Unburning Fame

Horses, Dragons, Beings of Smoke, and Other Indo-European Motifs in Ugarit and the
Hebrew Bible
Wikander, Ola

2017

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Wikander, O. (2017). Unburning Fame: Horses, Dragons, Beings of Smoke, and Other Indo-European Motifs in
Ugarit and the Hebrew Bible. (Coniectanea Biblica, Old Testament Series; Vol. 62). Eisenbrauns.

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 Unburning Fame

Horses, Dragons, Beings of Smoke, and Other Indo-European Motifs

in Ugarit and the Hebrew Bible

Coniectanea Biblica Old Testament Series 62

by
Ola Wikander

Originally published by Eisenbrauns, 2017 (that version copyright © Eisenbrauns 2017)

.

This PDF text of the book, after the addenda/corrigenda page, is identical to the 2017 edition,
and should be cited using 2017 as publishing year.

Copyright © 2017-2021 Ola Wikander

ADDENDA ET CORRIGENDA

• On the question of the reconstructed proto-phrase for “He killed the Serpent” discussed on pp 65–67 (and
underlying a part of the book’s “quotation motto” on p. v), I now refer to my forthcoming article “L’s
and S’s in the Land of Israel” (SEÅ 2021), in which the relevant verb is reconstructed with an emphatic
lateral, *maḫaṣ́a; see that publication for further arguments concerning the phrase and references to
relevant literature.

• On p. vii – for “Wakins” read “Watkins”. For ḥārāš read ḥāraš.

• In footnote 19, for “2015” read “2015c”.

• On p. 27 – for à-zú-wi read á-zú-wi.

• In fn. 143, for “1963” read “Rabin 1963”.

• On pp. 100 and 104, for “Lluis” read “Lluís”.

• Concerning the Vercelli inscription (discussed on p. 107), it has now come to my attention that the reading
is uncertain, and that a different reading (teuou-ton+[..]neu) can be found in María José Estarán Tolosa
(2016), Epigrafía bilingüe del Occidente romano : el latín y las lenguas locales en las inscripciones
bilingües y mixtas (p. 233; I would like to thank David Stifter for bringing this to my attention).

• On p. 110, for “’voiced’/fortis/non-geminate” read “’voiced’/lenis/non-geminate”.

• In fn. 232, the date for Feliu (given there twice as 2005) should be 2003.

• In fn. 254, after the quotation from Mallory, insert “(the fourth version he refers to is a word in
Kartvelian)”.

• In fn. 281, remove “(in a footnote, no less)”.

.
• On p. 175, the date for Waldman should be 1989.
 v

Echoing words…

*egwhent ogwhim –

*maḫaṣa naḥaša.

*n̥dhgwhitom h1estu k̑lewos!

… ʾim ʾeškaḥēk… tiškaḥ yĕmînî!

vi
 vii

Preface ........................................................................................................ x

1. Introduction ........................................................................................... 1
1.1 Aims and Form ...................................................................................... 1
1.2 Scope .................................................................................................... 2
1.3 Methodological self-reflection .............................................................. 4
1.4 Implied readership; nomenclature, transcriptions,
and protocols ........................................................................................ 10

2. Preamble: the Semitic and Indo-European language families,

and possible arenas of interaction ........................................................ 12
2.1 The two language families and their linguistic typology ...................... 12
2.2 Different levels of possible historical interaction ................................. 15
2.3 A case of demonstrable interaction: the Elkunirša text ......................... 16
2.4 Why generally “Indo-European”? ......................................................... 17

3. Horse and Plow: Case Studies in Technological

Indo-European/Hebrew vocabulary .................................................... 19
3.1 “Case study” 1: The Hebrew word for “horse” (sûs)
and its cognates ....................................................................................... 20
3.1.1 Is sûs really a loan, and if so, from what language? .................... 20
3.1.2 Problems in the form of the Semitic word—
and a proposed solution ....................................................................... 23
3.1.3 Some conclusions ......................................................................... 26
3.2 “Case study” 2: Hebrew ḥārāš, “to plow,” and its cognates ................. 28

4. Biblical chaos dragons—and Indo-European ones ............................ 32

4.1 The chaos battle as an Indo-European/biblical motif in earlier
scholarship; problems with Dumézilianism ......................................... 33
4.2 Storm gods and serpents: some parallel texts ....................................... 34
4.3 Shadows of an epic lost: YHWH, the sea monster, and the weapons ... 42
4.4 The Hittite serpent story ........................................................................ 47
4.5 Sea and creation: Characteristic differences ......................................... 48
4.6 Conquerors and Encirclers:
the names of the storm gods and serpents ................................................ 51
4.7 Different levels of mythological correspondence
and possible vectors ................................................................................. 56
4.8 Phrasal correspondences and Wakins’ proto-myth ............................... 58
4.8.1 The formulation of a possible Northwest Semitic proto-phrase,
and its reconstruction ........................................................................... 60
4.8.2 The proto-phrases as connected ................................................. 65
viii Contents

5. Beings of Smoke: terms for living breath and humanity in Indo-

European, Ugaritic, and Hebrew—and remarks on
fatlings and merciful bodies .............................................................. 68
5.1 “Life as smoke” in the Ugaritic Aqhat story ......................................... 68
5.2 An Anatolian background for the “smoke” motif ................................. 69
5.2.1 An excursus on one possible (and one impossible) Anatolian
background of the word ztr and a note on ilib ..................................... 74
5.3 A few points thus far ............................................................................. 75
5.4 “Smoke” as a simile for life in the Hebrew Bible
and the Deuterocanon ........................................................................... 76
5.5 The Hurrians as middle men—and the motif of fattened animals ........ 77
5.6 Smoke and fatlings in Hosea 13 ............................................................ 79
5.7 The fatling motif in the Song of Deborah ............................................. 82
5.8 The “smoke” and “fatling” motifs in the Psalms .................................. 83
5.9 Later (Hermetic) reception of the “smoky offering” motif
as an image of the life of the petioner ................................................. 85
5.10 A late example from Jewish liturgy ..................................................... 86
5.11 Merciful laps and bodies: some other metaphors of anthropology in
Indo-European and the Hebrew Bible ................................................. 87
5.12 Conclusions ......................................................................................... 90

6. When Jeroboam divided his God ........................................................ 91

6.1 A Hittite background for the concept of “god-splitting” ....................... 91
6.2 Other Ancient Near Eastern comparanda in the Jerobeam story:
The young vs. old motif as known from Gilgamesh and Aga ............. 93
6.3 Conclusions ........................................................................................... 96

7. Dagan/Dagon as a possibly Indo-European-derived name,

and some methodological questions raised by religio-historical
etymology ........................................................................................... 97
7.1 The Proto-Indo-European word *dh(e)g̑hom- (“earth”) as
a possible source for Dagan/Dagon ..................................................... 98
7.2 Criticism of the Indo-European interpretation of Dagan/Dagon ........... 99
7.3 The questions of vocalization and phono-semantic matching ............... 101
7.4 Baal and Dagan at Ugarit, and the title ḥtk dgn .................................... 103
7.5 Dagan and the netherworld ................................................................... 103
7.6 An “Indo-European” Dagan/Dagon and the Hebrew Bible .................. 104
7.7 Excursus: Methodological issues inherent in searching
for etymological meanings of divine names ....................................... 108
7.8 Phonological implications for the source language .............................. 110
7.9 The question of gender .......................................................................... 111
7.10 A possible parallel case: ʿAṯtart and Indo-European *h2ster- ............. 111
7.11 Dagan/Dagon, Kumarve/Kumarbi, and Kronos .................................. 112
7.12 Conclusions ......................................................................................... 114
 Contents ix

8. Strangers, boundary crossers, and young predators in

Hebrew and Indo-European: gwr, *h3erbh-, and ḫabiru ................. 115
8.1 Hebrew gēr: a crosser of boundaries ..................................................... 116
8.2 The root *h3erbh- in Indo-European ...................................................... 117
8.3 Hebrew gwr/gēr and Indo-European *h3erbh-:
parallel social realities .......................................................................... 118
8.4 The roots as expressions of transcending between the
realms of the mortal and the immortal ................................................ 120
8.5 Parallels in the typology of semantic development ............................... 123
8.6 The ḫapiru/ḫabiru/ʿpr.w question ......................................................... 124
8.7 Reasons for the parallels: borrowing? ................................................... 125
8.8 Self-definition and Indo-European “war bands” ................................... 127
8.8.1Warriors as “wolves” or “dogs” .................................................. 128
8.9 Jephthah and David ............................................................................... 129
8.10 Orpheus ............................................................................................... 130
8.11 Methodological implications and conclusions .................................... 130

9. Fame that does not burn: the verb ṯkḥ, the drought
motif, Indo-European *dhgwhei-, and etymological poetics ............ 133

10. Dragons returning home: the “pizza effect” ..................................... 139

10.1 Dragons in Gnostic and Gnosticizing literature .................................. 139
10.2 An example: the dragon in the Hymn of the Pearl .............................. 140
10.3 The dragon in the Book of Revelation and Christian dragons ............ 142
10.4 Other Gnostic and estoteric reborrowings ........................................... 143
10.5 From borrowing to fusion: the case of the segmented Adam .............. 145

11. In conclusion ........................................................................................ 147

12. Abbreviations ...................................................................................... 153

13. Bibliography ........................................................................................ 157

14. Index of personal names ..................................................................... 179

15. Index locorum ..................................................................................... 182

x

Preface
This book is a labor of love. It represents, from various angles, my love both for
the writings of the Hebrew Bible and their “uncle,” the texts from Ugarit, and
the epic, mythological and linguistic traditions of the early Indo-Europeans—
and, in all of these cases, for the discipline and methodology of comparative
linguistics used as a tool for deepened exegetical understanding of texts.
The title of the book, Unburning Fame, is based on one of the poetic motifs
studied in it, one involving burning heat as a metaphor for forgetting past
famous deeds as well as important events and places—and thus its opposite,
“unburning,” as a piece of imagery signifying their resilience. As we shall see,
this type of imagery appears both in biblical and Indo-European literature, and
thus provides a perfect metaphor for the resilience of these inter-cultural motifs
themselves. They have, most certainly, never burned. And if the connections
may at one point or another seem to have been obscured, then the title has
another possible significance (due to the grammatical intricacies of the English
language): that the aim of the book, then, is “unburning” them.

The first steps in the writing of this book were taken at about 8.16 AM on July
15, 2012, at the Swedish Institute in Rome (Istituto Svedese di Studi Classici a
Roma), where I was staying with my father and wife. As I entered into the final
phase of working on the manuscript in the summer of 2016, I was once again at
the Institute, which seems a fitting inclusio for the project. The Institute was and
is a marvelous and inspiring place to work in, and it is certainly happy for me to
be able both to start and to (almost) end the writing of this book with a stay in
its magical and “cloistral hush,” as Evelyn Waugh might put it.
I have also benefitted from a short visit to the Warburg Institute, London,
in October of 2015; I would like to extend my thanks to Charles Burnett for the
warm reception I was given and for the permission to work in the wonderful
Warburg library, which provided a number of important pieces of secondary
literature.
To various scholars and colleagues who have helped me with discussions
both concerning parts of my manuscript and more general questions that turn up
in it (as well as access to certain secondary literature), I also extend my most
humble thanks. On the exegetical/Semitist side of the fence, I would especially
like to mention Noga Ayali-Darshan, Kevin Cathcart, Philip R. Davies, Göran
Eidevall, Sten Hidal, Antti Laato, Fredrik Lindström, Tryggve Mettinger,
Blaženka Scheuer, Terje Stordalen, Sophia Tranefeldt, and David Willgren. The
entire Old Testament seminar at Lund has been very helpful and supportive
along the way, and thus, thanks are also due to Jessica Alm, Erik Aurelius,
Linnéa Gradén, Bo Johnson, Sophie Lovén, and Elisabet Nord. Two of the
chapters making up the present volume have been presented and discussed (in
earlier versions) at the OTSEM conferences in Oxford (2012) and Tartu (2013),
and I would like to express my thanks to all those that took part in the
discussions. Among scholars of Indo-European languages, I have enjoyed
fruitful discussions and interactions with Martin Gansten, Adam Hyllested,
 Preface xi

Alwin Kloekhorst, Jenny Larsson, H. Craig Melchert, and Sergio Neri. I would
especially like to thank Jenny Larsson for inviting me as a guest lecturer to the
“Historical Linguistics Seminar” (Språkhistoriska seminariet) at Stockholm
University (April 2015), to present (inter alia) some of the ideas appearing in
chapter 4 of this book. Craig Melchert has been extraordinarily generous in
answering my many questions and in discussing various philological/linguistic
problems. Thanks are also due to Folke Josephson, who once upon set me on the
wonderful path of studying Anatolian. From the Lund History of Religions
seminar, I would especially like to extend my gratitude to Paul Linjamaa, Johan
Nilsson, and Olle Qvarnström for valuable discussions and suggestions. My
long talks with Martin Lund have been highly invigorating. Kåre Berge deserves
thanks for his reading and positive assessment of my manuscript during the
summer of 2016.
Any errors or infelicities are of course my own responsibility.
I offer my warm thanks to Göran Eidevall and Fredrik Lindström, the
editors of ConBOT, for accepting the volume into that series, for which I have
great respect—and for many valuable comments.
As I have done in many of my writings, I extend a very heartfelt thank you
to my father, Örjan Wikander, who actually was the first to introduce me both to
the study of Hebrew and to Indo-European linguistics and also did me the
enormous service of compiling the indexes for the volume (indexing is a well-
known superpower of his). A great お 疲 れ 様 to YOHIO for his constant
encouragement. Magnus Halle (also a member of the Lund OT seminar) has
been a great and inspiring dialogue partner during much of the writing of the
book, and our discussions of Northwest Semitic texts have been a constant
source of joy.
As mentioned above, the intial sketches for the book were produced in
2012, a year during which I was employed as a so-called RQ08 researcher at
Lund University. In 2013-2014, the project took a substantial step forward, as it
received funding from the Swedish Research Council. This book is the direct
result of that work, more specifically of the research project “Dragons and
Horses—Indo-Europeans and Indo-European in the Old Testament World,”
number 421-2013-1452. I would like to thank the Council for the opportunities
this funding created. Without it, this book would not exist.

Finally, and as always, I extend my love and gratitude to my Dear Lady

Rebecca Bugge, who not only helped type the index into the computer and
proofreading it but supported my work from the get-go.
お疲れ様 … 愛している!

Early 2017

Ola Wikander
xii
 1. Introduction
1.1 Aims and form
The biblical poets sang of the deeds of YHWH and his heroes, of the Israelite
people, and of battles against the Sea and the Leviathan. Ancient Indo-European
singers told of the imperishable, undying fame of other heroes, of dragons they
slew and enemies they conquered. The purpose of this book is to see how these
stories met. How they intertwined.
No man is an island, as the old and clichéd saying goes. No culture is
alone. No barrier is impenetrable—neither linguistic nor religious. This is true
now, and it was true in Antiquity. The “imperishable fame” the ancient Indo-
European poets sang about was not limited or fenced in: it spread, it crossed
seen and unseen borders. And one of the places to which it spread was the
Northwest Semitic-speaking world of the Hebrew Bible.
From the poetic and literary tradition of the Proto-Indo-Europeans came
some of the most influential textual and religious traditions of the world. The
literary/religious tradition represented in the Hebrew Bible is perhaps its only
rival in terms of influence on the religious history of our planet. And the two
interacted. This interaction is the subject of the present book.

In the studies making up the present volume, I will delve into the relationship
between the world of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and that of the Indo-
European cultures that were its early neighbors, particularly the Anatolian
cultures of the Hittites, Luwians, etc. I will paint a picture of connection, of
interrelations, of interaction—of cultural spheres and literary traditions mixing
and influencing one another. My goal is to examine certain cases exemplifying
how poetic ideas, concepts and (in some cases) words from Indo-European
sources came to be integrated into the cultural sphere that we know as that of the
Old Testament, and to study if these patterns of integration can tell us something
of the way in which the peoples involved interacted with one another. We are
dealing with two of the most historically influential cultures of ideas, thought
and mental production that the world has known, and what I wish to do in this
book is look at a few instances where they can be shown to have influenced
each other. I make no claims as to being all-encompassing or all-inclusive: this
volume is a collection of studies, of individual forays into a field both vast and
complicated. The endeavor, though based in religio-historical and linguistic
methodology, is exegetical in its goals. By looking at the interactions between
the Indo-European and biblical worlds, the understanding of the writings of the
Hebrew Bible and its kindred literatures (especially the Ugaritic writings) can be
increased.
This way of approaching the material—producing a collection of studies
circling around a common theme—has resulted in what I like to refer to as a
“polyphonic monograph”: the studies making up the book are separate, to be
sure, but they are meant to be read in connection with one another. They are
1
2 Unburning Fame

based in similar questions, phenomena and objects of study, and they are also
(taken together) meant to illustrate and discuss certain methodological ideas that
arise concerning the possibility of reconstructing literary/cultural interaction at
the level of motifs. Thus, the various chapters are not meant to be viewed as
individual Lesefrüchte, but as parts of a wider picture: one in which Indo-
European and Semitic-speaking peoples of Antiquity collaborated in creating
the multi-faceted tapestry that we know today as the Ancient Near East.

The study of the relationship between the Old Testament milieu and the Indo-
European cultures of antiquity may help shed light on the cultural and linguistic
contexts out of which the Hebrew writings grew—and help us understand how
that language came to look the way that it does in the texts preserved to us. And,
as suggested above, this is not all. As I hope to show in the pages of the book,
finding and illuminating cases of Ugaritic and/or biblical reception of Indo-
European mytho-poetic motifs is not merely a question of antiquarian interest or
abstract philology: in many cases, showing this background provides concrete
explanatory power for the real and basic exegetical questions: why do the texts
look the way they do, and how can we understand them better?

1.2 Scope
It should be stated right out at the forefront what type of examples this book
looks at. I am not investigating interactions and borrowings into the world of the
Hebrew Bible from or involving the large first millennium BCE political powers
that spoke Persian and Greek. In the context of seeing the culture that shaped the
Hebrew writings as exponents of a greater Northwest Semitic milieu, the
Persian and Hellenistic influences on the biblical text and its language must be
regarded as quite late indeed. This by no means implies that I find those
influences less important or less interesting—indeed, there is a growing
consensus that the Persian- and Greek-dominated periods were extremely
important for the formation of the texts we know today as the Hebrew Bible,
and I have absolutely no qualms with this view. The Hebrew Bible that we read
today is ultimately a product of these post-exilic eras (and, for the purposes of
canonization, the Roman period), but the influences of these major and late
Indo-European cultures—the Persian and the Greek—on the writings of the
Hebrew Bible have been extensively studied and are being studied by others as I
am writing this. I intend instead to look at examples of interaction with Indo-
European culture at an earlier stage, mainly the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron
Age. This means that the Indo-European cultures that come into focus in this
volume are mainly the Anatolian ones (Hittites, Luwians etc.) and the Indo-
Aryan ones (or, in some cases, Iranian).
One reason for this choice of focus is the way in which I view the Hebrew
and Ugaritic literary cultures in this book (and generally). It is my contention
that, notwithstanding the undeniably strong influence of post-exilic culture, one
cannot productively understand the background of much Biblical Hebrew
literature without viewing that literature as an exponent of a shared Northwest
 1. Introduction 3

Semitic cultural milieu. As I like to put it, the Israelites did not “borrow” from
Northwest Semitic culture, nor were they “influenced” by it: they are Northwest
Semitic culture.1 And thus, in order to study how Indo-European influences are
reflected in that background, we must look at the level that is held in common
by Israelite and Ugaritic literature (i.e., that historically and linguistically
underlies them), and see how that level and its individual descendants reflect
such influence. If this is the level at which one is searching, Anatolian and Indo-
Iranian become the obvious influences to look for.
In this book, the phrase “the world of the Hebrew Bible” is meant to
signify both the texts of the Hebrew Bible itself and parallel and closely related
textual material, especially, but not limited to, the mythological texts from
Ugarit. It is an undeniable fact that the religious culture reflected in the Hebrew
Bible/Old Testament and that preserved in the texts from Ugarit form two
tightly-grown branches of the same Northwest Semitic tree, both from a
linguistic and a religio-historical point of view. As I shall discuss in greater
detail later on, the shared Northwest Semitic background of which both these
textual corpora are representatives or descendants provides the common point at
which borrowings from Indo-European sources will mainly be searched for in
these studies. Influences at a wider scale (including, say, East Semitic or even
extra-Semitic Afro-Asiatic linguistic cultures) will be referred to on occasion,
but the main focus will be on the Hebew Bible and the Ugaritic literature. This
is due not only to the main spheres of competence of the author, but also to the
linguistic and literary closeness of these textual cultures. As mentioned, I
believe it highly important always to underscore that these two corpora are part
of a Northwest Semitic whole, and one way of doing that is—perhaps
ironically—to show how that “whole” interacted with linguistically “foreign”
cultures, such as the Indo-European ones.

