RAS SHAMRA— HARRIS 4g9 



which one is accustomed or which one unconsciously wishes to find. 

 For this reason it is always best to rely upon the incontrovertible lin- 

 guistic evidence of the linguistic forms as they appear in the text, and 

 to draw only such minimum content as appears most "simply" from 

 the material itself. 



The smaller tablets include chiefly lists of temples and gods (in- 

 cluding non-Semitic), lists of temple goods, lists of sacrifices, direc- 

 tions for preparing sacrifices, and ritual prayers. The parallels with 

 Hebrew religious practice are many. The animals which may be 

 sacrificed are the same; many names of sacrifices are the same. But 

 it is interesting that one sacrifice calls for the cooking of a kid in milk; 

 this is prohibited in Exodus 13: 19, 34: 26. One asks if the Biblical 

 prohibition arose in opposition to this rite, with the general Jewish 

 separation of meat and milk foods developing therefrom, or whether 

 that general custom preceded (from pre-Palestinian times) and ex- 

 plains the interdiction of the Canaanite rite. 



Of the relation of this Canaanite religion to that of the Hebrew 

 people, two tilings appear certain: Clearly the forefathers of the 

 Hebrew people, when they settled in Palestine, took over much of 

 Canaanite culture, including many of the cult practices, types of 

 sacrifices, mythological heroes, even some of the moral proverbs, as 

 witness the appearance in Ugarit of the phrase "pleading the plea of 

 the widows, judging the cause of the orphans" (Danil 2v 8) which the 

 Bible so frequently parallels. But it is even clearer that the bulk of 

 the cultural and religious background of the Hebrew people was a 

 different one. The Babylonian legends of the Bible (creation, deluge, 

 Nimrod, Tower of Babel) are conspicuously absent from Ugarit. For 

 various social and historical reasons, the Plebrews in Palestine, even 

 with the assimilation of Canaanites into them, retained much of the 

 culture which they had had in pre-Palestinian days, and although the 

 final form of Hebrew culture was certainly no mere continuation of the 

 old, it nevertheless remained fundamentally different from the 

 Canaanite. 



THE UGARITIC ALPHABET 

 DECIPHERMENT 



Within a few months after the first great finds of tablets in 1929, 

 ViroUeaud published a set of excellent copies of the tablets in their 

 unknown cuneiform signs. It was clear that the signs constituted an 

 alphabet, for there were only about 30 of them used over and over 

 again. The words were separated by short strokes, and it was found 

 that most were of three or four letters. ViroUeaud and the excavators 

 thought that the script might be Cyprian, because of the extent of 

 Cyprian material found at this stratum. Other scholars, judging by 

 the probable Semitic population of Syria, and by the three- and four- 



31508—38 35 



