even evoked in modern political discourse, indicating that their importance extends into the present. With such prominent positioning, it is important to gain a more complete and historically accurate perspective of the Canaanites, their land, history, and rich cultural heritage. So, who were the Canaanites? Where did they live, what did they believe, what do we know about their culture and history, and why do they feature so prominently in the biblical narratives? In this volume, Mary Buck uses original textual and archaeological evidence to answer to these questions. The book follows the history of the Canaanites from their humble origins in the third millennium BCE to the rise of their massive fortified city-states of the Bronze Age, through until their disappearance from the pages of history in the Roman period, only to find their legacy in the politics of the modern Middle East.

Covering the time span from the Paleolithic period to the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C., the eminent Egyptologist Donald Redford explores three thousand years of uninterrupted contact between Egypt and Western Asia across the Sinai land-bridge. In the vivid and lucid style that we expect from the author of the popular Akhenaten, Redford presents a sweeping narrative of the love-hate relationship between the peoples of ancient Israel/Palestine and Egypt.

Canaanites explores the ancient population of the Western Levant (Israel, Transjordan, Lebanon, and coastal Syria), examining the development of its distinctive culture from the early farming communities of the eighth millennium B.C. to the fragmentation of its social and cultural ideals in the latter half of the first millennium B.C. Jonathan N. Tubb makes judicious use of the Hebrew Bible in describing Canaanite culture. He views the Bible as a rich resource for understanding the literary and theological heritage of Israel, which he classifies as a subculture of Canaan. At the same time he reveals the limitations of the Bible as a historical document, arguing that to reconstruct the Canaanites' history we must first look at the archaeological data. Tubb stresses the continuity of Canaanite civilization, portraying events such as the imposition of Egyptian imperial rule and the development of historical Israel as episodic interruptions.

Tablets of poetic mythological texts unearthed during the excavation of Ugarit have been edited and translated to shed new light on the religion and literature of the ancient world.

Religion.