It could be asked why this book is organized around the concept of Indo-
European influence in general. Why use such a wide-ranging term for cultures
and languages as different from each other as Hittite and Indo-Aryan? To be
sure, they are linguistically Indo-European, but some readers might object that
this is not really relevant in their interaction with the “world of the Hebrew
Bible” sketched above. To this I would answer that the Anatolian and Indo-
Aryan (and in a wider perspective, Indo-Iranian) branches of Indo-European
provide such a glimpse into the early world of Proto-Indo-European thought,
and give such important data for the reconstruction of the poetic/religious
universe of that world, that it would be folly indeed only to regard the two as
atomic entities and not as exponents of “Indo-European.” This implies another
basic methodological basis for the present book, which will become even clearer
in what follows: that it tries to take into account and build upon certain of the
results of comparative Indo-European poetics and mythology. It is not in the

1 I speak of the Hebrew Bible not “borrowing” from Northwest Semitic culture but

being Northwest Semitic culture in Wikander 2017: 119. Similarly, Wikander 2014: 15.
4 Unburning Fame

main to specifically Indo-Aryan or Anatolian phenomena as such that these

studies are looking, but to the shared Indo-European background of which they
are exponents. Thus, given what was stated above about the Northwest Semitic
“world of the Hebrew Bible” and its central role in the book, we arrive at a view
of interaction that is (at least partly) operating at the levels of two different
reconstructed linguistic cultures, the shared Northwest Semitic culture of
Israelite and Ugaritic writings, and the shared Indo-European background of
Anatolian and Indo-Aryan. To be sure, we shall in certain cases focus more
squarely on individual exponents of both of these cultural spheres, yet the
macro-perspective is always there in the background. 2 This methodological
choice is, of course, fraught with difficulty, yet it is also, I believe, the only way
of highlighting which words, motifs and ideas in the Hebrew and Ugaritic
writings carry something inherently Indo-European with them and, by so doing,
illustrating the cultural interactions that break down the artificial cultural
borders created by difference in linguistic background. To see how Northwest
Semitic and Indo-European cultures interacted, and to challenge assumptions of
walls between them, we must first start in the basic fact that these walls exist in
a linguistic sense. And to do that, we must have a firm grounding in a
philologically oriented methodology. It is not enough to find pieces of ideas
that “feel Indo-European.” Indo-European is a linguistic and philological
concept, and therefore, finding Indo-European motifs demands a philologically
and linguistically grounded method. To this question we now turn.

1.3 Methodological Self-Reflection

After having gone through the process of finishing up my doctoral dissertation
and preparing it for publication in the ConBOT series (Wikander 2014), as well
as working out the perimeters of the research project of which the present book
is a result, I was in the happy and interesting position of being able to take a step
back and take a look at what I had actually been doing during all those hours of
research—from a broader and hopefully well-informed perspective. What, I
asked myself, is the special methodological approach that I have grown fond of
using in order to study textual material from the Ancient Near East? What has
my own methodological contribution looked like? If someone asks me what my
specific attitude towards the study of the Biblical Hebrew and Ugaritic material
is, what would I answer?
The answer that I came to is that I am working in the methodological field
of etymologically based history of motifs, or (as I like to call it) etymological
poetics. What I examined in my 2014 study of drought motifs in Ugaritic
literature and in the Hebrew Bible was how ancient religious and poetic material
can survive for long periods of time, being carried between authors, redactors,

2 This also means that some of the more previously well-known and oft-proposed

connections between, e.g., Hittites and the Old Testament are not discussed in this
volume; one example of this is the connection suggested between the Azazel/scapegoat
ritual of Lev 16 and Hittite ritual practices. On this, see Janowski and Wilhelm 1993,
with references to further literature.
 1. Introduction 5

centuries and texts using lexical or semantic material as their vectors. This was
my approach in the previous book, and this will be the approach of the present
one.
This methodological attitude towards material from the Hebrew Bible and
other Ancient Near Eastern texts stands at the intersection of three scholarly
fields: Biblical Exegesis, Comparative Linguistics, and History of Religion. The
book is not, however, a sociological or even “historical” study in the narrow
sense of reconstructing historical events: the format is almost entirely textually
centered. What I intend to explore in this volume is how possible Indo-
European/Northwest Semitic interactions are reflected in actual preserved texts,
trying to draw lines between them in a way that hopefully grants some new
layer or depth to the interpretative process. It is but rarely that I venture into
discussions of actual, “physical” pathways of transmission: it is my opinion that
such are in the main impossible to reconstruct in their details. Often, we cannot
know or even plausibly imagine exactly how a specific mytheme or motif was
transported between the cultures involved; we can only note and argue for the
case that it appears to have happened.
This, of course, creates a vast methodological problem of “sifting the real
connections from the imagined.” However, this difficulty is not fundamentally
different from what would be the case regarding any study of history of ideas
crossing long periods of time. Within the field of Old Testament study, the great
ideological currents of Deuteronomism, Priestly thinking, etc., are presupposed
to be real without anybody actually being able to pinpoint the historical or
sociological realities underlying them.3 They are definitely convenient analytical
constructs well suited for describing vast rivers of theological and ideological
developments, but they cannot necessarily be correlated easily with actual
historical figures; there have, of course, been many attempts at doing so—and
many of these are certainly interesting and thought-provoking—but they are
often quite difficult to verify or falsify. This means that the kind of relationships
between motifs that I am discussing is not as easily verifiable or falsifiable as,
say, a description of an ancient building that can perhaps be correlated (or
contrasted) with archaeological finds.
The type of “etymological poetics” that I am studying in this book (as well
as in my 2014 study on drought motifs in Ugarit and the Hebrew Bible) instead
uses the medium of motif transmission based on words and phrases as its most
important method of testability. What I am trying to work on is cases in which
the words themselves appear to have acted as carriers of motifs and
mythological information. In some of the cases appearing in this book, this
process is very apparent and clearly recognizable; in others, it is more nebulous.
Nevertheless, this is the basic methodological approach that I am taking towards
my material.

3 As an indicator of this fact, one need only think of the amount of scholarly articles

and writings on the issue of “who the Deuteronomists really were.” One indicative title is
that of the anthology Those Elusive Deuteronomists (Schearing and McKenzie [eds.]
1999).
6 Unburning Fame

This is why the reader will find a number of references to possible loan-
translations of mythological titles, creative word-play on the part of the ancient
authors, and other such-like phenomena. In the cases where we can show such
connections, the mythological comparisons between differing textual corpora
become less prone to accidental “parallelomania.” That is also the reason for the
first study in the book being centered on two possible cultural-interactional
loanwords (words for “horse” and “to plow,” respectively) rather than on more
abstract mythemes (which appear later in the volume). I want to underscore the
idea of etymological study as a basic and quite necessary tool in the search for
mythological and literary parallels, as well.
What makes such a quest more perilous for this study than for studies of
purely inner-Indo-European mythological patterns, for example, is of course the
fact that we are dealing with different linguistic cultures in the present case,
cultures that cannot “inherit” (in the etymological sense) anything from each
other but between which borrowing is the only pathway open. Studying
etymological connections here is much trickier, and, in fact, the word
“etymology” must here be thought of as being enclosed in quotation-marks. It is
not a question of etymology in the sense of direct inheritance, but in that of
lexical interaction (borrowings and calques) and interaction at the level of
literary, theological and mythological motifs. Still, anchoring one’s comparisons
in the study of words (be they borrowed or calqued) provides some type of
scholarly control, as opposed to more purely typological parallel-finding (which
is interesting in and of itself but does not necessarily imply any type of
historical connection between the phenomena being compared). 4 This means
that I will not, in general, be working with that type of general typological and
mythological comparison that can, for example, be found in the work of
Grottanelli (1999), when he discusses a general (and transcultural) “battle” myth
as being historicized and instantiated in the story of Deborah and Barak.
Grottanelli expressely does not want to be fettered by the necessity of
demonstrating historical connectedness: typology is enough for him. Yet, one
cannot help being slightly bemused that even Grottanelli uses a form of
“etymological poetics” when he analyzes the names of Barak and Lappidoth as
having to do with “lightning” and “flashes” as part of his typological
comparison. Even though he purports only to employ a more general form of
comparative mythology, Grottanelli uses a type of historical linguistic method to
try to find a deeper level in the story (which in itself seems to imply a historical
background for the mythological connections). 5

4 As part of the research project leading towards the present study, I have also
published an article based in this purely “typological” form of comparison. That article
(Wikander 2015a) discusses the phenomenological similarities between Josiah’s and
Hilkiah’s supposed discovery of a holy book in the Temple in 622 BCE and a discovery
of an inscribed cultic image of that in a sense most Indo-European of deities, Indra, in the
temple Shibamata Taishakuten, on the outskirts of Tokyo, in 1779 CE.
5 Grottanelli 1999; the discussion of the Deborah-Barak episode can be found in

chapter 4 (originally published in article form as Grottanelli 1987) and the discussion of
the names on pp. 74-75.
 1. Introduction 7

So, in general, I will try to keep to the “etymological poetic” methodology,

searching for historically connected poetic phrases, motifs and mythemes by
searching for linguistic material that may have carried them through history. As
I have pointed out previously in the introduction to Wikander 2014, 6 this
methodology builds upon the work of Calvert Watkins (1995) and his studies of
dragon myths in Indo-European cultures and their linguistic inheritability. We
shall return to this topic in greater detail in chapter 4. In a few cases, I will start
by showing a more general “typological” similarity even at the motif/word
level, but even in those cases, I will argue that historical connections are quite
possible. And again, the lexical phraseology (both in the sources from the
“world of the Hebrew Bible” and in the Indo-European ones) are in constant
focus.
One should note that searching for contacts between Indo-European and
Northwest Semitic culture and mythology has not been seen as very strange
when going in the opposite direction from what is mainly studied in this book.
Influence from Semitic (or other Ancient Near Eastern) sources upon the world
of classical antiquity has been foregrounded many times (and with various
degrees of persuasiveness), for example in works by Gordon (1962), Astour
(1967), West (1997), and Bachvarova (2016). Looking for Indo-European
motifs in biblical and Ugaritic mythology need be no stranger; yet, as I
mentioned above, methodological stringency is needed, and it is for this reason
that I believe “etymological poetics” to be such a viable and valuable tool.

A recent reading of Philip R. Davies’ In Search of “Ancient Israel”—one of the

modern classics of the tendency often, though perhaps not very precisely,
referred to as “biblical minimalism” 7—provoked another type of methodological
self-reflection. I am not myself an adherent of the above-mentioned “school” or
tendency, yet I readily concede that it has provided a very good and welcome
methodological challenge to certain often unspoken axioms of older biblical
scholarship while highlighting the important roles of the Persian and Hellenistic
eras in the literary genesis or background of many texts in the Hebrew Bible.
Even though I am generally much more open to early datings of biblical texts
than is Davies, the challenge of “minimalist” methodological criticism is one
that all scholars of the Hebrew Bible need to take seriously—and that challenge
may in fact help in making one’s own axioms clearer and more consciously
known and opted for, even if one does not always agree with the specific points
of that challenge.

6 Wikander 2014: 14-15.

7
One should note that Davies himself rejects this label, viewing it as pejorative and
as not really referring to a cohesive school of thought that can fruitfully be talked of as a
scholarly collective (see Davies’s web article “Minimalism, ‘Ancient Israel,’ and Anti-
Semitism,” available at http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/Minimalism.shtml [accessed
latest May 6, 2016], and also Davies 2015: xvi-xvii). However, I will continue to use the
term, though in quotation marks, to signify a tendency made up by scholars such as
Davies and the so-called Copenhagen school. This is just a matter of simplicity.
8 Unburning Fame

The basic idea underlying many forms of “minimalism” is a very, very

thoroughgoing application of Occam’s razor. The fewer historical postulates one
makes, the better—so to speak. If the texts of the Hebrew Bible can be
explained without positing an extensive “Ancient Israel” but mainly by cultural
memory during the Persian and Hellenistic periods, then it should, so the
argument goes (stated in an extremely simplistic way).
My own basic methodology is different. The goal of the present studies is
not to reconstruct “Israelite” history with as few (and late) postulates as
possible, but to offer models that make the texts as preserved to us (biblical,
Ugaritic or otherwise) easier to understand and explain. The point, actually, is
not to make abstract historical statements at all, but to present models of
historical interaction that explain the literary material of concrete texts from an
exegetical point of view. The important thing, then, is not necessarily which
explanation contains the fewest postulates, but which one provides the clearest
religio-historical and linguistic background for interpreting the textual entity at
hand. We are working here not in the realm of historical facts in a general or
abstract sense but in that of literary, poetic and mythological motifs. This will,
perforce, sometimes have purely historical implications—and will often require
tests of plausibility by comparing with known historical facts—but the issue
remains one in which the text or motif itself is the primary object of study (and
not necessarily its material-political background).8
I would like to return for a moment to the methodological choice alluded to
above: that the motif comparisons carried out in this volume are mainly based in
those that can be associated with specific pieces of lexical material, i.e., words
(either borrowings or calques/loan translations). Why, it could be asked, have I
chosen such an approach? As I will mention at a number of points during the
book, there have been attempts to find Indo-European motifs and poetic
materials in the Hebrew Bible and other Northwest Semitic literature that do not
show such lexical connections (the endeavors to find traces of Dumézilian
trifunctionalism in the biblical writings provide one such example, to which I
will be returning later). The reason for me refraining from such more “abstract”
comparison is methodological in nature. If a possible historical connection is to

8 There are of course cases in which these two different ways of studying the genesis
of textual entities cannot be separated: one example among many is the discussion
focusing on Josiah’s putative cultic reforms in 622 BCE and the background of
Deuteronomic/Deuteronomist ideology. The classical view of that ideology in essence
going back to the specific historical events of 622 provides a very clear example of
literary developments that are not seldom regarded as impossible to understand without
reference to specific historical events. One should not forget, however, that even this
classical dictum of historical-critical study is being challenged today: see, for example,
the study of Pakkala (2010), who concludes that there were no Josianic reforms at all.
Even though I do not really agree with that conclusion myself, the fact that the discussion
concerning even such a classical connection between event and text is still ongoing
proves that this type of “event-based” textual study (often regarded as one of the
analytical bedrocks of biblical scholarship) is certainly not without its difficulties from a
methodological point of view.
 1. Introduction 9

be posited between two mythemes or motifs in two (linguistically unrelated)

religious literatures, one should rather like to anchor that in something more
concrete than just noting that “two ideas or motifs seem similar.” If one has no
such mooring post whatsoever, the risk of intrusive coincidences becomes very
high indeed. While it is not possible to do so in each and every case, I have tried
as far as possible to demonstrate possible pieces of lexical data that could have
carried the motifs with them.
The process just delineated is, in fact, exactly what I mean by
“etymological poetics.” The basic idea is that pieces of poetic diction carry
motifs with them, and that such phrases and collocations are often transferred in
a rather verbatim fashion. If one can follow words that have been inherited and
borrowed, one can also follow the differing strands of a tradition in its
constantly changing creations of meaning, i.e., one may find a tool with which
to separate continuity from discontinuity. When one can show that words or
collocations have survived (or have even been borrowed between languages, as
in the Indo-European/biblical case), one can see a way of sifting the static from
the changing.
This is a field of inquiry that I have been working in before. In an earlier
research project, which was carried out with funding from the Swedish Nuclear
Waste Management Company, I discussed various ways in which religious
intelligentsias have been instrumental in preserving vast amounts of textual,
technical and ideological material for long periods of time (examples such as the
Rabbis and Brahmins come to mind). Such a method has been suggested as a
way of preserving information about nuclear waste deposits into the far future,
for example by semiotician Thomas Sebeok, who proposed creating what he
called an “Atomic Priesthood,” a sort of self-perpetuating intelligentsia that
would preserve the vital (and lethal) information as a kind of religious corpus,
while not telling the people at large of what they were doing; the people would
instead take part in recurring rituals that would preserve the memory of the
necessity of not disturbing the dangerous places, without actually describing the
dangers in any real detail.
In one of the articles that came out of the above-mentioned project, 9 I
criticized Sebeok’s scheme by looking at other pieces of long-term transmission
of religious material which, even though preserving basic motifs and lexical
carriers thereof, was fundamentally reinterpreted as time went on. I mentioned
examples such as the Israelite Feast of the Unleavened Bread being reinterpreted
and historicized through its integration with the Pesach celebration and—from
the Indo-European context also relevant to the present volume—the oft-
proposed possibility of tales of dragon-slaying and rituals of horse sacrifice
having been inherited from Proto-Indo-European times. The problem is that all
of these traditions, however ancient they may be, have been reinterpreted over
time and given vastly different explanations as opposed to what may have been

9 Wikander 2015b; the original proposal concerning the “Atomic Priesthood” and

their recurring rituals can be found in Sebeok 1984: 24.

10 Unburning Fame

their original significance. This, I argued, makes Sebeok’s proposal rather less
workable: even if a lexical and ritual transmission were successful, there would
be no guarantee that their contents would not be reinterpreted by later
generations.
All of this brings us back once more to the present investigation and
“etymological poetics.” What the problems with the “Atomic Priesthood” show
is that identifying inherited narrative and ritual structures separated by great
temporal or cultural gaps can be very difficult indeed if one does not separate
that which continues on from that which is reinterpreted. It is here that lexical
transmission comes in: anchoring the study in words and phrases at least has a
chance of focusing on the more resilient links in the chains of tradition. If one
looks not only for seemingly parallel cultural constructs or rituals but for words
that either have a common origin (through etymological inheritance or, as in this
case, loans or calques) or an identifiable semantic overlap, one has a control for
the—on the face of it—rather abstract comparisons one is carrying out.

1.4 Implied Readership; Nomenclature, Transcriptions, and Protocols

Because of the dual objects of study and, thereby, dual disciplinary background
underlying the present volume, something should be said about the intended
readership of the studies contained herein. The book is mainly intended for
scholars with a background in Old Testament Exegesis and/or the study of
Northwest Semitic religious literature (mainly, of course, Ugaritic), but it is also
meant to be of use to readers with a more general interest in Ancient Near
Eastern religious history or, for that matter, Indo-Europeanists. However, given
that the first point in this list of “implied readerships” is Old Testament scholars,
hardcore Indo-Europeanists will have to accept that terms that are quite basic in
that field (Brugmann’s law, thorn-clusters, etc.) are given what may appear to
be handbook-like explanations in footnotes. On the other hand, exegetes and
Semitists may find that certain parts, which abound more in such Indo-
Europeanist terminology or presuppose knowledge of concepts from Indo-
European studies, are heavy going. In these cases, I refer both to the
explanations that I have myself tried to give and to the standard handbooks of
Indo-European studies, which cover most of these concepts. 10
I use the standard transcriptions of Semitic languages (for Hebrew, I use
the “Anglo-American” type of transcription). The names of the most well-
known Ugaritic deities are often given in their common, Hebrew based, forms
(Baal, Anat). Personified terms such as “Storm God,” “Sea,” “Serpent,” etc. are
written with initial capital when it seems appropriate (where it is actually a
matter of an individual, personified being), although I cannot vouch for
complete consistency in this regard, as there are many borderline cases. For
Sanskrit, I use the standard IAST transcription. Renderings of reconstructed

See, for example, Beekes 2011 (specifically introducing the “Leiden school” of
10

Indo-European studies, out of which the work of Alwin Kloekhorst, referred to on many
occasions in the present study, also comes), Clackson 2007, Fortson 2010, Meier-
Brügger 2010, and Sihler 1995.
 1. Introduction 11

Proto-Indo-European words are, except when explicitly quoting sources using

different systems, given in the ordinary way in the field, with superscript letters
showing coarticulations such as aspiration and labialization and subscripts for
the “largyngeals” *h1, *h2, and *h3; in line with the general consensus, I reckon
with three laryngeals in Proto-Indo-European. The “palato-velar” stops of Proto-
Indo-European are written *k̑, *g̑, and *g̑h. It should be noted that I render the
consonantal glides as *w and *y at the start of Proto-Indo-European syllables.
Old Testament texts are given according to the Masoretic Text (BHS)
unless otherwise noted. Ṛg-Vedic texts are quoted according to the metrically
restored edition of van Nooten and Holland (1994).11 Ugaritic texts follow KTU,
third edition; in the main text, I have indicated uncertain letters with roman type,
as done in that edition, marking word dividers as well. In footnotes, however, I
have dispensed with such details, writing “bare” Ugaritic words. I have not
included signs marked as erased by the editors; also, in a (very) few instances, I
have inserted a blank space after a conjunction where KTU does not. Quotations
from the LXX follow the Rahlfs-Hanhart edition. Translations of ancient textual
passages are my own, if not stated otherwise. The texts from the Enūma Eliš are
based on the edition of Lambert (2013).

11 However, for simplicity’s sake, I do not include the Vedic accents. The text of van

Nooten and Holland 1994 is now available online at the University of Texas Linguistics
Research Center: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/lrc/rigveda/, accessed latest Jan 30, 2017.
 2. Preamble:
The Semitic and Indo-European Language Families,
and Possible Arenas of Interaction
2.1 The Two Families and their Linguistic Typology
As a preamble to our more detailed studies of Indo-European/Northwest Semitic
interaction, it may be fruitful to think for a short while about the typological
similarities (and differences) between the Indo-European and Semitic linguistic
families (in the latter case, of course, necessarily expanding the question to the
greater Afro-Asiatic phylum in certain instances). The point of presenting such a
comparison will not be to imply any type of “Indo-Semitic” or “Nostratic”
relationship between the phyla. Such endeavors are, to my mind, beset with the
most thoroughgoing methodological problems—so much as to make them more
or less impossible. Rather, the typological similarities that—it must be said—do
exist between the Indo-European and Semitic linguistic families should be seen
as either being interesting chance resemblances or (possibly at least) signs of
common areal features due to early cultural interaction between their speakers.
Such a possibility is of course relevant to the present study.

In an earlier article (Wikander 2010), I discussed certain typological parallels

between the Indo-European and Semitic verbal systems, or more specifically,
the developments of the ways in which they grammatically encode tense, aspect
and Aktionsart. There, I noted how both Indo-European and Semitic seem to
have begun with a system basically divided into one category expressing some
sort of “stativity” and one expressing fientic/eventive verbal predication. Both
families split the latter into a durative and a perfective/aoristic subcategory
(often reinforcing their temporality using an “augment”-like particle, in the
Indo-European case the tense augment *e- or *h1e- and, most clearly in
Classical Hebrew, the “consecutive wāw”), whereupon the originally stative
category gradually took on fientic uses, especially for perfective past time. 12
The similarity in this “two-categories-and-a-half” typology of the verbal
system is certainly a rather remarkable point of commonality between the Indo-

12 This argument does not take into account more radical (though intriguing)

reformulations of the Proto-Indo-European verbal system, such as the “*h2e conjugation”

proposed by Jay Jasanoff (2003). After the finishing of Wikander 2010, it came to my
attention that points similar to some of the ones put forth in that article had been made by
David D. Testen (1998: 197-198); Testen also compares the temporalization of the
Hebrew consecutive imperfect to the Indo-European augment, but his anaysis differs
from mine in the crucial point of seeing the temporalizing action not in the consecutive
wāw itself but in an intervening particle that Testen sees as coming between the wāw and
the actual verbal form. His interpretation is thus different than mine: we both see the
consecutive imperfect as temporalized in a way similar to the Indo-European augmented
tenses, but we view the Hebrew “augments,” so to speak, as consisting in different
morphological units.
12
 2. The Semitic and IE Linguistic Families 13

European and Semitic linguistic families. Proto-Indo-European possessed the

“present” stem (durative) and the “aorist” stem (perfective), both basically
inflected with similar endings, and it also had a parallel so-called “perfect”
(originally stative) system. In quite a similar way, Semitic languages have (at
least) two prefix conjugations used for fientive actions: yaqtul (perfective) and
yaqattal [or yaqtulu in Central Semitic] (imperfective), as opposed to the old
stative (turned into the qatala “perfect” in West Semitic). 13 In both Indo-
European and Semitic, the old stative gradually acquired perfective/past
meaning.
Of course, the question is whether this striking typological similarity is due
to some type of areal contact or simply to coincidence. Again, it cannot be any
matter of actual linguistic relatedness: the formation of the forms is completely
and utterly different between the families. If anything, it could only be a
question of very early Sprachbund-like areal influence.
When looking at this type of general parallels of linguistic typology on a
wide scale, one has to exercise great caution. It is a well-known phenomenon
that different linguistic phyla can develop similar features quite independently
of one another, even in cases where the parallels appear to be very substantial
and concrete indeed. One such example directly involving the Indo-European
and Semitic phyla can be found in the fact that languages from both families
exhibit a system of two categories of nominal gender referred to as masculine
and feminine, and that a number of these languages (in both families) appear to
mark the feminine gender using a morpheme looking something like -a (Hebrew
-â, dialectal Arabic -a, Latin -a, Sanskrit -ā, etc.). However, a basic historical
insight into the development of these forms shows that the origin of these
seemingly almost identical morphemes is completely different. The Semitic “a-
feminines” are, in fact, shortened or apocopated versions of the actual historical
ending -(a)t-, in which the t and not the a is the central part of the morpheme.
And the Indo-European feminine ā-ending originally appears to derive from a
more complex ending *-eh2.
Another example of how Indo-European and Semitic languages have
developed in similar ways (a sort of “convergent evolution,” if one wants to use
Darwinian terminology) is Old Irish, which has developed several features
seemingly more typical of Semitic languages than Indo-European ones,
regardless of that language having a secure Indo-European (Celtic) pedigree.
Old Irish has inflected prepositions, Verb-Subject-Object word order, and direct
object markers incorporated into the verbal chain (similar phenomena occur in
other Insular Celtic languages as well). The typological similarities between
Insular Celtic and the Semitic languages have even led to the proposal that there

13 The development of Semitic stative, nominal-based, forms into verbal predications

was in fact used by Warren Cowgill (1979: 34) as a typological argument concerning the
genesis of the Hittite so-called ḫi-conjugation (cf. Jasanoff 2003: 17-21, esp. p. 18, with
following criticism).
14 Unburning Fame

was a Semitic (or generally Afro-Asiatic) substratum in the areas subsequently

inhabited by speakers of Insular Celtic.14
The phonologies of Proto-Indo-European and early Semitic (and Afro-
Asiatic in general) also seem to have possessed certain parallels with each other.
Proto-Indo-European possibly had pharyngeal sounds (or at least a number of
back fricatives, referred to as “laryngeals” in Indo-European scholarship, despite
their exact articulation being unknown or debated), and both Afro-Asiatic and
Indo-European display a similar system of “triads” in the consonantal system (in
the Indo-European case, only in the stop system). Indo-European has a triad
traditionally described as being made up of “unvoiced, voiced, breathy
voiced/voiced aspirated” (for example, in the dental series, *t, *d, and *dh) with
the “voiced” sound sometimes being reconstructed as glottalized instead; 15
Semitic has “unvoiced, emphatic, voiced” (for example t, ṭ, d). In both cases, the
exact phonetics of these triads is under constant and vociferous debate. Yet, the
triadic systems are similar, and (as Lutz Edzard points out), there is nothing self-
evident or especially common about having consonantal triads in the phonemic
inventory of a language. 16 Another clear typological parallel between Indo-
European and Afro-Asiatic (including Semitic) is the reliance on verbal roots
and fusional morphology (as opposed to agglutination, for example). 17
It is of course possible that some of the typological similarities that can be
found between Semitic and Indo-European languages could have something to
do with very early interaction and areal contact, but this is by no means certain
and definitely enters into the realm of the purely speculative. The similarities
mentioned above in the area of historical verbal morphosyntax are certainly
interesting, but no clear historical conclusions can be drawn from them. It is
quite possible (even probable) that such similar typological developments could
appear purely due to chance, and the same applies to the alleged pre-Celtic
Semitic substrate. A connection is possible, but other possibilities could seem
quite as or even more likely. And as any interactions on this level would need to
have begun at an extremely early point (at the level of Proto-Afro-Asiatic rather

14For an overview of the question and a skeptical assessment, see Hewitt 2009.
15Or, according to a recent suggestion (Kümmel 2012, esp. pp. 303-304), implosive
or “non-explosive.”
16 Edzard 2012: 27.
17 Indeed, the parallel focus on root-based, fusional morphology, has been taken even

further by Roland A. Pooth (2009, esp. p. 234-236 and 248-250), who radically argues
that the traditional analysis of Proto-Indo-European roots as containing a vowel subject
to gradation/Ablaut is methodologically misconstrued, and that it would make more sense
to compare the Indo-European root system to that of a Semitic language, with a
consonantal skeleton as the basis of root formation (he specifically mentions Classical
Arabic and Proto-Semitic as examples of what he is thinking of). This is a very radical
proposal, but it does highlight some of the typological parallels that exist between the
Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages. Yet, it is still only a matter of a typological
similarity and not of any distant genetic relationship, as Pooth himself clearly points out
on p. 248.
 2. The Semitic and IE Linguistic Families 15

than Proto-Semitic) it would be very hard indeed to prove them. Words, phrases
and motifs are, however, a different matter.

2.2 Different Levels of Possible Historical Interaction

One of the first things clearly to ponder before attempting any search for Indo-
European-derived motifs in Ugaritic and Ancient Hebrew literature is the
multitude of levels at which such motifs could have passed between the cultures
studied and the various types of influence and interaction this may entail.
The first level:
The areal influence delineated above that may or may not have affected the
early Indo-European and Semitic verbal systems would (if true) have to have
occurred at a very early point indeed (probably at one in which speakers of
proto-languages interacted with each other). Contacts and borrowings at that
early level may certainly be quite hard to process in a methodologically
stringent way. One thinks of extremely early possible loan words, such as the
oft-noted correspondence between Proto-Indo-European *k̑(e)r-n-(o)- (with
various suffixes, giving Latin cornu, Sanskrit śṛṅ-ga-, etc.) and Semitic *qarn-,
both meaning “horn” (the modern English word is, in fact, a reflex of the Indo-
European complex of forms). In this book, a few possible examples of
transmission at this early level will be taken up for discussion, even though the
necessary methodological caveats must be remembered to apply.
The second level concerns influences that may have taken place at a time
when the (to a large extent Semitic) literature of the Ancient Near East had
come into being (or at least not too far from that point), even though the exact
linguistic background of the putative Indo-European interacting culture cannot
always be certainly known. One possible such example from the present volume
is the divine name Dagan (see chapter 7).
The third level (and the one with the least amount of methodological
pitfalls present—even though they are still many!) is the one for which one can
plausibly argue a direct path of influence between an attested Indo-European-
speaking culture of the Ancient Near East and the Ugaritic or biblical writings.
In some cases (as we shall see) more than one of these levels of interaction
may well have been involved, i.e., an influence at a very early point in time may
later have been “buttressed” by a later one. There may also have been instances
in which Indo-European influence was indirect, i.e., mediated through some
third party. 18 Both these problems will make themselves known when we
discuss the serpent-slaying mythology of Indo-European and biblical culture.

18On the more general question of how OT authors viewed and interacted with (to
them) foreign languages generally, I would like to refer to the recent doctoral dissertation
Power 2015.
16 Unburning Fame

2.3 A Case of Demonstrable Interaction: The Elkunirša Text

Before moving into actual analyses of concrete words, motifs, and texts, I would
like to remind the reader, just as an illustration, of a very concrete example of
Indo-European/“proto-biblical” interaction, one that directly shows how such
borrowings could happen in practice (and how motif and meaning could be
transferred by means of lexical material). When dealing with motif- and word-
level relationships between Indo-European-speaking Anatolia and the Northwest
Semitic-speaking cultural sphere reflected at Ugarit and in the texts of the
Hebrew Bible, there is one textual entity that cannot be ignored, as it attests
directly to such a relationship, albeit in the opposite direction from what I will
be mainly discussed in this book. I am speaking of the story of Elkunirša, an
originally Northwest Semitic myth which has only been preserved in a Hittite
translation. The name of the main character himself, Elkunirša, shows the
linguistic background of the story. The name is a Hittite version of a Northwest
Semitic expression essentially identical with that in Gen 14:19 and 14:22, ʾēl
[…] qōneh […] ʾereṣ/ʾāreṣ, “El, Creator of the Earth.” Interestingly, the
rounded vowel u of the Hittite form Elkunirša suggests that the immediate
background of the name was not a Syrian language similar to Ugaritic but a
southern Canaanite tongue, displaying as it does the Canaanite shift of *ā to an
o or u-quality vowel. In Ugaritic, the G active masculine participle of the verb
qny (“to create”) would be /qāniyu/ with the original long *ā preserved. The -
kun- of the form as appearing in the Hittite text is closer to the Hebrew form
qōneh. Thus, the language from which the myth was translated/adapted was in
all probability a Canaanite one (given the early period, perhaps “Canaanite” is
the only name that we should give such a language).19
This fact is important for our purposes, since it shows beyond doubt a
direct contact between Hittite (Indo-European) speaking Anatolia and the exact
linguistic culture out of which the Hebrew writings grew—in all probability not
a mediated interaction, but a direct one. Of course, what the existence of the
Elkunirša text shows is the opposite direction of exchange to what will mainly
be studied in the present volume (from “Canaanites” to Hittites rather than the
other way around), but it provides a very clear example of the two cultural
spheres interacting at a literary level at an early period. As the title ʾēl qōneh
ʾereṣ appears to be something of a relic or a fossil in the Hebrew Bible
(appearing as it does as the title of Melchizedek’s god in Genesis 14), one could
actually argue that the Hittite-language Elkunirša text is closer to the Canaanite
(and general Northwest Semitic) heritage level on this point than the biblical

19
The Hittite rendering may include yet another hint about “early Canaanite”
phonology, at least in relation to one dialect thereof. The fact that the Northwest Semitic
divine name is rendered with an š- grapheme suggests that (despite the early period) the
dialect from which the name was taken did not pronounce ṣ with a clear affrication. I
have argued earlier (Wikander 2015) that affrication was preserved here and there for a
very long time (indeed, until Ashkenazi Hebrew), but this preservation was probably
dialectal, which is also suggested by the Elkunirša example.
 2. The Semitic and IE Linguistic Families 17

text itself. Also, as shown by Harry A. Hoffner, the text includes a creative
mistranslation, in which Anat transforms herself into a “cup” when the original
text apparently talked of a type of owl, which also appears in the text (both
words being identical in Canaanite, as shown through the Hebrew kôs, which
can mean both “cup” and “owl”). Hoffner’s inspired insight goes to illustrate the
basic methodological premise of the present study: that knowledge of the
background of mythological motifs—even if (or actually especially if) they
derive from “foreign” linguistic cultures—is necessary to understand the literary
level of the texts.20 To be sure, the Elkunirša example is more extreme, as the
text is in all probability an actual translation from a Northwest Semitic original,
but the point stands for shorter textual entities and motifs as well.
Even though the Elkunirša story is clearly “Canaanite” in context and
background, it provides a perfect example of “translatability” of deities, as the
Storm God (who is clearly the Northwest Semitic Baal/Hadad) is rendered by
the Hittite translation as dU, one the normal Sumerographic spellings used for
the Hittite Storm God(s), often standing for the Storm God par excellence,
Tarḫunna-. This provides an ideal (and in no way unique) example of how these
divinities could be conflated with one another, highly relevant for the upcoming
discussion of the serpent stories, for example. The Northwest Semitic goddess
Anat (or possibly Athtart) also appears in the Hittite text, written using the
Akkadogram IŠTAR, as does El’s wife, Athirat/Asherah (called Ašertu).
This is not the place to enter into a lengthy analysis of the Elkunirša story;
what is necessary for the present purposes is noting its existence as proof
positive of the Anatolian-biblical interaction that is one of the main points of the
present volume. It shows that some of the lines of interaction that will be
discussed in this book are no mere speculation: they were demonstratively there.

2.4 Why Generally “Indo-European”?

So, there are a number of different historical and linguistic levels at which Indo-
European influence could have made itself known in the “world of the Hebrew
Bible.” The possible question then again suggests itself: why search for “Indo-
European” influences at some type of meta-level, when such influence could in
fact mean very different things? Would such a search not constitute an
unnecessary conflation of several very different kinds of investigation,
muddying the “methodological purity” of the enterprise? Why not simply talk of
“Hittite” influence, “Luwian” influence, “Indo-Aryan” influence (etc.), without
seeing these as representatives of Indo-European influence on a larger scale?
To this I would answer that there do appear to be a number of more
generally “Indo-European” mytho-poetic tropes and images which seem to have
been inherited from the proto-language level into the various attested Indo-
European linguistic cultures (in a literary and linguistic sense as opposed to a

20 The “owl/cup” suggestion is found in Hoffner 1965: 13-14. He translated the text
in Hoffner 1998: 90-92. The Hittite text is edited in transliteration in Laroche 1969: 139-
144. On translatable deities in general, see Smith 2010 (esp. pp. 82-83 on Elkunirša).
18 Unburning Fame

biological one), and that these have proven to be studiable at the meta-level of
Proto-Indo-European. In a number of interesting cases, words, expressions and
mythological tropes very similar to these appear in Ugaritic and Hebrew
literature. To get at the various possible levels of transmission that may have
given rise to these correspondences, I believe it necessary to study them as
“Indo-European” ones as opposed to atomizing them into Hittite, Indo-Iranian or
even language-specific levels, while not forgetting that the “common Indo-
European background” will almost always have manifested itself through one of
these sub-languages (attested or unattested).
Just as I firmly believe that one must reach for the level of shared
Northwest Semitic poetic inheritance if one intends in a meaningful way to
study the remarkable correspondences that exist between Ugaritic and Old
Testament literature, in the same way I believe that the shared Indo-European
mytho-linguistic stock of literary tropes and words can be seen, on a meta-level,
as a background for influences on that shared Northwest Semitic cultural milieu.
One must be able to move conceptually back and forth between the “proto”-level
and the level of concrete, attested languages if such a comparative study is to be
undertaken.
With these methodological caveats in mind, we shall now start our
investigations at the most concrete of levels: that of words for concrete beings
and implements: the horse and the plow.
 3. Horse and Plow: Case Studies in Technological
Indo-European/Hebrew Vocabulary
Before entering in earnest into the land of poetic or religious motifs, we shall
begin with something more down to earth, viz. two possible cases of
cultural/technical loanwords from Indo-European into the Northwest Semitic
cultural sphere of which Hebrew and Ugaritic are parts. One of the words
involved is the one that is often regarded as a sort of “poster boy” for
comparative Indo-European linguistics as such: the word for “horse.” Given the
near-ubiquitous attestation of the “horse” word in the various branches of Indo-
European, it is a very common stance to view the horse—and the mastery
thereof—as one of the most defining traits of Proto-Indo-European culture and
its early descendants. A possible borrowed representation of this word in
Semitic is an important example case of Indo-European/Semitic cultural
interaction. Thus, the “horse” word is the first case study of the present chapter.
On the topic of non-Semitic loan-words in Biblical Hebrew, James Barr
writes the following:

Where a non-Semitic origin for a word in the Old Testament is considered,

attention should be given to the date both of the passage itself and of the events
described in it. The probability of Hittite words would be higher in the earlier
period. Accadian words may have come into Hebrew from early times down to the
Babylonian exile. Persian words are conceivable from the sixth century or so
onwards, but acknowledged examples of these (and also of Greek words) in the
Hebrew parts of the Old Testament are very few; the Aramaic sections contain
many more.21

Disregarding the fact that Akkadian words are not, in fact, “non-Semitic” (if one
discounts loanwords that are in turn Sumerian in origin), Barr’s words would of
course seem to ring true, in the sense that a temporal overlap with the culture
giving the loan would be preferable to the lack thereof. However, the problem of
dating specific biblical passages needs no introduction to readers versed in Old
Testament Exegesis, and thus the issue is not so clear cut in practice. Actually,
loanwords are not seldom the means by which specific passages in the Hebrew
Bible tend to be dated. And for a word as ubiquitous as “horse,” such a practice

21 Barr 1987: 104. There has been an increased interest in the systematic study of
loanwords into Northwest Semitic during the last decades; one could mention the works
of Mankowski (2000), on loanwords from Akkadian in Biblical Hebrew, Muchiki 1999,
on Egyptian words in Northwest Semitic, Watson 2005, some of the sections in Watson
2007, as well as the recent Watson 2015, on loans appearing in Ugaritic (in the latter case
focusing on a Hittite loan), and Watson 2013 (on loans in Phoenician and Punic). On
possible loans from Indian languages in Biblical Hebrew, see Rabin 1994. For a
summary of earlier work and references on suggested loanwords in Hebrew, including
Indo-European ones, see Waldman 1989: 57-61. I would like to thank Prof. Kevin
Cathcart for pointing out some of these references to me, as well as for many fruitful
suggestions concerning this chapter.
19
20 Unburning Fame

(judging the question of possible loanwords on the basis of textual dating)

becomes impossible. I would like to remind the reader of what was said in
section 2.2 about different levels of possible interaction: the receiving language
need not have been “Hebrew” as such, but may just as well have been a
predecessor language, out of which what we now know as Hebrew subsequently
grew. One should also not discount the possibility of several stages of
borrowing through various languages. With these points in mind, we shall now
take a look at the Hebrew word sûs and its possible background, whereafter we
shall discuss another possible “technical word” that may represent an Indo-
European/Semitic interaction, the word for the verb “to plow.”

3.1 “Case Study” 1: The Hebrew Word for “Horse” (sûs), and Its Cognates
The Semitic word appearing in Hebrew as sûs has a long, earlier history. The
earliest possible appearance of the lexeme may be represented by the writing
ANŠE.ZI.ZI, which occurs already in the Ur III period as a variant of the
ordinary Sumerian spelling of “horse” (ANŠE.KUR.RA, literally “donkey from
the mountains”). 22 The classical, Akkadian version of the word is the well-
attested sīsû(m)/sīsāʾum, and there are of course attestations of the lexeme in
many Semitic languages (Ugaritic ssw/s̀s̀w, Aramaic swsh/swsyh/sûsĕyâ,
Phoenician ss etc.) It is a common assumption that this word represents some
form of loan from Indo-European. 23 Specifically, the supposition is that the
Semitic word has its origin in a borrowing from some form of the Indo-
European word reconstructed as *(h1)ek̑w(o)- in Proto-Indo-European, the very
word that by normal processes of inheritance (and in some cases derivation)
gave rise to Sanskrit aśva(s), Latin equus, Old Irish ech, Gothic aíhwa-, Gaulish
epo-, Lithuanian ašvienis, Tocharian yakwe/yuk, Median aspa- and (by
somewhat aberrant and unclear processes) Greek ἵππος/ἴκκος. This word is one
of the most prominent and well-attested of all inherited lexemes in the Indo-
European family, and the idea that sûs represents a borrowing from it in some
fashion is the proposition that I shall discuss here.

3.1.1 Is sûs Really a Loan, and if so, from what Language?

The first question one has to ask oneself is whether or not the Semitic word is
really a plausible candidate for being a foreign loan. This question must be
answered in the affirmative, a fact clearly underscored by the Ugaritic evidence.
It is certainly no coincidence that the Ugaritic form of the words is sometimes
written using the uncommon grapheme s̀, 24 which was probably used to

22See Civil 1966: 121-122.

23For this type of general reference to “Indo-European” without further specifying
qualifications, see, for example, Rainey 1970: 77 and the CAD, vol. S: 328 (s.v. sīsû).
References to more specific suggestions will be found below.
24 The spelling with s is mainly used in prose texts, the one with s in poetic texts. The
̀
transcription ś (which one sometimes comes across for the former) is unfortunate and
 3. Horse and Plow 21

represent an affricate sound [ts] at a time when the ordinary sāmekh (which,
according to modern Semitological consensus, originally represented an
affricate sound) had already been deaffricated. 25 The same phenomenon occurs
in the case of the word ks̀u, which is certainly a loan, ultimately from the
Sumerian gu-za. In both of these cases, it appears that the use of the unusual
grapheme serves to underscore the affricate pronunciation in a period when that
realization of the phoneme s had already mostly been given up in purely native
Ugaritic words.26
The fact that the scribes thought is necessary to use a specific sign to
underscore the affricate pronunciation of the word points quite clearly to the
word being regarded as foreign. This means that—even though it had existed in
the Semitic linguistic ambit for a long time—it may still have been regarded as
somewhat alien to the Ugaritic language at the end of the second millennium
BCE.
Another important point implied by the use of the affricate sign is that—if
the word does, indeed, originate in some form of Indo-European—the Anatolian
language Luwian (or something closely related to it) stands out as a probable
source of the loan. It has many times been suggested that the origin should have
been an Indo-Aryan language (cf. Sanskrit aśva-, nominative aśvas, perhaps
from the Indo-Aryan superstrate language of the Mitanni kingdom), such as was
undoubtedly the case with the hippological terminology of the Hittite texts
associated with the Mitannian horse trainer Kikkuli, which includes non-native
words for various horse-related concepts. 27 But in the Kikkuli material, the

should ideally be avoided, as it invites confusion with the Hebrew śīn, to which the letter
is completely unrelated.
25 On the affricate value of s (originally) and s (later), see Tropper 1995 (specifically
̀
on s̀) and later Tropper 2012: 40-50 (with ample references and examples). The fact that
sāmekh and its equivalents originally represented [ts] must always be kept in mind when
studying early Semitics. For simplicity’s sake, I write simple [ts] for the affricate [ ts].
26 The affricate pronunciation of the letter s is indicated not only by arguments from
̀
comparative Semitics and transcriptions into and from other languages (such as Egyptian
and Hittite), but also by inner-Ugaritic evidence in the form of the substandard writing
ḫds̀, for ḥdt (“month”) in KTU 1.78, line 1, both probably representing something like
phonetical [ḥudsu]/[ḥutsu] (I personally find it more than likely [with Cross 1962: 250,
pace Tropper 2012: 112-113] that the Ugaritic phoneme t had shifted to something like
[s], at least in the later phases of the language; for my specific views on the development
of the Ugaritic sibilants and interdentals, see Wikander 2015c). For the word ḫds̀ being
variant of ḥdt, see Tropper 1995: 521 and 2012: 49.
27 The idea that the Semitic word (in its various versions) derives from Indo-Aryan

aśva(s) was supported, e.g., by O’Connor (1989: 30, n. 30), by Gamkrelidze and Ivanov
(1995: 809), and (with a question mark added) by Watson (1995: 547). One should note
that later, in Watson 2007: 70, the latter opts for the Ugaritic “horse” word being a loan
from Hurrian, via Akkadian, while still stating an Indo-Aryan (“Sanskrit”) origin on p.
146—perhaps “Hurrian” is there meant to be read as a sort of shorthand for “the part of
the Hurrian lexicon that was probably derived from the once-existing Indo-Aryan
superstrate language of the Mitanni kingdom,” which would make the apparent
22 Unburning Fame

morpheme meaning horse is spelled aššu-, with a simple sibilant and not an
affricate (and thus fitting better with Sanskrit aśva-; the Sanskrit ś sound was a
palatal, unaffricated sibilant).28 This (and the difficulty in explaining away the
initial a-, which does not appear in the Semitic words) means that Indo-Aryan is
not very likely as a source for sûs, despite how well that would fit with the well-
known association between Indo-Aryan culture and equestrian prowess. The one
attested Indo-European language in the Ancient Near Eastern region in which
etymological *k̑ can regularly appear as an affricate—and therefore could
reproduce that sound in *(h1)ek̑w(o)- in this way—is Luwian.29 In Luwian, the
word for “horse” seems to have been azzu-; it is written EQUUSá-sù- in the
modern standard transcription of the Hieroglyphic Luwian dialect—but EQUUSá-
zú- would probably be more accurate. 30 The Luwian sound transcribed z was
probably phonetically [ts],31 and would thus provide a perfect fit for the sāmekh,
z or s̀ of the Semitic forms.
The supposition that sûs (etc.) represents a loan-word from Indo-European
has not been without detractors. For example, G.R. Driver was sceptical,
suggesting the possibility that sûs was instead a kind of Lallwort, which could

contradiction disappear. In Watson 2013: 332, a more general idea of an Indo-European

loan is argued, mentioning Hittite and Luwian but not appearing to take a decided
position on the source language (he just says “quite early”). Rabin (1994: 26-27)
discusses the Indo-Aryan possibility but dismisses it in favor of an original Semitic word.
For further references on the idea of an Indo-Aryan etymology, see Stendebach 2000:
180.
28 Kikkuli calls himself aššuššanni, which was probably borrowed into Akkadian as

šušānu, “horse trainer” (cf. CAD, vol Š III: 379 [s.v. šušānu]). On Kikkuli, see Raulwing
2009. An unusual stance is taken by Puhvel (1983: 671), who suggests viewing West
Semitic *sūsu as the source of Mittanni-Indian aššu- rather than the other way around.
29 For the historical implications of this, see Melchert 1987 and (with a somewhat

revised perspective) Melchert 2012. Note that Melchert expressly uses the argument of
the affricates in the Luwian “horse” word to show that this word cannot be borrowed
from Indo-Aryan but must represent an authentic inheritance from Proto-Indo-European
into Luwian (Melchert 2012: 210), in a way similar to how I argue against an Indo-Aryan
background for the Semitic word. The great difficulties in trying to derive Hebrew sûs
from Indo-Aryan are well pointed out by Stendebach (2000: 181). Luwian as a probable
source of the Semitic word was also endorsed by Tropper (1995: 514-515; 2012: 45), but
it should be noted that he did not propose the same analysis of the plural source of the
word that I do below. Also, one should be aware that Tropper’s point is the other way
around from what I am arguing: he presupposes the Luwian origin of the Ugaritic word
and uses the Luwian phonological shape of the word (with the affricate sound) as an
argument for the affricate vale of Ugaritic s̀. However, he has so many other good
examples for this affrication of s̀ that my referring to his arguments here could hardly be
regarded as circular. I do not really understand, however, how Tropper accounts for there
being two affricates in the Ugaritic word (even one at the beginning), when there is only
one affricate segment in Luwian (albeit perhaps a geminate one).
30 Melchert (2012: 210) argues convincingly that Luwian Hieroglyphic sign no. 448

must be read zú, not sù (contra Hawkins 2000: 35-36). See also Younger 2014: 180-181.
31 Melchert 1987: 190.
 3. Horse and Plow 23

be indicated by the “double” forms such as su-su, zi-zi etc. Stendebach seems to
regard this possibility with favor, holding that “sibilants are characteristic of
words describing quick, impetuous movements.” 32 This, however, does not
seem like much of a solution to my mind. At least within the context of Ugaritic,
a Lallwort explanation would not solve very much, as the use of the s̀ grapheme
would fit better with a borrowed word, whatever its ultimate origin. I would
therefore like to argue the case for an Indo-European borrowing a bit further.

3.1.2 Problems in the Form of the Semitic Word—and a Proposed Solution

Regarding the form of the word as it appears in various Semitic languages, one
has to admit that there are problems to solve—most pertinent is the question of
the double sibilant/affricate s-s in the Semitic words. The common assumption
of an Indo-European background for the word is sometimes challenged because
of this. The double s- (originally [ts]-) sound of sûs is often seen as suspect
given an origin in Proto-Indo-European *(h1)ek̑w(o)-, which shows only a single
*k̑ (the proto-phoneme that later developed into a sibilant or similar sound in
many of the attested Indo-European languages and often into an affricate in
Luwian).33 There have been various attempts to circumvent this problem. One
such is proposing an alternative version of the Indo-European lexeme, one
beginning with a sibilant, which would account for the additional sibilant in the
Semitic word. However, postulating such a variant version of the word appears
to me to be much too ad hoc to satisfy the demands of rigorous etymological
scholarship.34

32 The original suggestion is found in Driver 1954: 73, n. 2 (non vidi; reference in

Stendebach 2000: 180, who appears to find the idea attractive). One should note that the
“revised and abridged” version of Driver’s book (Driver 1957: 29, n. 2) no longer
mentions the Lallwort theory but does, however, seem to retain a certain healthy
scepticism towards a derivation from Indo-Aryan aśva(s). Driver’s argument that a
theoretical Indo-Aryan loan must have taken place “at a very remote date before the
tendency to drop the final -s of Skt. words” is, however, not compelling: even in the
Classical Sanskrit of the first millennium BCE the nominative -s is retained in certain
contexts (before voiceless dental stops and—as ś—before voiceless palatal ones).
33 This objection is, for example, raised by Kogan (2006: 270, esp. n. 53), who is

rather sceptical towards the possibility of an Indo-European origin for sûs.

34 One early example of this line of reasoning can be found in Goetze 1962: 35.

Goetze reconstructs a word *sik̑wo-, which, he argues, would also explain the difficult
Attic Greek form ἵππος, the initial aspiration and vocalization of which has never been
adequately explained (the Greek aspiration should most easily go back to an s according
to the normal sound laws). Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1995: 478, n. 21) postulate that the
Semitic words represent a reduplicated version of the Indo-European source word
(thereby explaining the double s of the Semitic lexemes). Alternatively, they suggest
(with a great deal of apprehension) taking Goetze’s idea further by postulating a form
*ŝek̑hwo-, beginning with a special, palatalized version (*ŝ) of the sibilant phoneme. The
latter idea seems very ad hoc to me, as does, in fact, the idea of a spontaneous
reduplication. If sûs is to be interpreted as an Indo-European loan, its phonetic structure
24 Unburning Fame

I believe, however, that the solution may be relatively simple—without

having to resort to ideas of spontaneous reduplication, etc. 35 In order to explain
the double affricates of the Semitic form, the easiest solution to my mind is to
suppose that it was borrowed not from the singular nominative of the Luwian
word, but from the plural. 36 The plural nominative of Luwian azzu- is not yet
clearly textually attested, but according to the morphological rules of the
language, it would have been *azzunzi (or less probably, in decending order of
likelihood, *azzuwanzi or *azzuinzi, in the latter, and most improbable, case
with the Luwian phenomenon of “i-mutation”).37

must be explainable in terms of the Indo-European word itself, which is what I will
attempt to do here.
35 Such as was done by Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1995: 478, n. 21).
36 One could also imagine a solution in which the second s-sound came from the s-

ending of the Luwian nominative singular, which would probably have been something
like *azzus. However, this would fail to explain why the Semitic forms have the original
affricate [ts] in both places and would also provide no hint as to why the a- is missing.
Neither would the “reduplicated-looking” forms of words such as ZI.ZI be easily
explainable on such a basis.
37 There is a spelling ANIMALEQUUS-zi/a (in TOPADA §21), which could represent

the nom. plur., but it does not show the stem of the word (cf. Kloekhorst 2008: 238 [s.v.
*ekku-]), and thus cannot help us (Kloekhorst reconstructs /ʔasuntsi/; cf. my n. 30 on the
s or z/ts question). “I-mutation” is a phenomenon of Luwian grammar in which the vowel
i is inserted between the stem and the ending of animate nouns in the nominative and
accusative singular and plural—but nowhere else. It affects many words, but was not
normally a feature of Luwian u-stem words (as azzu- probably was); see Melchert 1993:
iii and 2009: 114, n. 3. A third possibility mentioned above for the plural nominative of
“horse” in Luwian is *azzuwanzi, a thematic (cf. n. 42) form (which could be argued
based on attested Cuneiform Luwian azzuwanza, prob. dative/ablative plural). However,
as Kloekhorst has argued (2008: 237-239, [s.v. *ekku-]), most of the Anatolian evidence
points not to a thematic noun but to a u-stem. The possible evidence from Lycian (esbedi
and esbehi) can be interpreted in both ways, though, and the lack of Lycian “Umlaut” in
other comparable forms (like ladi, dat. of “wife”) could point to there having been a
proto-Anatolian thematic stem, as a u-stem would yield a Lycian a-stem with a form like
**asbadi (Craig Melchert [pc., email August 17, 2014]). The synchronic Luwian u-stem
seems clear, though. Also, the strange initial ι of the Greek form ἵππος/ἴκκος may
possibly also point towards an u-stem in a roundabout way. This, however, depends upon
an interpretation of Indo-European phonetic developments with which one may or may
not agree. de Vaan (2009: 200-202) and (following him) Kloekhorst (2014 [2016]: 56-
57) argue that the common, thematic versions of the “horse” word (with initial *h1e- and
a thematic nominative in *-os at the end), as represented in Sanskrit, Latin, etc., are
reformations of an original genitive of an athematic u-stem noun, a form which would
have been *h1k̑uós. According to them, the initial ι of the Greek form would be a remnant
of the original form that began with the cluster *h1k̑u, the idea being that such clusters in
Greek inserted an extra ι vowel to break up the cluster (the model word for this putative
sound-law is the imperative ἴσθι, “be!”, from a reconstructed form *h1s-dhi). Craig
Melchert informs me (pc., as above) that he is still of the opinion that the “horse” word
was originally thematic in Indo-European, but that the attested Luwian and Hittite forms
show syncope of the thematic vowel and thus have been secondarily transformed into u-
 3. Horse and Plow 25

If one presupposes that the source of the lexical borrowing was the plural
*azzunzi (or possibly*azzuwanzi), we suddenly have an explanation not only of
the double affricate of ssw/sûs/sīsû/ZI.ZI, but also if the varying vocalism of the
words. The vacillation between i- and u-vowels in the different languages
becomes eminently understandable: both were actually present in the original
Luwian word (first the -u- of azzu- and then the –i of the ending –nzi). A plural
origin also provides a possible hint for explaining the lack of the initial vowel a-
in the Semitic words. If the original recipients of the borrowed word heard a
Luwian speaker refer to a number of horses as *azzunzi or *azzuwanzi—
probably without very good knowledge of the Luwian language as such—the
two syllables starting with affricates would probably have stood out and would
have appeared to be the center of the word. The central part registered would
have been something like [tsuntsi] or [tswantsi], and given the apparent (but not
etymologically accurate) reduplication of [ts], the n could easily have been
regarded as redundant (or might not even have been registered as a distinct
sound at all), as could very well have been the case with the a- as well (also,
Luwian sometimes shows aphaeresis of initial a-sounds, at least in the later
period).38 The disappearance of the problematic -n- may actually have been an
inner-Luwian development, as well: in historically attested Luwian, n has a
tendency to disappear (possibly with nasalization of the preceding vowel) before
affricates; the phenomenon is actually attested in the case of the nominative
plural ending -(vowel)nzi, which sometimes appears as -(vowel)zi in Cuneiform
Luwian, thus providing a perfect fit for the present case of (a)zzu(n)zi.39
The “borrower” would then have been left with something like [tsutsi]
(most probable option) or possibly [tswatsi]. It is not hard to imagine how such
a sequence of sounds could indeed have been secondarily interpreted as a sort of
Lallwort or reduplicated root syllable, later regularized as ZI.ZI, sīsû, sûs, etc.40
The underlying loan-form [tsutsi]/(later) [susi] (from *azzunzi) may possibly be

stems. He is also rather skeptical towards the Lycian evidence, in which the meaning
“horse” is not actually assured for the relevant words. Melchert regards *azzunzi
(/atsuntsi/) as the likeliest form for the Luwian nom. plur. of the word, followed by
*azzuwanzi (/atswantsi/), the “mutated” *azzuinzi (/atswintsi/) being improbable.
38 Note that there is an 18th Dynasty Egyptian word smsm meaning “horse,” which

was probably borrowed from Semitic (see Rabin 1994: 27). The nasals in that word could
possibly represent a remnant of a stage at which the nasal was present in Semitic as well.
On aphaeresis of sounds spelt with intial a- in later Luwian, see Yakubovich 2015: 7, 23.
39 For the disappearance of Luwian n before affricate, see Yakubovich 2015: 10.
40 As an example of the process of a previously existing word with an established

etymology being secondarily “Lallwort”-ized, one could mention the Swedish expression
lyckost (literally “cheese of luck,” used as an appellation of an uncommonly fortunate
person), which in the years of my own youth in southern Sweden had degenerated in
children’s speech into lyllo, completely obscuring the etymological origin of the word
and also looking like a classic, reduplicated nursery word, yet not being one originally.
Reinterpreting a borrowed word as something reminiscent of a pattern fitting one’s own
language is similar to phono-semantic matching, an analytical concept developed by
Ghilʿad Zuckermann, that will be taken up in greater detail in chapters 7, 8, and 9.
26 Unburning Fame

seen quite clearly in the Aramaic form swsyh/swsyʾ, which appears to attest the
u/i vocalization appearing in the Luwian plural form.

One still has to explain the specifically Ugaritic form, ssw, with its strange w at
the end. 41 If one supposed that the Semitic word were borrowed either from
Indo-Aryan aśva- (nom. sing. aśvas) or from the similar-sounding, putative
Luwian thematic 42 form *azzuwa- (theoretical nom. sing. *azzuwa/is?) one
would have a plausible reason for the w in the labial glides inherent in these two
words. However, as seen earlier, a derivation from Indo-Aryan aśva- is unlikely
on other grounds, and it is rather uncertain whether a Luwian word *azzuwa-
even existed (cf. footnote 37). And if one supposed the w/v of one of these
words to be the source of the w of the Ugaritic word, one would still have
trouble explaining why the Ugaritic w occurs after the sibilants and not between
them.
Two more plausible explanations suggest themselves: (a) that the u-sound
or w-diphthong of the first syllable of [tsutsi]/[tswatsi] was transplanted to the
second one, as the word was increasingly seen as being made up of one,
reduplicated syllable beginning with [ts], or (b) that the w of Ugaritic ssw
represents an attempt to reproduce Akkadian sīsāʾu(m), thus implying that
Akkadian would be the immediate source of the loan in Ugaritic. Of these two
possibilities, I would find the former more likely. If one presupposes an initial,
borrowed form with a diphthong in the first syllable (e.g. [ts(u)watsi] from
*azzuwanzi), one could well imagine a process leading to the attested Ugaritic
form based on adding the nominative singular or plural endings (-u and -ūma,
respectively) to this word: [ts(u)watsi-u] would create a type of “reverse echo”
in the vowels—[tsu(w)a-tsi-u]— which could very easily have been
reinterpreted in the quasi-reduplicated Lallwort-eque manner mentioned above,
leading to the insertion of a w in the second part as well: [tsuw(a)-tsiw-u]. This
could have happened even easier with the less likely Luwian form *azzuinzi: the
“echo” would then be perfect: [tsuwi-tsiwu]. And if the borrowed form was
*azzunzi, one could still imagine a [tsu-tsi-u] being reinterpreted as a quasi-
reduplicated [tsuw-tsiw-u], and we would still arrive at the attested ssw, by way
of a simplification to [tsutsiwu] (and similar in the other possible cases).

3.1.3 Some conclusions

If we now regard it as established that early Luwian was the probable source of
sûs/sīsû(m)/ssw, what does this tell us of the relationship between early
Anatolian Indo-European and the world of the Hebrew Bible?

41There is also a similarly structured Targumic Aramaic plural swswn, in addition to

the more common word swsyʾ discussed earlier. In Imperial Aramaic, the word is ssh.
42 In Indo-European linguistics, a “thematic” form is one that inserts a connective

vowel between the stem and the ending (in nouns, we are talking here of stems in *-o,
such as the many Greek words in –ος, Latin ones in –us, etc.). In Luwian (as well as in
Hittite and, for that matter, Sanskrit), the thematic vowel in such nouns appears as -a-.
 3. Horse and Plow 27

First of all, it is surely no coincidence that a word meaning “horse” found

its way between the two linguistic families. The horse does, after all, appear to
have been the animal that was most characteristic of early Indo-European
culture as a whole—and a very important cultural marker probably involved in
the spread of the Indo-European language phylum as such.43 It has often been
taken for more or less granted that this focus on the horse as an Indo-European
“cultural emblem” was specifically tied to Indo-Aryan or Vedic culture,
represented in the Ancient Near East by the Indo-Aryan linguistic component in
the Mitanni kingdom and exemplified by the Kikkuli texts, which do indeed
attest to an Indo-Aryan hippological vocabulary. However, as I hope to have
demonstrated, a Luwian origin (and specifically an origin in the Luwian plural
form of the word) is much more probable for sûs, etc., which means that this
concentration upon Indo-Aryans/Mitannians has to be abandoned, or at least
qualified. The horse was clearly associated with speakers of Indo-European, but
in this case with Anatolians and not with Indo-Aryans. This is historically
probable, as the presence of Indo-Europeans in Anatolia was probably quite
early. 44 The importance of the horse as sign of power in Luwian-speaking
society is attested in the inscriptions from Karatepe (c. 8th century BCE), in
which the ruler Azatiwada boasts:

EQUUS.ANIMAL-zú-(n)ha-wa-ta (EQUUS.ANIMAL)à-zú-wi SUPER-ra/i-ta i-zi-i-

ha45

“Horse I added to horse [lit. “horse I made upon horse] …”

The horse was apparently an important piece of Indo-European cultural identity,

but not only (or primarily) in the form of Indo-Aryan charioteers. Indeed, it is
worth keeping in mind that the Indo-Aryan superstrate language of Mittanni was
probably a rather obsolescent entity in the historical period—the main
Mitannian language was Hurrian, not Indic. The Anatolian languages, however,
were present in one form or another for most of the second and first millennia
BCE and therefore provide an excellent explanation for Hebrew sûs. The
prominent appearance of a Luwian word for the horse in the world of the Old
Testament is indicative of the central cultural role played by the animal in
cultural interaction, and identifying the ultimate source of sûs may become a
link in a chain binding the Old Testament to its linguistic and cultural context.

43 This is a very common stance; see, e.g., Beekes 2011: 37, 52. A modern exposition

of the horse as a central feature in the spread of Indo-European is Anthony 2007.

44
This modern consensus in underscored in Melchert 2003: 23-26 (with references).
45 Somewhat idealized transcription, based partly on the edition in Werner 1991: 66,

because of its clear and simplified reading of the signs, and partly on the purer edition in
Hawkins 2000: 49 (KARATEPE 1: §VIII). I have replaced the sù signs with zú (see
above, n. 30). An almost identical expression occurs in the ÇINEKÖY inscription of the
8th century BCE ruler Warika (known in Assyrian as Urikku), §4 (transcription and
translation in Beckman, Bryce and Cline 2011: 264-266 [text 28 in that volume]).
28 Unburning Fame

3.2 “Case Study” 2: Hebrew ḥāraš, “to Plow”, and Its Cognates
For a long time, there has been a scholarly awareness that there appears to be
some kind of relation between the Semitic word meaning “to plow”, appearing
in Hebrew as ḥāraš and in Ugaritic as ḥrt, 46 and the Hittite verb ḫarš- or
ḫaršiya-, which also means “to plow” or “to till the soil.” That both Indo-
European and Semitic should have so similar-sounding verbs expressing the
same technological advance purely by chance seems somehow too good to be
true.
Already in 1954, Jaan Puhvel published a rather thorough discussion of the
“plow” word, which he concluded was not a loan from Indo-European into
Semitic (as appears to have been the case with the “horse” word), but rather the
other way around.47 Puvhel’s view has been taken up after him on a number of
occasions and can be found referred to in many places, although other opinions
certainly exist.48
During the first half of the twentieth century, the suggestion was, however,
often made that the Hittite verb was not a Semitic import, but rather an
Anatolian reflex of the original Indo-European root for “plowing”, the root
underlying Latin arō, Greek ἀρόω, Gothic arjan, Old Irish airim, Tocharian āre
(”a plow”), etc., the modern Proto-Indo-European reconstruction of which is
*h2erh3-.49 This root is also the background of the nominal derivation *h2erh3-
tro-m (“a primitive plow”), reflected in Latin arātrum, Greek ἄροτρον, Old Irish
arathar, English ard and Swedish årder.
Puhvel’s suggestion of a Semitic loan underlying Hittite ḫarš- was to a
large extent meant as a counter-proposition against the idea of an inheritance
from this Indo-European root. His point was partly that the phonological
structure of the Hittite word was hard to explain given the proposed Indo-
European etymology. These two proposed explanations of Hittite ḫarš-/ḫaršiya-
have therefore been viewed as mutually exclusive.
One of Puhvel’s main arguments against Hittite ḫarš- being a genuine
Indo-European word but rather a Semitic import is the fact that both it and the
verb ḫarr(a)- (meaning something like “to pulverize” or “to crush”) tend to
occur regularly together with what appears to be a synonym thereof—he
mentions the combination ḫaršzi terippzi (possibly meaning something like
“plows and turns”, “plows and tills” or similar). Puhvel’s explanation of this
phenomenon is the idea that one word in the collocation would represent a
genuine, Hittite word while the other one would be a newly imported,
technological loanword from Semitic, a process for which he adduces the

46
Also attested as Arabic ḥarata, Old Ethiopic ḥarasa and Akkadian erēšu.
47Puhvel 1954. He maintained his position in Puhvel 1964: 183-184.
48 The view that ḫarš-/ḫaršiya- is a loan from Semitic is reflected in Olsen 2006: 237,

n. 4, Weeks 1985: 104 and, not surprisingly, in Puhvel’s own Hittite etymological
dictionary (HED, vol. 3: 184-185 [s.v. har(a)s-, harsiya-]), which cites a number of
(different!) Semitic roots as possible sources.
49 On the root and its reconstruction, see (for example) Beekes 2011: 36.
 3. Horse and Plow 29

Homeric expression ἐξ ἀπίης γαίης (“from a faraway land”, with the non-Greek
word ἀπίη being paralleled by its genuine, Greek counterpart γαίη) as a
typological analogue. This latter comparison is unconvincing in two respects:
firstly, because the non-Greek provenance of ἀπίη is by no means certain (it can
also be taken as an adjectival formation based on the preposition ἄπό, an
explanation preferred by the etymological dictionaries of Chantraine, Frisk, and
Beekes) and, secondly, because such a parallel (even if correct in terms of its
own philology) appears to be rather far-fetched. 50 Yes, the Homeric example
would show that such a solidified combination of a native and an imported word
could appear in this way, but in no way would it prove that this is what
happened in the case of the Hittite expression.
The view that the Hittite word is an actual Indo-European inheritance from
*h2erh3- is, however, represented in modern literature as well. One highly
interesting example of this is Alwin Kloekhorst’s analysis in his Etymological
Dictionary of the Hittite Inherited Lexicon. He there makes the point that the
Anatolian verb ḫarš- should actually be regarded as a relative of the verb
ḫarr(a)-, “to crush” (in the sense of “to crush the land”), and that the specified
meaning “to plow” found in the rest of the Indo-European family (outside of
Anatolian) must be regarded as secondary (though in the process of appearing in
Hittite as well).51 Regarding the form of the Hittite word, Kloekhorst posits an
expansion of the original root with *-š.52
The existence of this apparent relationship between ḫarš- and ḫarr(a)- to
my mind makes it less than necessary to assume a Semitic loan into Indo-
European. Also, Puhvel’s original suggestion looked not only to ḥāraš (etc.), but
also to a number of other “sound-alike” Semitic roots.53 This, to me, looks like
casting the net a little too wide methodologically.
One possibility to explain the similar-sounding roots in Semitic and Indo-
European could be to posit a loan in the opposite direction: from Indo-European
to Semitic. This would make the relationship between Hittite ḫarš- and ḫarr(a)-
easy to explain (as they both would represent the same original Proto-Indo-

50 Puhvel 1954: 86-87; the collocation is also discussed in Weeks 1985: 104. The
data in the Greek etymological lexica can be found in Frisk 1960: 122 (s.v. ἄπό, with
some doubt as to the derivation), Chantraine 1968: 98 (s.v. ἄπό), and Beekes 2010: 116
(s.v. ἄπιος).
51 Kloekhorst 2008: 313-314 (s.v. ḫārš-).
52 Another possibility in deriving Hittite ḫarš- from Indo-European *h erh - would
2 3
be regarding the -š as a remnant of *h3—a proposed sound-development that one
sometimes comes across in the literature (see, for example, Olsen 2006, with references).
However, this supposed sound-law is not generally accepted, and even if it is in fact true
in some fashion, one still has to explain why ḫarš- has an -š and ḫarr(a)- does not.
Kloekhorst’s š-suffix seems to make more sense here. In a recent presentation by Cohen
& Hyllested (2006), it is argued that Proto-Indo-European *h3 did sometimes yield
Anatolian s (the sound written š in Hittite), but only in the vicinity of labiovelars, which
would make the sound-development irrelevant to the present case.
53 Puhvel 1954: 87.
30 Unburning Fame

European root). However, there is a clear problem with such an approach, and
this is the fact that the Semitic word ḥrt/ḥāraš itself has been suggested to go
back to an earlier, biliteral root without the final t/š—a root that appears in a
wider Afro-Asiatic context and not only in Semitic. This is an uncertain—but
interesting—suggestion. Such a root would have an approximate meaning “to
scratch” or “to scrape [off].”54 A basic meaning “to cut” has been suggested for
the Hebrew root itself.55
These facts point to an interesting correlation: both in Indo-European and
Afro-Asiatic (including Semitic), there may have been an original root having to
do with a more general form of “mechanical manipulation” (such as crushing,
pulverizing, cutting, or scratching), which later was expanded by an -s, -t or
similar sound and thus acquired the meaning “to plow.” This suggests the
possibility of a very early loan (in one direction or other), in which the root-
expansions continued playing a role in the borrowing process—that is, a
situation in which the Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic roots have continued to
influence one another over time, possibly in connection with the development of
agricultural technology. This is, of course, a highly tentative line of reasoning,
but one which invites further research. If it could be argued that these roots of
both linguistic families developed in some kind of “tandem” with one another, it
would create a fascinating illustration of the interaction of Semitic/Afro-Asiatic
and Indo-European in the world of the Old Testament, and create new layers of
understanding for the word ḥāraš in the Hebrew text. It would, then, not be a
simple case of borrowing in either direction but of a possibly reciprocal
Wanderwort illustrating the complexities inherent in trying to map the cultural-
linguistic background that ultimately is reflected in the Old Testament. This
would not be the only case in which a term from agricultural technology
wanders between the linguistic families: one thinks, for example, of the word
for “wine,” which appears in a Semitic form as Hebrew yayin, Ugaritic yn (with
initial y- from *w-, as normally in Northwest Semitic), and Arabic wayn-, but
also in various forms in Indo-European, such as Hittite wiyana-, Greek οἴνος
(from ϝοίνος, which appears as a dialect form), and various others (such as Latin
vīnum). A version of the word also appears in Georgian (neither Indo-European
nor Semitic).56 It is quite difficult indeed to pinpoint the origin of this complex
of words, which apparently wandered far and wide, and such may also be the
case with the “plow” word.
Thus, both “horse” and “plow” may turn out to be interesting focal points
in the larger context of Indo-European/Afro-Asiatic interaction in the world of
the Hebrew Bible, showing different types of lexical interaction: one at a very

54
Ehret 1995: 375 (no. 757); such a basic root was also suggested in Bomhard and
Kerns 1994: 543, in the context of the speculative “Nostratic” macro-family that
allegedly includes both Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic (as well as many other families).
Bomhard and Kerns also saw this Afro-Asiatic root as being related to Hittie ḫarš- (etc.),
but in this “Nostratic” context and not as a loanword in either direction.
55 See, for example, Loewenstamm 1959.
56 On some of the “wine” words, see, e.g., Beekes 2011: 36.
 3. Horse and Plow 31

early level, with words apparently developing in tandem and perhaps being
borrowed back and forth across linguistic boundaries, and one in which the
trajectories are at least somewhat easier to fathom and show a more direct
influence from Indo-European culture upon the Old Testament world.
 4. Biblical Chaos Dragons—
and Indo-European Ones
Now we move into the main part of the present “polyphonic monograph”: that
involving the study of borrowed poetic motifs, carried through lexical material.
In the previous chapter, we made some initial remarks on possible technological
interaction at the lexical level, as a sort of preamble. But—and this is in fact the
main point of this book—cultural contacts between the Indo-European and Old
Testament worlds are not only possible in terms of specific words or concepts,
technological or otherwise. If one is to take a more thorough investigative view
of how Indo-European cultures influenced the world of the Hebrew Bible, one
must look not only at words but greater units of cultural interaction and
transmission. It is time now to tackle what is probably the most salient piece of
“etymological poetics” in both Indo-European and Northwest Semitic: that of
the battle against the dragon or serpent.
As this type of investigation will indicate, larger pieces of ideology, motifs
or mythemes could also be regarded as having been borrowed between the two
cultural spheres (as opposed to simply borrowing specific words), which would
of course open up possibilities of highly interesting cultural interactions being
unearthed—and of the biblical texts being given yet another layer of
interpretation. Indeed, it is here that “etymological poetics” will really come into
its own as an investigative and interpretive methodology. Mythological patterns
are, however, notoriously fickle items to work with, and (as mentioned in the
Introduction) methodological restraint and rigor must be exercised when this
type of comparison is undertaken. One must always ask oneself what is really
compared with what, and I believe, try solidly to ground one’s comparison in
preferably quite concrete parallels, rather than merely to look at rather vague
similarities.
I would like to reiterate some of the points I made in the Introduction and
argued earlier in an article on certain parallels between the Hurrian/Hittite Epic
of Liberation and Deut 32:15—a quite specific instance of cultural transmission
between (partly) Indo-European-speaking Anatolia and the Hebrew Bible. I
there highlighted the necessity of separating general survivals of motifs from the
type of more literal correspondences that are the focus of most of the present
volume, and pointed to the fact that inherited motifs and poetic expressions can
be radically reinterpreted through history and put into radically new contexts by
later writers (or, for that matter) redactors. 57
The sort of “literal correspondences” mentioned forms the very basis of
“etymological poetics,” and in this chapter, I shall attempt to show its
implications in a way that clearly illustrates how ancient words could be used to
carry motifs on their shoulders, even across linguistic boundaries. It is time to
talk of dragons, and those who slay them.

57 Wikander 2013a: 144.

32
 4. Chaos Dragons 33

4.1 The Chaos Battle as an Indo-European/Biblical Motif

in Earlier Scholarship; Problems with Dumézilianism
One of the instances that have often been suggested as a possible link between
Indo-European and biblical traditions and thought constructs is that of the battle
against the dragon or sea monster, that is, a special instance of the Chaoskampf
motif. Suggestions in this direction have been put forth by Nicolas Wyatt and by
Ajoy Kumar Lahiri,58 who have argued that Semitic tales concerning the divine
battle against aquatic monsters may be somehow connected to Indo-European,
or specifically Indo-Aryan, traditions of a similar nature. A more recent
contribution to this line of historical comparison was published in 2014 by
Robert D. Miller, who attempts to trace the dragon mythology across a large
part of the Ancient Near East (including looking at the cross-sections with Indo-
European materials). 59 Some kind of connection between the Near Eastern,
Semitic speaking tales of serpent slaying and the Greek tale of Zeus and Typhon
is suggested by Carolina López-Ruiz (but in the context of understanding Greek
mythological literature as opposed to studying Near Eastern texts in their own
right).60 A recent contribution on the background of the chaos battle myths in
the Hebrew Bible and the Semitic-speaking Ancient Near East (including
comparisons with some Indo-European texts) is the 2016 doctoral dissertation
by Joanna Töyräänvuori.61 These are only some examples. To be sure, the idea
of a divine hero battling a serpentine monster is thoroughly ensconced both in
the greater Old Testament world and in many ancient Indo-European cultures.62
It is my purpose to discuss such possible links and evaluate them, and hopefully
to add some ideas of my own.
Wyatt’s general arguments concerning possible Indo-European influences
on Northwest Semitic thought are heavily slanted towards the Dumézilian
trifunctional approach, which he believes to be in evidence for example in the
Ugaritic mythological texts—and, indeed, in the Hebrew Bible—indicating
Indo-European influence. Wyatt believed that evidence of Indo-European-
influenced tripartite thinking could be found both in parts of the Ugaritic Baal
Cycle and in the story of King David’s census. 63 This “tripartite” thinking refers

58 Lahiri 1984: 110-128; Wyatt 1987, 1988—the former applying a cosmological

perspective on the Ugaritic and Vedic text..

59 Miller 2014. Other contributions by the same author on various aspects of the

dragon mythology are Miller 2013 and 2016. I have been informed that, in early 2017,
Miller will be publishing a forthcoming book on the biblical dragon mythology, entitled
The Dragon, the Mountain, and the Nations: An Old Testament Myth, its Origins and its
Afterlives, further laying out his views on the subject. Due to the date of finishing the
present volume for press (Jan/Feb 2017), I have not been able to consult that work.
60 López Ruiz 2014: 179.
61 Due to the recent appearance of this dissertation (defended August 2016), I have

only been able to make limited reference to it.

62 A handy overview of various dragon/serpent-slaying myths in ancient and

Christian sources can be found in Ogden 2013.

63 Wyatt 1985; Wyatt 1990.
34 Unburning Fame

to the famous putative division of ancient Indo-European social organization

and thought into three functions: the priestly, the warlike and the productive.
A somewhat similar line of reasoning can be found in the volume The
Hebrew God: Portait of an Ancient Deity (2002) by Bernhard Lang, which also
uses the theories of Dumézil as tools with which to analyze Northwest Semitic
theological and mythological material, in this case the character of the Israelite
God himself. There is, however, a crucial difference between the latter study
and those of Wyatt, namely that Lang only uses this theoretical framework as a
heuristic implement and does not imply the necessity of an actual historical
influence from any type of “Indo-European ideology,” thus effectively
transforming the tripartite scheme of Dumézil from a template for Indo-
European religion into an analytical classification applicable to many different
mythologies, regardless of linguistic or cultural provenance. Bernhard Lang
writes:

Borrowing could have taken place in both directions, and elements of ideological
tripartism may have found their way from the Indo-Europeans to the Semites.
There could have been a much simpler explanation, however, for the tripartite
structure may be considered as somehow universal, reflecting an elementary mode
of organization. Dumézil described the three functions with great virtuosity, but,
placing the emphasis on specific cultural traditions, he neglected their archetypal
and universal character.64

The fact that such an application of the Dumézilian theory appears to work
rather well regardless of its in no way implying an Indo-European influence on
the Hebrew Bible would actually militate against finding this kind of influence
using such a method.65
In this study, I will not venture into the area of trifunctional analysis; the
theories of Dumézil are, after all, subject to serious doubts even within the field
of Indo-European studies itself, and this fact makes it rather precarious to try to
find borrowed traces of such a scheme in biblical or Northwest Semitic
material.66

4.2 Storm Gods and Serpents: Some Parallel Texts

The mythology of the battle against the dragon or serpent monster is, however, a
much more concrete textual concept, which is demonstrably present in the Old

64
Lang 2002: 4.
This point (that the possibility of finding pieces of “trifunctional ideology” in the
65

Hebrew Bible weakens the case for such an ideology being specifically Indo-European)
was in fact made more than 40 years earlier by John Brough (1959: see especially the
concluding remarks on pp. 84-85). Wyatt (1990: 352-353) sees this as just another
impetus for regarding trifunctional ideology as having been transmitted from the Indo-
Europeans into the Bible.
66 See, for example, Belier 1991 and Beekes 2011: 41 for scathing criticisms of

Dumézil’s trifunctional hypothesis.

 4. Chaos Dragons 35

Testament material and the larger Northwest Semitic cultural sphere (Ugarit,
Mari)—and in East Semitic materials as well (Enūma Eliš). And this type of
story is also very prominent in many ancient Indo-European cultures and text
complexes (the Vedic story of Indra and Vṛtra, the Hittite one of the Storm God
Tarḫunna- and the Serpent, Illuyanka-, the Greek tales of Typhon, Ophion, and
many others). This motif occurs in much of the Indo-European world, and it has
been argued by Watkins, West and others that these stories constitute remnants
of an ancient Proto-Indo-European myth, 67 perhaps the most central of all
inherited Indo-European myths, actually. This means that a historical
comparison between the biblical/Semitic versions of the story and the parallel
Indo-European ones can be carried out with greater methodological stringency
and rigor. The focus is no longer simply on “shared ideological characteristics”
(such as when discussing alleged trifunctional mythologies) but on actual,
comparable pieces of texts from the cultures involved.
Of all those mythological items in the Hebrew Bible which have been
successfully and productively compared with similar ones in the neighboring
Near Eastern World, the motif of the battling thunder god destroying the forces
of chaos has long been perhaps the most classic. The descriptions of YHWH’s
battle with the dragon-shaped monster (Leviathan, Rahab etc.) lend themselves
excellently to comparison with parallel stories about Baal at Ugarit, Marduk in
the Mesopotamian Enūma Eliš, and also with the myth of the Hittite Storm God
and his conflict with the “Serpent.” It has for a long time been apparent that
what we are dealing with here is a common Ancient Near Eastern mythological
concept, one concerning the main divine protagonist of the stories creating order
out of the chaos which the serpent or monster personifies. The concept of a
powerful male thunder deity battling and destroying a serpentine monster is
ubiquitous in the Ancient Near Eastern world.
But such a statement shows us only one part of the situation. The fact that a
mytheme or theologoumenon is spread over a whole complex of closely-knit but
fundamentally differing cultures also implies another thing: that this common
motif might be expressed and handled in quite different ways in its various
instances, and that those differences might tell us something important about the
religious and ideological histories of the cultures in question, or at least about
the theological outlooks of the individual authors of the texts involved. Thus one
might argue that, the similarities having been very thoroughly studied for many
years, it is equally important to look at the differences between the accounts in
greater detail.
What concerns us here is, as seen above, that similar concepts occur further
outside the classical Semitic world. The most salient example of this is the story
of the Vedic god Indra and his battle against the serpent Vṛtra. It is a fact that
this story shows many parallels with the classical Northwest Semitic battle
myths: a young storm god fights (and destroys) a monstrous serpent, a
representative of the chaotic powers, using weapons that he has been given by

67 Watkins 1995; West 2007: 255-259, 430, etc. Cf. the recent Slade 2008 [2010].
36 Unburning Fame

other members of his pantheon. This battle appears to be connected with the
fertility-giving functions of the storm deity and with his imposing order on the
universe. It is not surprising that such a comparison has been made.
In his volume dedicated to the battle between the Vedic Indra and his
opponent, Lahiri draws wide parallels between that story and similar “cosmic
contest” motifs preserved in a Semitic-speaking linguistic context. Somewhat
surprisingly, however, he does not focus on the Northwest Semitic versions of
this motif but on the Babylonian Enūma Eliš. Lahiri enumerates sixteen
common points between the two stories, some more weighty than others. 68 In a
number of cases, the parallels are rather tenuous. For example, Lahiri notes that
both Tiāmat and Vṛtra are “very intimately associated with the water” and that
the “action of both Vṛtra and Tiamat leads to the extinction of vegetal life, as it
were.”69 Neither of these connections really holds up to closer scrutiny. To be
sure, Tiāmat is an aquatic monster (her name even means “Deep” and is
probably connected etymologically with the Hebrew tĕhôm of Gen 1:2) and
Vṛtra does indeed have to do with waters, but in quite a different sense. In fact,
the Vedic serpent is the one that holds back the waters, which have to be
liberated by the divine hero Indra, of whom the Ṛg-Veda says:

Yo hatvāhim ariṇāt sapta sindhūn

… he who after slaying the serpent released the seven rivers …

(ṚV II 12:3)

A similar reference can be found in what is perhaps the most famous Vedic
verse about Indra’s battle with the Serpent: 70

Indrasya nu vīriyāṇi pra vocam

yāni cakāra prathamāni vajrī
ahann ahim anu apas tatarda
pra vakṣanā abhinat parvatānām

Indra’s valorous deeds I shall now proclaim,

the first ones that he, the Vajra [lightning-bolt]-bearer, carried out.
He slew the Serpent and broke forth the waters,
he split the innards of the mountains!
(ṚV I 32:1)

68Lahiri 1984: 117-124.

69Lahiri 1984: 117-118.
70 The serpent-battling adventures of Indra are most fully expounded in this hymn of

the ṚV (I 32), but they also appear or are mentioned in hymns I 52, 1.80, II 11, II 12, III
32, IV 18, V 32, VI 17, VI 29, VIII 96, and X 113 (the list is not exhaustive). Cf. the
overview in Ogden 2013: 259.
 4. Chaos Dragons 37

Note here the alitterative phrase ahann ahim (“he slew the Serpent”), the first
part of which is derived from the verb han- (“to slay, strike”). We shall return to
this phrase later on. The verse also clearly refers to Indra letting the water loose,
rather than defeating it.
Nor can it be truthfully argued that Tiāmat is instrumental in destroying
vegetation; there is no direct reference to anything of the sort in the Babylonian
text. Lahiri himself seems to acknowledge this when he says:

Although this is not directly stated in the Enuma Eliš, we believe it was so.
Because, as we have pointed out before, it was the yearly flood of the two rivers
that led to the inundation of the valley region as also to the extinction, as it were, of
the vegetal life of the world.71

One should note that Lahiri’s interpretation of the parallels between the Enūma
Eliš and the Vedic narrative does not make him imply an Indo-European
influence on the Babylonian myth. Rather, he supposes the opposite possibility,
that the Indian story was influenced by Babylonian thought. 72
The more obvious parallel to the figure of Indra and his battle with Vṛtra is
to be found in the Northwest Semitic ambit, which of course includes the
Hebrew Bible. Not only the motif of the battle against a chaos dragon or sea
monster but the very conception of the heroic deity himself offers obvious
parallels. The classical representation of the Northwest Semitic storm deity has
much in common with the imagery that is applied to Indra. The most famous
exponent of the Northwest Semitic storm god “persona” is that of the Ugaritic
Baal, of whom the texts say the following:

qlh . q[dš .] trr . arṣ His holy voice shakes the earth,
ṣat . [šp]th . ġrm [.] aḫšn the issue of his lips makes the mountains fear.
( ... )
bmt . ar[ṣ] tṭṭn . The heights of the earth quake.
ib . bʿl . tiḫd yʿrm . The enemies of Baal take to the forests,
šnu . hd . gpt ġr . the haters of Haddu to the slopes of the hills.
( ... )
ydh k tġḏ . His hand shakes,
arz . b ymnh the cedar in his right hand.
(KTU 1.4 VII 31-41)

This storm god theophany is replete with thunder and lightning-based imagery:
note especially the references to Baal’s “voice” (his thunder) directly impacting
topographic details of nature and to his “cedar weapon,” apparently meant as a
reference to a lightning-bolt, which he wields against with his right hand.

71 Lahiri 1984: 188, n. 312.

72 Lahiri 1984: 127-128.
38 Unburning Fame

Compare this with the following description of Indra from the Ṛg-Veda:

Dyāvā cid asmai pṛthivī namete Even heaven and earth bow
down to him,
śuṣmāc cid asya parvatā bhayante from his might even the
mountains fear,
yaḥ somapā nicito vajrabāhur he who is called soma-drinker, he
with the lightning-bolt at his arm,
yo vajrahastaḥ sa janāsa indraḥ he with the lightning-bolt in his
hand—he, O men, is Indra!
(ṚV II 12:13)

And, returning to the area of the Hebrew Bible, both of these textual passages
resonate well with what we find in the famous “storm god hymn” that is Psalm
29:73

Qôl YHWH ʿal hammāyim

ʾēl hakkābôd hirʿîm
YHWH ʿal-mayim rabbîm
qôl-YHWH bakkōaḥ
qôl YHWH behādār
qôl YHWH šōbēr ʾărāzîm
wayšabbēr YHWH ʾet-ʾarzê hallĕbānôn
wayyarqîdēm kĕmô-ʿēgel
lĕbānôn wĕśiryôn kĕmô ben-rĕʾēmîm
qôl-YHWH ḥōṣēb lahăbôt ʾēš
qôl YHWH yāḥîl midbār
yāḥîl YHWH midbar qādēš
qôl YHWH yĕḥôlēl ʾayyālôt
wayyeḥĕśōp yĕʿārôt

The voice of YHWH over the waters!

The God of Glory thunders—
YHWH over the great waters!
The voice of YHWH in strength,
the voice of YHWH in majesty!
The voice of YHWH breaks the cedars,
YHWH breaks the cedars of Lebanon!
He makes them jump like a calf,
Lebanon and Siryon like an ox.
The voice of YHWH carves out fiery flames—
the voice of YHWH shakes the wilderness,

73 For the storm god theophanies of YHWH, comparare the classic work of Jeremias

(1977).
 4. Chaos Dragons 39

YHWH shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.

The voice of YHWH makes the hinds give birth
and strips the forests bare.
(Ps 29:3-9b)

All three of these passages describe what looks like a classical Northwest
Semitic storm theophany. They talk of the thunder or lightning of the god in
question: in two of the cases—the Semitic ones—poetically referred to as his
“voice,” while the Baal Cycle passage and the Vedic one agree in symbolically
hypostasizing the lightning bolt as an almost physical weapon of the deity
(Baal’s “cedar weapon,” depicted on the well-known “Baal stele” from Ugarit,
and Indra’s vajra-weapon, probably symbolic of a lightning-bolt). In all of the
cases, mountains are shaken by the thunderous appearance of the warrior god—
they are visibly frightened (literally in the Ugaritic and Vedic passages, and in
Ps 29:6 the mountains Lebanon and Siryon are made to jump like startled
animals).
One thinks also of Ps 18:8-16, a passage that shows earth and mountains
quaking before the God of the storm going into battle against the powers of
chaos:

Wattigʿaš wattirʿaš hāʾāreṣ

ûmôsĕdê hārîm yirgāzû
wayyitgāʿăšû kî ḥārâ lô
ʿālâ ʿāšān bĕʾappô
wĕʾēš-mippîw tōʾkēl
geḥālîm bāʿărû mimmennû
wayyēṭ šāmayim wayyērad
waʿărāpel taḥat raglāyw
wayyirkab ʿal-kĕrûb wayyāʿōp
wayyēdeʾ ʿal-kanpê-rûaḥ
yāšet ḥōšek sitrô sĕbîbôtāyw
sukkātô ḥeškat-mayim ʿābê šĕḥāqîm
minnōgah negdô ʿābāyw ʿābĕrû
bārād wĕgaḥălê-ʾēš
wayyarʿēm baššāmayim YHWH
wĕʿelyôn yittēn qōlô74
wayyišlaḥ ḥiṣṣāyw waypîṣēm
ûbĕrāqîm rāb wayhummēm
wayyērāʾû ʾăpîqê mayim
wayyiggālû môsĕdôt tēbēl
miggaʿărātĕkā YHWH
minnišmat rûaḥ ʾappekā

74 I have removed the repeated bārād wĕgaḥălê-ʾēš.

40 Unburning Fame

And the earth shook and trembled

and the bases of the mountains quaked,
they shook, for he was angered.
Smoke rose from his nose
and devouring flame from his mouth.
Charcoal burned from him.
He folded the heavens and descended,
and gloom was under his feet.
He rode on the Cherub and flew
he swept on the wings of the wind.
He put darkness as a covering around him,
his booth was dark waters, dense clouds.
In the radiance before him his clouds passed forth
hail and charcoals of flame.
YHWH thundered in the heavens,
the Most High gave forth his voice.
He sent out his arrows and spread them around,
he threw lightning-bolts and created confusion.
The stream-beds of water became visible,
the bases of the world were uncovered,
by your roar, O YHWH,
by the breath of your raging wind.

All of these three divine characters—Indra, Baal and YHWH—fight a monster

of some kind, a representative of chaos. In the case of Baal and Indra, we have
actual preserved mythological accounts of how this was thought (at least by
some) to have taken place—and in these, there are certain striking
correspondences. One of these is the fact that both Baal and Indra are presented
with specific weaponry with which to battle the chaos monster, and the one
preparing this gift and donating this is the “craftsman god” of the respective
pantheon—in Baal’s case, the responsible party is the deity of handicrafts and
magic, Kothar-wa-Hasis, who presents Baal with his weapons ygrš (“it drives
away”/”Driver”) and aymr (“it expels all”/”Expeller”), and in the Vedic story it
is the god Tvaṣṭṛ, who has a similar sphere of influence, who prepares the
vajra.75
Also parallel is the somewhat strange circumstance that the actions of both
Baal and Indra against the monster/serpent are regarded at some point in the
stories as being in some way negative or going against established custom or
law, so that the divine hero of the stories is not necessarily always regarded as

75The exact type of weapon represented by the vajra is not entirely clear; one
suggestion is a type of club (see Dahlquist 1977: 153-155), or “cudgel” (thus Watkins
1995: 302), but (as will be seen below) there are also later descriptions more suggestive
of a stabbing weapon. For an illuminating discussion of the iconography of the vajra, and
its possible inherited Indo-European connection with the iconography of the weapon of
the Hittite Storm God, see Miller 2016.
 4. Chaos Dragons 41

such by the divine establishment. In the case of Indra, the negativity of the
chaos battle consists in the deity thereby acquiring a kind of “sin,” which is
apparently due to Vṛtra being regarded by the text as a sort of priest and thereby,
apparently, sacrosanct. This leads to Indra having to go into hiding. 76
In the Baal Cycle, this state of affairs comes to light when it is recounted
that El, the divine patriarch, has actually ordained that Yamm, the sea god,
should act as the king of the gods and has thereby granted him his sanction, and
also when Baal flies into a rage at Yamm’s messengers, who try to get him to
submit to the sea god’s rule, and is subsequently restrained by the other gods
due to the “diplomatic” status of the messengers. In the latter case, El even tells
the messengers that Baal is to be Yamm’s “servant” (ʿbd) and the “prisoner”
(asr) of the messengers. 77 Another instance of this “negativity” apparently
inherent in Baal’s battle against the powers of Sea occurs when, at the beginning
of KTU 1.5, Mot (the god of death) apparently accuses Baal for his killing of
the sea monster Litan 78 /Lotan/Leviathan and implies that the ensuing killing
drought and powerlessness of the heavens to provide rain is somehow a
consequence of this act (this episode is the background of Dietrich’s and
Loretz’s article “Der Tod Baals als Rache Mots für die Vernichtung Leviathans
in KTU 1.5 I 1-8,” 1980). The Ugaritic text in question is the following (and we
will come back to it again in section 4.8):

k tmḫṣ . ltn . bṯn . brḥ As/because you smote Litan, the fleeing serpent,
tkly . bṯn . ʿqltn . killed off the writhing serpent,
šlyṭ . d. šbʿt . rašm the ruler with seven heads,
tṯkḥ . ttrp . šmm . the heavens will burn hot and shine/be weakened.
krs ipdk . ank . I, even I, will tear you to pieces—
ispi . uṭm ḏrqm . amtm . I will swallow elbows, blood, and forearms.
l yrt b npš . bn ilm . mt . You will surely descend into the throat of
divine Mot,
b mhmrt . ydd . il . ġzr into the gullet of El’s beloved, the hero.79
(KTU 1.5 I 1-8)

This passage appears to imply that Baal’s battle against the powers of the Sea
may have led to some unintended consequences, at least from a rhetorical point
of view. However, the fact of the “negativity” of the battles against the chaos

76 Wendy Donniger in EOR, vol. 14: 9646 (s.v. “Vṛtra”). This occurs in later (post-

Vedic) textual material.

77 The apparent support from El for Yamm as divine king is found in KTU 1.1 IV

(although that column is in a highly damaged state and certain conclusions as to its
contents are highly difficult to draw). The aggressive behavior of Baal during his being
handed over to Yamm’s messengers occurs in KTU 1.2 I 36-41.
78 On the most probable vocalization of this name (*lītānu), see Emerton 1982.
79 This translation is mine (also used in Wikander 2014: 52, here with one small

correction of a typographic error). It has been especially influenced by the ideas of van
Selms (1975), Emerton (1976), Wyatt (2002: 115-116) and Barker (2006).
42 Unburning Fame

monsters is a rather superficial link, given the methodological and criteria-based

argument given earlier.

4.3 Shadows of an Epic Lost: YHWH, the Sea Monster, and the Weapons
It is lamentable fact that the Hebrew Bible does not preserve in its entirety a
version of the story that must once have existed—“the tale of YHWHs battle
with the sea monster.” Such a text (or type of texts) must in all probability have
been composed at some period in time, given how many and persistent
references to the Chaoskampf motif that can be found scattered throughout the
biblical text.80 All we can do in absence of such a preserved text is to try to
piece together what scraps and fragments we may find in the Hebrew Bible, in
order to get an idea how such a “YHWH and the Sea”-epic may have sounded.
We shall begin by looking at some of these fragments and return later to a sort
of synthesis, which we shall then compare with similar work done on the Indo-
European texts.
In Isaiah 51:9, it is a matter of course that YHWH (or, metonymically, his
“arm”) has “cut down Rahab” and “pierced the Dragon.” Yet the complex of
myths which these and other such lines suggest is nowhere spelled out in full.
One is reminded of how the classical Greek tragedians wrote plays on
mythological themes not in order to tell a new, and previously unknown story to
a riveted audience, but rather to make a new artistic interpretation of a story
which was already well known. There must once have been such a story (or
most probably a complex of stories), which described the battle between
YHWH and the chaos monsters; this is indicated very clearly by the author of
Isa 51:9, who calls upon the arm of YHWH to clothe itself in strength and
awake kîmê qedem (“like in the days of old”), clearly implying a reference to a
concrete story about these ancient times. But for reasons we will probably never
know (perhaps religious tendency played a part, as Deuteronomistic theology
grew stronger) it was not preserved to us. Thus, we have to “read between the
lines” to synthesize the beliefs and ideas concerning YHWH’s battle with the
chaotic powers.
It would, for example, have been highly interesting indeed to see whether
YHWH was ever thought to be given some form of divine weaponry with which
to defeat the Leviathan or Rahab, just as Baal and Indra were. 81 The parallels

80This point was implicitly made already in Gunkel 1895: 88. Gunkel believed that
the original myth must have had its place in a hymn to YHWH. This is certainly possible,
though to my mind not necessary.
81 For some other views on the weaponry of YHWH and other Semitic gods in their

respective Chaos battles, see Töyräänvuori 2012. She also connects the weapons of
YHWH specifically to the battle traditions inherited from the Northwest Semitic cultural
background, and points to Aleppo as one of the most central focus points for the idea of
the weapons of the weather deities (also discussing physical “divine weapons” from the
Ancient Near East). Discussing the various weapons implied to be used by YHWH in the
fight against the Dragon is a classical scholarly pastime, going all the way back to
Gunkel, who gives his own summary in Gunkel 1895: 85, mentioning many of the same
 4. Chaos Dragons 43

with the Ugaritic and the Indo-European story invite the question whether such
a “weapon of YHWH” was once part of the mythology of the Israelite God. In
his large study of the Indo-European dragon-slaying tales, Calvert Watkins
makes the point that the mention of the weapon of the hero is an important
(though optional) part of the poetic structure (a matter that we shall be returning
to later on).82 Even though no such overt description of YHWH’s weapon is
available to us, it is interesting to note that in the quite subdued reference to the
battle against Leviathan found at the end of the Book of Job, a specific
implement is mentioned as the means by which the sea monster can be handled:

Timšōk liwyātān bĕḥakkâ Can you pull up Leviathan with a fishhook,

ûbĕḥebel tašqîaʿ lĕšōnô and with a rope restrain his tongue?
hătāśîm ʾagmôn bĕʾappô Can you set a ring through his nose,
ûbĕḥôaḥ tiqqôb leḥĕyô and with a hook pierce his jaw?
(Job 40:25-26)

This passage, though in a sense satirically meant (referring as it does to the great
sea monster as a rather demythologized being which YHWH is capable of
handling in a way similar to a fish) may well contain within it a reference to a
weapon used by YHWH to defeat the Leviathan in an actual (unpreserved) tale
concerning that great feat. The “fishing hook” would then be a demythologized
and perhaps partly humorous variant of that weapon, which was believed to
have been wielded by the Israelite God in the battle. 83 It is probably no
coincidence that the above passage uses the verb nqb (“to perforate” or “to
pierce”)84 with Leviathan as its object—the same verb occurs much earlier in the
Book of Job, in the passing reference to certain imagined evil sorcerers, who are
called upon to curse the night on which Job was born:

possible weapons that I discuss here, though without, of course, comparing them to Indo-
European sources. He also adds the net as a weapon, appearing in Ez 32:3.
82 Watkins 1995: 302.
83 It might of course be objected that the “Leviathan” of the Job passages—and the

corresponding terrible animal Behemoth—is simply a reference to the rather mundane

and non-mythological animal, the crocodile (as the Behemoth appears to refer to a
hippopotamus). Indeed, this is supported by the well-known analogy with the
iconography of the Egyptian battle between Horus and Set, the latter taking the forms of
precisely these two animals (see, for example, the classical account in Keel 1978: 136-
154), as well as by the ingenious suggestion of Keel’s (1978: 142) that the word timšōk
(“Can you pull up”) is meant to play on the Egyptian word msḥ, “crocodile”: note that,
with the definitite article, the Coptic form of this word (“the crocodile”) is ti-msah, which
matches the Hebrew word extremely well.
84 The same verb occurs in the line preceding the ones here quoted, Job 40:24, which

talks of the other monstrous animal, the Behemoth, in the following way: bĕʿênāyw
yiqqāḥennû / bĕmôqĕšîm yinqob-ʾāp (“Can one grab him by his eyes / or pierce his nose
with snares?”).
44 Unburning Fame

Yiqqĕbūhû ʾōrĕrê-yām85 Let them pierce through it—those who curse

Sea,
hāʿătîdîm ʿōrēr liwyātān those who are ready to awaken Leviathan.
(Job 3:8)

This bicolon, which apparently refers to some sort of curse-magic (boring

through “voodoo dolls” or similar) being performed by sorcerers so skilled as to
be able to summon the terrible sea monsters, 86 may also contain traces of a
reference to a weapon of YHWH. Can it really be a coincidence that both Job
3:8 and 40:26 use the same verb nqb in connection with the sea monster
Leviathan (in widely diverging contexts)? The evil sorcerers who are powerful
enough to command Leviathan are called upon to “pierce” the moment when
Job was born (indicating that “piercing” was a standard way of describing
power over the sea monster), and Job himself is mockingly asked by YHWH
whether he can “pierce” the jaw of Leviathan. It is quite possible to interpret this
as an indicator that the traditional telling of YHWH’s battle against the serpent
to which the Joban poet appears to be alluding included a weapon with which
the Israelite God was thought to have slain the serpent—more specifically, then,
a stabbing (or “piercing”) weapon of some kind, as opposed to the club-like
weapons that Baal is given by Kothar-wa-Hasis in the Ugaritic text. When the
author of the Book of Job has YHWH ask the protagonist if he can “pull up
Leviathan with a fishhook,” the reader of the text is apparently meant to know
exactly the mythological concept to which this phrase refers, again reinforcing
the idea that there must have been at least one actual textual entity recounting
the “YHWH and Leviathan”-epic.
The above-quoted line about “pulling up Leviathan with a fish-hook” is
certainly not only a piece of mythological inheritance—it probably also refers to
the more mundane practices of fishing or hunting more ordinary reptiles. The
two images (that of fighting a chaos monster and that of catching animals) are
superimposed. However, these two interpretations need not contradict each
other: an older, mythological motif may well have been reinterpreted in a more
“near to earth” fashion. This is indicated by the fact that the motif of “piercing”
the serpent occurs in other places as well. The idea of the Israelite God using
some form of piercing weapon to defeat his serpentine enemy is in part
reinforced by the above-mentioned verse from Deutero-Isaiah (51:9), which
addresses the arm of YHWH with the following words:

85
MT has yôm instead of yām. The reading yām goes back to Gunkel’s (1895: 59)
publishing of an idea by Gottfried Schmied. This emended reading has won many
adherents, not least because of its increasing the parallelism between the lines. The
prominent motif of the “day” (yôm) in Job 3 would make it easier for yôm to have crept
into the text as a lectio simplicior. For further discussion and references concerning this
problem, see Wikander 2010: 265, n. 1.
86 For my views on this passage, see further Wikander 2010.
 4. Chaos Dragons 45

Hălôʾ ʾatt-hîʾ hammaḥṣebet rahab Indeed it was you that cut

down Rahab,
mĕḥôlelet tannîn that pierced the Dragon!
(Isa 51:9c-d)

A similar reference is found at another place in the Book of Job, where it is said
of YHWH:

Ḥōlălâ yādô nāḥāš bārîaḥ His hand pierced the fleeing serpent.
(Job 26:13b)

If this analysis is correct, some sort of stabbing weapon seems indeed to be

referred to. One should however, note that Ps 74:13 talks of “crushing” (šibbēr)
the heads of Rahab, which does sound more club-like. A similar double
description of the type of weapon used by the victorious divine warrior occurs in
the Enūma Eliš, in which it is first stated that Marduk defeats Tiāmat using an
arrow that pierces her heart...

Issuk mulmulla iḫtepi karassa

He shot the arrow, and it ripped through [her] belly.

(EE IV 101)

... after which the other version of destruction is recounted:

Ina miṭṭīšu lā padî ulatti muḫḫa

With his unsparing mace he crushed [her] skull.

(EE IV 130)

The double (both beating and piercing) victory over the serpent may possibly be
in evidence in the following half-verse from Psalm 89:

ʾattâ dikkāʾtā keḥālāl rāhab

You crushed Rahab like one pierced through …

(Ps 89:11a)

In this case, it is usual to translate keḥālāl with “as one slain” or similar, but I
believe that keeping the actual root meaning of ḥālāl (“pierced”) may hint at an
older tradition.
The overt description of a “crushing” type of violence against the monster
is also in evidence in the Vedic material—notice for example a line from the
46 Unburning Fame

more magically oriented Atharva-Veda,87 where the poet addresses Indra in the
following way:

Tvaṃ rauhiṇaṃ vyāsyo vi vṛtrasyābhinac chiraḥ

You scattered Rauhiṇa and crushed the head of Vṛtra …

(AV XX 128:13)

This imagery is highly reminiscent the following lines from the Psalter:

ʾattâ pôrartā bĕʿozzĕkā yām

šibbartā rāʾšê tannînîm ʿal-hammāyim

You split (?) the Sea with your power,

you crushed the heads of the Dragons on the waters.
(Ps 74:13)

Going back to the Vedic material, these lines (with a 2nd person dual imperative
directed to the gods Indra and Agni) may possibly indicate a type of crushing
violence:

Ābhogaṃ hanmanā hatam

udadhiṃ hanmanā hatam

Slay, you two, the Serpent with the slayer/blow/striker!

Slay, you two, the water-holder with the slayer/blow/striker!
(ṚV VII 94:12)

Here, the instrument used to slay the Serpent is described using the word
hanman-, from the root han-, “to strike, slay,” itself derived from Proto-Indo-
European *gwhen-, to which we will be returning later on. This derived word
would mean something like “blow,” “strike,” “slaying,” or the like. The
imperative hatam is from the same root, so that we get “slay with the slayer,”
“strike with the striker,” or something similar. Compare this with the weapons

87Another interesting parallel exists between the Israelite and Vedic serpent demons
in their later religious history. Both Vṛtra and Leviathan later become stock characters in
various forms of magic or curses—or sometimes the victory of the heroic deity against
them is used in such contexts. Such is the case already in Job 3:8, where some evil
sorcerers are referred to who are powerful enough to command the Leviathan; a similar
motif appears in a number of the Jewish-Babylonian Aramaic incantation bowls from
Late Antiquity, which refer to spells that once bound the great chaos serpent as threats
against enemies of the user of the bowl (see Wikander 2010 for my views on the
relationships between these texts with one another—and further references). In Vedic
India, the Atharva-Veda is the natural repository for this type of “magical” material, and
here too, we find such references (see Lahiri 1984: 229-232).
 4. Chaos Dragons 47

of Baal mentioned above, using the same paronomasia (“Driver, drive Yamm!”
and “Expeller, expel Yamm!”). 88 The poetic constructions are startlingly
similar: “Slay with the slayer!”/“Driver, drive Yamm!”/ “Expeller, expel
Yamm!”

There are post-Vedic accounts of Indra’s battle which seem to point to piercing
damage to Vṛtra as well:

Bhittvā vajreṇa tatkukṣiṃ After piercing his [Vṛtra’s] belly with his vajra
niṣkramya balabhidvibhuḥ and emerging, the powerful slayer of Bala
[=Indra]
uccakarta śiraḥ śatror cut off the head of the enemy,
giriśṛṅgam ivaujasā which was like a mountain peak, with force.
(Bhāgavata-Purāṇa 6:12:32)

Regardless of whether one is talking of piercing or crushing, the biblical pieces

of text referred to above seem to point to a notion of YHWH destroying the
dragon monster using some form of implement, in the same way that Baal and
Indra do in their respective stories. Note that this question of YHWH’s
weaponry is most easily brought up as a result of a comparison not only with
surrounding Semitic-speaking cultures but with Indo-European ones as well. We
shall return to the matter of the possible original formulation of a Yahwistic
dragon-killing tale or phrase when discussing the corresponding reconstructed
Proto-Indo-European phrase in section 4.8.

4.4 The Hittite Serpent Story

Another Indo-European parallel to the Northwest Semitic serpent slaying stories
is the Hittite narrative (CTH 321) of the battle between the Storm God and his
enemy, the serpent Illuyanka (the latter is not actually a name but literally
means “serpent”). This story is rather different than the ones about YHWH,
Baal and Indra: the Hittite god is painted as a rather weak character, one who
has to be helped not only by the goddess Inara, but also by a mortal named
Ḫūpašiya, in order to slay the serpent:

nu dInaraš mḪūpaš[iyan p]ēḫutet nan mūnnāit

d
Inarašš-a-z unuttat n-ašta MUŠilluyank[an] ḫantešnaz šarā kallišta
kāša-wa EZEN-an iyami
nu-wa adanna akuwanna eḫu
n-ašta MUŠilluyankaš QADU [DUMUMEŠ-ŠU] šarā uēr
nu-za eter ekue[r]
[n]-ašta DUGpalḫan ḫūmandan ek[uer n]e-za ninkēr
[n]e namma ḫattešnaš kattand[a] nūmān pānzi

88 The Ugaritic text has ygrš grš ym […] aymr mr ym (KTU 1.2 IV 12, 19).
48 Unburning Fame

m
Ḫūpasiyašš-[a uit] nu MUŠilluyankan išḫimā[nta] kalēliēt
d
IM-aš uit nu-kan MUŠilluy[ankan] kuenta
DINGIRMEŠ-š-a kattišši ešer

And Inara transported Ḫūpašiya and hid him.

Inara dressed herself, and she called the Serpent up from his hole:
“See, I am making a feast,
come eat and drink!”
And the Serpent came up together with [his children],
and they ate and drank.
They drank every vessel, and they were satiated.
And they could no longer go down into their hole;
Ḫūpašiya came, and he tied the Serpent up with a cord.
The Storm God came, and he killed the Serpent;
the gods were with him.89

We see here that the serpent is killed not by mighty force, but rather by trickery.
No specific weapon is mentioned, and neither is any storm theophany—but the
victorious deity is the storm god (written with the Sumerogram IM,
“wind/storm”). Another interesting detail in the Hittite story is the fact that the
Storm God and the serpent do battle once earlier in the story, at which point the
hero is actually defeated. This could possibly parallel the humiliating
submission Baal is forced into before Yamm at the beginning of the Ugaritic
story (and perhaps his fear of and surrender before Mot). 90

4.5 Sea and Creation: Characteristic Differences

There are a few significant differences between the Indo-European and Semitic
serpent slaying narratives. The most apparent of these is the connection existing
in the Semitic stories with the two concepts of creation—and the association
with the battle against the personified Sea. None of these central associations are
as clearly present in the Indo-European narratives.91 However, it should also be
noted that the creation-theme is not always present in the Semitic ambit, either:
the Ugaritic Baal Cycle lacks all reference to a creation narrative. But the role of
the personified Sea is certainly an important and specific part of the Semitic-

89 I have kept my translation from Wikander 2010: 269-270. The transcription is

normalized based on the text as edited by Beckman (1982: §§ 9-12).
90 One may note with some interest Haas’s (1994: 104-105) assertion that the Hittite

Illuyanka forms a parallel to the Ugaritic Mot, rather than Yamm and the chaos dragons!
91
Though one can note with some interest that Töyräänvuori (2016: 130) regards the
motif of creating the world by “halving a whole” and a “war between the generations of
the gods” in the Enūma Eliš as “distinctly Sumerian” and “possibly Indo-European.” If
this is intended to suggest an Indo-European connection for the splitting creation, so to
speak, I agree that there are certainly such stories in Indo-European languages; this motif
is, however, generally not woven together with the dragon battle in a clear way in the
Indo-European material.
 4. Chaos Dragons 49

language stories: one may note with some interest that both the Hebrew and
Ugaritic versions of the narrative vacillate between just talking of the “Sea”
(Yamm/yām) and the various serpentine monsters. Could it be that the idea of
the Serpent was shared through some medium of transmission with various
Indo-European cultures, while Semitic-speakers combined this motif with the
more specifically Near Eastern idea of the chaotic Sea, which had to be pacified
by a deity? The idea of the battle against the Sea as such seems to be very much
at home in the western Ancient Near Eastern milieu: note for example the so-
called Song of the Sea, which is preserved in fragmentary form in both Hurrian
and Hittite but is Hurrian in origin: in that text, the Hurrian storm god Teššob
fights no dragon—but confronts the personified Sea itself. 92 Some of the Indo-
European dragons do live in the sea, to be sure, but the “Sea as a being” idea
that is so clearly tied up with the serpent battle in the Semitic sources is not
present.
Noga Ayali-Darshan has argued that the idea of battling the Sea is an
essentially Levantine conception, specifically having its origin in the Phoenician
coastal territories, whence it subsequently spread into Canaan, Egypt, the Hittite
territories, and finally Mesopotamia. 93 I concur with this general assessment,
even though one could add that there are certain early Mesopotamian
attestations as well, like in one of the Gudea texts (from the 2100s BC), in
which the god Ningirsu is referred to in Sumerian as a ḫuš gi4-a (“the one who
made the raging/terrifying waters turn back”). 94 Yet, the point that the battle
against the personified Sea is an autochthonous entity from the Near East is
highly probable, and it fits well with the lack of this element in the Indo-
European serpent slaying stories.95

92 On the Hurro-Hittite Song of the Sea as relevant piece of comparative material for

the Hittite Illuyanka story, see e.g. Gilan 2013: 99 (with further references). For a deeper
treatment of the text, see Rutherford 2001. Rutherford also basically agrees (p. 601) that
the most probable main theme of the fragmentary text is a battle between the Storm God
and the Sea.
93 Ayali-Darshan 2011 (in Modern Hebrew); her point is summarized in English in

Greenstein 2015: 34. She also makes the argument in Ayali-Darshan 2015, especially in
the Conclusion and Appendix on pp. 49-51. Ayali-Darshan herself (2015: 22, n. 4) points
out that the Hittite story of the battle against Illuyanka does not actually include the
personified Sea as a protagonist (or rather antagonist) in the story, which makes it
different from the main mytheme of storm gods battling the Sea that she is studying.
94 Cylinder A, l. 8.15; text available online at the ETCSL.
95 A similar point is made by Töyräänvuori (2016: 426), who points out that Watkins’

basic formula for the Indo-European serpent slaying stories (see below) is subtly
different from the “Amorite” one partly because latter focuses upon the Sea and not a
dragon in general. Wakeman (1973: 25-26, 29-30) also argues that the dragon battle as
secondary to the battle against the Sea in the Northwest Semitic stories. Töyräänvuori
(2016: 421) holds that the serpent stories are older than the “Sea” ones, but that there
were local “river” stories—and that political developments motivated the combination
between the Sea and Dragon battles.
50 Unburning Fame

The Hittite word for serpent can be associated with the sea, such as in the
phrase arunaš MUŠilluiyankaš (“serpent of the sea”) which appears at KUB
XXXVI 55 ii 28.96 The sea also does appear in the Illuyanka text itself, in the
second telling of the story, in §25’ of Beckman’s (1982) edition (line 22’), as
the place where the Storm God meets the Serpent for a second battle. The sea is,
however, not the one doing battle, nor is the association between the Serpent
and the sea unequivocal: in the first version of the story (§11, line 14’), the
Serpent is said to live in a “hole” (ḫatteššar), which would seem to have more
chthonic associations. There are references to sea dragons in other parts of the
Indo-European phylum: for example, the Old Irish Saga of Fergus mac Léti
includes one, referred to as muirdris, which probably literally means “sea-
dragon.”97 Another example is the Vedic monster Ahi Budhnya (“the Serpent of
the Deep”). 98 M.L. West refers to the Indo-European tellings of the battle
against the Serpent as stories of a “Water Dragon,” 99 but it should be
remembered that the relationship between, e.g., the Vedic Vṛtra and the waters
are subtly different than that between the biblical and Ugaritic dragon monsters
and the watery deeps: Vṛtra holds the life giving waters back until the hero Indra
can release them (see the above quotes from ṚV I 32:1 and II 12:3 on p. 36).
West even refers to the Avestan chaos monster Apaoša (who, while not a
dragon, is connected with Vṛtra by both etymology and function) as a “demon
of drought,” an epithet that could hardly be used of Leviathan or Rahab. 100 In
the Ugaritic texts, the “demon of drought” would be Mot, not one of the
monsters of the side of personified Sea.
There are certainly “sea serpents” in Indo-European tellings, but the battle
against the personified Sea as such (and, thereby, its integration into the dragon
battle motif) definitely seems to be an autochthonous, Ancient Near Eastern
development.101 We shall return to this matter later on.

96 Mentioned in Katz 1998: 320. See also footnote 121, on Katz’s ideas about the
possibility of the word illuyanka- itself etymologically meaning “eel-snake” (and thus
carrying with it an aquatic association).
97 Watkins 1995: 447
98 Watkins 1995: 460.
99 West 2007: 255. Miller (2016: 150) uses the expression “the dragon-who-is-

water.” He also points out (2014: 227) how the Vedic Serpent lies in “the deep” after the
great battle (ṚV I 32:8).
100 West 2007: 257.
101 And in the Levantine material as well, the Serpent and Sea battles, though closely

connected with one another, need not necessarily be identified with each other. In the
Baal Cycle, for example, the serpentine monster is mentioned in a way that appears to
indicate that it is separate from Yamm himself, though allied with him (in the monster
list in KTU 1.3 III 38-46; for my analysis of this passage, see Wikander 2014: 238-240).
According to Miller (2014: 236), the Serpent ltn in the Baal Cycle is identical with
Yamm; I am rather skeptical of this (even though it is possible that Yamm has some
serpentine characteristics in another text, KTU 1.83; see Pitard 1998). Töyräänvuori
(2016: 428) argues the opposite of what I suggest above, that Indo-European tales may
 4. Chaos Dragons 51

4.6 Conquerors and Encirclers: The Names of the Storm Gods and Serpents
After this overview, we must return to what was stated in the Introduction to be
a main part of the project of the present volume: grounding the religio-historical
comparisons made in specific terminology, lexical material or poetic phrases. So
far, we have seen some clear correspondences in the ways in which Northwest
Semitic sources, Vedic, and Hittite texts express themselves, but in order to
argue more clearly for an actual connection between the texts from the “world
of the Hebrew Bible” and the Indo-European ones, such lexical or phrasal
correspondences are needed. And I believe that they can be found.
One tantalizing point of intersection between the stories here in question is
the way of referring to the heroes themselves. As we have seen, the name of the
Hittite Storm God was Tarḫunna-, which probably means “the Conqueror.” This
word is derived from the Hittite verbal root tarḫu- (“to defeat, conquer, be
mighty, be able”), which in turn is a reflex of the Proto-Indo-European verb
*terh2-u-, with similar meanings of “overcoming.” 102 In the Ugaritic myths,
Baal is very often given the epithet aliyn, an elative of the root lʾy, “to be able,
to be mighty”, which apparently meant something like “supremely mighty,”
“victorious” or “conquering.” These two descriptions of the storm gods are quite
similar, and one could imagine some form of conceptual link between the two
words (especially as we do not find many comparable instances of descriptions
such as aliyn in the Baal cults of the neighboring Semitic cultures). 103
If such a link really exists, the religio-historical connections between the
Indo-European and Northwest Semitic religious motifs involved may go one
step further—and quite a fascinating step, at that. As has been pointed out by
earlier scholars, the Hittite name (or title) Tarḫunna- (“the Conqueror”), as well
as its Luwian relative Tarḫunt- or Tarḫunza- (with the same meaning), form a
close and even striking parallel to the Vedic participle tūrvant- (“overpowering,
conquering”), which is derived from the same Indo-European root, is formally
identical in its derivation, and was applied to a number of Vedic deities, among
them Indra, the very serpent-battler god himself.104 Interestingly, a quite similar

have inspired the “anthropomorphization of the sea” in Northwest Semitic mythology; I

personally cannot find any evidence for this direction of influence.
102 As demonstrated by Kloekhorst (2008: 835-837 [s.v. tarḫuzi]), the verbal root in

question in Hittite is definitely tarḫu-, not simply tarḫ-, as has often been supposed in the
past. I have applied this reading consistently in Hittite texts.
103 The points made in this section about the etymologies of the terms for the storm

gods and serpents at Ugarit and in the Hittite and Indo-Iranian materials also appear (in
somewhat different form) in Wikander 2017.
104
The link between the name of the Anatolian Storm God and the Vedic word was
made in a quite abbreviated form in Eichner 1974: 28. It was seized upon (and expanded)
in Kloekhorst 2008: 838 (s.v. tarḫuzi), where Eichner’s idea is expounded in the form of
saying that the Cuneiform Luwian form Tarḫuwant-/ Tarḫunt- “forms an exact word
equation with [Sanskrit] tū́rvant- ‘overpowering’, which is used as an epithet of Indra,
Agni and Mitra.” Kloekhorst considers the underlying paradigm (at least of the Luwian
forms) to have been nominative *trh2-u-énts and genitive *trh2-u-nt-ós, probably a frozen
52 Unburning Fame

participle occurs in Avestan in the expression vərəθra.tauruuå̄ (“the one who

overpowers/conquers resistance”), a compound word that includes the Avestan
version of the name of the serpent Vṛtra (vərəθra, here with the lexical meaning
of “resistance”).105 This word expresses very clearly the association between the
“Conqueror” title and the title of the great serpent in the Vedic tales. An
expression made up from the same etymological material, Vṛtra-tura-
(something like “overpowerer/conqueror of Vṛtra”), also occurs in Vedic texts
as an epithet of Indra,106 proving that the expression is probably of Proto-Indo-
Iranian provenance.
If, indeed, the Ugaritic term epithet aliyn which is applied to Baal
represents a kind of loan-translation from some form of the Anatolian words
mentioned earlier, and the Northwest Semitic tales of a storm deity slaying a
serpent monster also include elements borrowed from Indo-Iranian sources, then
the use of the term “mighty/conqueror” in Ugaritic could in a strange way
represent a kind of confluence of material from two Indo-European branches
using an etymologically identical expression for talking poetically about the
victorious storm god. The non-Indo-European, Ugaritic language becomes an
apex at which the Indo-Aryan and Anatolian legs in the triangle can meet.
The above-mentioned Avestan compound word vərəθra.tauruuå̄ and its
Vedic counterpart Vṛtra-tura become even more interesting in this context, as I
would suggest that Ugaritic texts imply a sort of word-play between the roots lʾy
(“be powerful, conquer”) which is used of the storm deity in the title aliyn and
lwy (“to encircle”) which is used as the basis of one of his aquatic enemies,
Lotan/Litan/Leviathan.
While the Avestan and Vedic compound expressions mentioned above put
the opposites “resistance/’coverer’” and “Conqueror” together, Ugaritic uses
highly poetically similar words for the two concepts, as a way of expressing the
same mythological antonymity. In both Indo-Iranian and Ugaritic, the concepts
of conquering on the one hand and resisting/covering/encircling on the other are
opposed to each other in a similar way. This, I believe, is not a coincidence.
If this argument holds true, it would mean that both the name of the divine
warrior and that of his enemy constitute pieces of “etymological poetic”
material that have been borrowed from one or more Indo-European origins into
a Northwest Semitic context. The fact that the titles of the storm deities meaning

participle. The Vedic Sanskrit form tūrvant- is a present participle as well, showing that
the use of this etymological material for describing a storm deity is indeed ancient and
can confidently be counted as “Indo-European” in the more general sense.
105 For the Avestan form, see Sims-Williams 1997: 338.
106 The connection between the name of the Anatolian Storm God and the Vedic

word tūrvant- is also mentioned in Watkins 1995: 344, where the Vedic epithet Vṛtra-
tura- of Indra is also pointed out. The connection between the Hittite and Vedic titles is
also referred to by Jasanoff (2003: 142, n. 320) and by Schwemer (2008: 18), the latter
rendering the relevant Vedic title as “storming along.” The Vedic verbal root for “to
overcome, to conquer” is also highlighted as being central to the Indra/Serpent story in
Miller 2016: 150 (along with other relevant roots).
 4. Chaos Dragons 53

“Conqueror” are represented by the exact same inherited etymological material

in Hittite and Vedic (with parallels in Avestan) substantially increases the
likelihood of the Indo-European versions of these stories being primary in
relation to the Semitic ones, as does the fact of the Indo-European serpent
slaying-myths being spread almost over the entirety of the Indo-European
linguistic area (from Germanic sources to Indian ones), as delineated by
Watkins (1995). A borrowing of the motif from Indo-European sources into
Semitic ones seems much more likely than a movement in the other direction. 107
And even more spectacularly: it is a possibility that the Ugaritic epithet
aliyn applied to Baal, the supreme Conqueror of enemies in that culture, may
actually represent a loan-translated conflation derived from two different Indo-
European cultures: Anatolian and Indo-Iranian! 108 To this, the Ugaritic poet
seems to have added his own literary flourishes, using wordplay as a means of
connecting the relevant roots (lʾy and lwy) in a way similar to what happened in
the Indo-European loan-giving cultures. Just as the Indo-Aryan cultures
juxtaposed “resistance/the coverer” and the “Conqueror,” so does Ugaritic
oppose the “Conqueror” (aliyn) to the “Enveloper” (Leviathan/Lotan/Litan).
But we can go one step further. The above-mentioned type of wordplay
occurs also in the Anatolian sources. The fact that the name of the Hittite Storm
God, Tarḫunna-, literally means “Conqueror” provided the Hittite authors with
an excellent means of such creative paronomasia. The example that I am
thinking of also clearly shows that this name was interpreted in antiquity as
having a direct, lexical sense, not just as an ossified, seemingly arbitrary name
without inherent semantic reference.
In the text about the battle between the Storm God and the serpent
Illuyanka, the protagonist is not immediately successful (as mentioned earlier).
His first attempt at battling the Serpent ends in defeat. The Hittite text puts it
this way (Beckman 1982: §3, l.11; end preserved whole in the parallel in §21):

Nu-za MUŠilluyankaš dIM-an [taru]ḫta

Given that the Sumerogram dIM (“Storm God”) was read in Hittite as the name
Tarḫunna-, the line when read in pure Hittite becomes as brilliant example of
etymologizing wordplay:

107 Again, see also my exposition in Wikander 2017.

108 The possibility of the Ugaritic poets having in a sense combined the occurrences
of the “Conqueror” terminology from two different Indo-European subphyla reminds one
of Ghilʿad Zuckermann’s (2003: 53) congruence principle, which states that if more than
one language contributes to a target language, those features that occur in more than one
of the contributors are more likely to appear in the target. To be sure, Zuckermann
discussed purely linguistic phenomena (in his case, the hybridized emergence of Modern
Israeli Hebrew), but a similar argument could be used for materials of “etymological
poetics” being borrowed as well. The presence of the “Conqueror” motif in two different
Indo-European languages interacting with Northwest Semitic may well have
strengthened the incentive for borrowing.
54 Unburning Fame

Nu-za MUŠilluyankaš dTarḫunnan taruḫta

The same verbal root tarḫu- is used both for the name of the Storm
God/Conqueror and for the “conquering” to which he is subjected. A succinct
translation getting this point across would be the following:

The Serpent conquered the Conqueror.

The most conquering god of all, the Storm God, is forced to swallow his own
medicine.109 This pattern of showing the subjugation of a deity by having him be
“beaten at his own game” is a common one in the Hebrew Bible as well, as we
will see also in chapter 7, on the possible Indo-European background of the
divine name Dagan/Dagon. 110 Also, the association between the name of the
Storm God and the battle against the Serpent suggests the possibility that such a
battle was one that Hittites would think of when hearing the name of the
“Conqueror” spoken. Such a possibility could definitely be there concerning the
Ugaritic Baal as well—his title aliyn could be a reference not to a generic
tendency to conquer things but to specific mythemes, such as the battle against
the Serpent (note again what I suggested above, that the roots of the names
Leviathan/Litan/Lotan and aliyn are deliberately similar).
Of course, later on in the Hittite story, the fortunes of the Storm God are
reversed, and he defeats the Serpent with the assistance of the goddess Inara and
the mortal man Ḫūpašiya.
But how is this piece of Hittite etymologizing wordplay (“conquering the
Conqueror”) in itself relevant to the Northwest Semitic literatures? After all,
neither the Ugaritic texts nor the Hebrew Bible includes any reference to the
divine protagonist having been defeated by the Serpent prior to his victory.
There are, however, other instances of a similar nature. In the Baal Cycle, the
hero is at first humiliated and extradited to his enemy, the sea god Yamm (as
mentioned earlier). This constitutes a type of defeat prior to the victory against
the side of the sea beings, of which Leviathan/Litan/Lotan can be considered to
be a part.
However, the really interesting parallel can be found in another part of the
Baal Cycle—the one concerned with the battle between Baal and Mot, the god
of death. In this part of the story (which mainly consists of tablets KTU 1.4 and
1.5, but has precursors in 1.3 as well), Baal is indeed defeated by his enemy and
is forced to descend into the netherworld. As a result, a great drought ensues,
striking the land and killing all verdure, thus manifesting the rule of personified

109For the importance of this collocation using tarḫu- and its etymological cogeners
in Vedic writings, and on the Hittite wordplay, see Watkins 1995: 343-346.
110 One may note Mettinger’s (1988: 82-91) suggestion that the appellation ʾēl ḥāy

(“living God”) used of YHWH was intended to oppose/contrast him to gods who were
thought to die and rise again. The Hittite text, it seems, does something similar, but it
does it to the same god that it wants to extol!
 4. Chaos Dragons 55

Death in the world. 111 As I have discussed in detail in Wikander 2014, this
drought is specifically described as being mediated through the goddess of the
sun, Shapshu. The relevant phrase (which I have referred to as the Refrain of the
Burning Sun), occurs three times during the course of the Baal Cycle, with very
small variations:112

nrt . ilm . špš . ṣḥrrt The divine lamp Shapshu burns/will burn
red-hot,
la . šmm . b yd . bn ilm . mt the heavens are wearied/dried up in the
hand of Mot, the divine one.

As I and others have argued earlier, the use of the verb la in the sense of “to be
weary, to be exhausted” (and by extension, perhaps, “to be dried up”) represents
an inverted meaning of the same root that also means “to be strong, to conquer”
(“inverted” in the sense of a verbal root also meaning the opposite of its basic
meaning).113 This is the same root used in the “Conqueror” title of Baal (aliyn):
the same root that underlies Baal’s epithet signifying his victories is here used to
recount the terrible effects of his defeat. Again, the Conqueror is conquered.
It is perhaps no accident that Mot refers to the defeat of
Leviathan/Lotan/Litan when he challenges Baal and scares him into descending
into the realm of the dead at the beginning of KTU 1.5 I (see above, p. 41). He
talks of skies that “burn hot” and “shine” or have been “weakened” because of
this—exactly the dangers that are described in the Refrain of the Burning Sun.
Could a conscious pun be intended here between lwy (“to encircle,” the root of
Leviathan/Litan/Lotan) and lʾy (“to be strong” or, in its inverted sense, “to be
weak”), a possible pun I referred to earlier? It is certainly interesting that the
two passages that express such similar phenomena seem to use both these roots,
roots that semantically correspond to the names of the Conqueror gods of the
Indo-European texts and of the serpent Vṛtra. And again, note the use of the root
lʾy to denote both the title of the conquering storm deity and the results of his
being conquered. Just as the Hittite text says Tarḫunnan taruḫta (“he conquered
the Conqueror”), the Ugaritic text calls Baal aliyn (“Victorious, Mighty,
Conquering”) and then describes the result of his defeat using the same root lʾy.
This, I argue, is too much to be a coincidence.
It might be objected that it is overreaching to search for parallels to the
Hittite Storm God/Serpent story in that part of the Ugaritic Baal Cycle that deals
not with the battle against Yamm (the sea god) but against Mot, the god of
death. However, I believe this objection to be less weighty for a number of

111
The way in which this is recounted and made into a literary structure is a large
part of the object of study in Wikander 2014. See, especially pp. 23-81 (but the matter
recurs throughout the course of the book).
112 KTU 1.3 V 17-18, 1.4 VIII 21-24, and 1.6 II 24-25. The version quoted here is the

last of these. My views on this Refrain make up the whole of section 2.2.1 of Wikander
2014 (pp. 23-45), to which I refer for my underlying linguistic and prosodic analysis.
113 See Wikander 2014: 41, esp. n. 97, with references to previous literature.
56 Unburning Fame

reasons. One of these is the fact that neither the Yamm nor the Mot battle
actually provides a perfect counterpart to the Hittite story. Illuyanka is a
serpent—not necessarily a sea serpent but one sometimes living in a hole in the
ground. While the Baal Cycle does mention the Leviathan/Litan/Lotan in two
places, the main “water enemy” in that text is Yamm, the sea god himself, who
does not appear as a serpent (at least not in that text). Because of the association
between “the Sea” and “the Dragon” that is often (and quite correctly) made in
studies of texts from the Semitic ambit, it may be easy to downplay the
relationship between Mot and serpentine monsters. But it is, after all, Mot who
mentions Baal’s struggle against the sea serpent as a reason for or background to
their own battle. Also, it should be noted that Mot lives in the earth, as does the
Hittite Serpent in one of the stories about him. As mentioned earlier, the
association between the serpent mythology and the personified Sea seems to a
large extent to be an inner-Semitic (or at least inner-Near Eastern)
phenomenon. 114 I find it quite probable that this idea was combined with an
imported Indo-European-derived concentration on battling serpents, creating the
well-known fusion that appears to us in the Hebrew Bible.
This type of fusion is actually in evidence already in the Hurro-Hittite
material itself. The text CTH 785 mentions “when the Storm God defeated the
Sea” (arunan-za maḫḫan dU [t]aruḫta), 115 using the same creative wordplay
between the verb tarḫu- (“to defeat”) and the name of the Storm God himself,
Tarḫunna- (here written logographically as dU). This may show the inherited
association between the Storm God and his victorious battle against the serpent
(cf. the Vedic uses of the same inherited Indo-European verb) being transposed
to the battle against the Near Eastern personified Sea itself.

4.7 Different Levels of Mythological Correspondence and Possible Vectors

When considering the possible implications of these parallels between the
Northwest Semitic (including Old Testament) narratives concerning the battle
against the great serpent or sea monster with that found in certain Indo-
European cultures, we must distinguish between two possible levels of historical
connection (cf. section 2.2). The first of these concerns the very general motif of
a divine hero (often, but not always, a storm god) slaying a serpent. As we have
seen, there are a number of similarities between this type of myth and the
dragon-fighting stories of the biblical and Semitic cultures, and these similarities
should be explained. One such explanation would be cultural influence or “co-
operation” at some level and in some direction, most probably at an early point

114
Or perhaps better: Syro-Palestino-Mesopotamian, which mostly means “Semitic”
in practice. But note, for example, the story of the serpent Ḫedammu (preserved in Hittite
as CTH 348), a serpent who also lives in the sea.
115 See Ayali-Darshan 2015: 23-25; she also mentions a few other texts with similar

expressions. Here and in other places, I have changed the common transcription of the
word “he defeated,” taraḫta, to the more probable taruḫta, in line with the findings of
Kloekhorst (as mentioned above, n. 102).
 4. Chaos Dragons 57

and possibly during a prolonged period. The other possible type of connection
would be shown by looking at more detail-oriented correspondences, such as the
descriptions of mountains being “afraid” at the thunderous roar of the battling
storm god (found both in the Hebrew Bible and at Ugarit on the one hand and in
the Vedic story on the other). Another such detailed similarity is the handing
over of the divine weapon by the craftsman god (found both in the Baal Cycle
and in the Ṛg-Veda)—and last but not least the startling similarities in the
naming conventions of the Storm God hero and the serpent enemy (“Conqueror”
and “Encircler/Coverer”), which, as I argue above, clearly suggest a historical
connection.
I believe that to provide an understanding of the various types of
correspondences and similarities that appear to exist between the water-dragon
slaying stories of the biblical ambit and the serpent myths of Indo-European
provenance, we must be open both to a more general idea of early cultural
interaction and of one involving specific loans or cultural back-and-forth
concerning specific motifs. For example, the rather significant detail-centered
similarities between motifs in the Baal Cycle and those occurring in the Indian
Vṛtra story would probably need to be explained through the latter type of
scenario. In this case, there is a possible cultural link that suggests itself as the
transporting agent, making such specific borrowings possible. This is the
kingdom of Mitanni, with its well-known presence of Indo-Aryan onomastics,
technincal terminology and divine names. It is a fact the Mitannians included
Indra (in-da-ra) in god lists, showing a familiarity with that deity. Also, as
pointed out by Nicolas Wyatt, there is evidence of Hurrian/Mitannian influence
in the Hebrew Bible, for example in the name Arauna, which may represent a
Hurrian word like iwer-na or ewirne, meaning something like “the lord.” 116
Even though the Mitannians were mainly a Hurrian speaking people, it is well
established that there was a (possibly somewhat fossilized) Indo-European
(Indic, to be specific) linguistic stratum as part of their culture (shown, for
example, by the onomastics of their rulers). At Ugarit, the Hurrians had a
pervasive influence, and the El Amarna literature attests great amounts of Indo-
Aryan names,117 showing the Mitannians as quite a possible vector of cultural
transmission between the Indo-European and Old Testament world. In the 2013
article mentioned earlier, I have argued for a direct influence from a
Hurrian/Hittite bilingual upon Deuteronomy 32 (including some very close
parallels).
Another thing that makes the Hurrians especially important in the present
context is the fact that they also showed a distinct cultural symbiosis with the
Indo-Europeans of Anatolia (especially pronounced in the way in which the
Hurrian culture exerted a pervasive influence upon the Hittite one). The dual
directions of contact with Indo-European cultures—Anatolian as well as Indo-
Aryan—makes the Hurrians ideal candidates as cultural vectors into the

116 Wyatt 1985: 372; Lipiński 2004: 500 (with ample references).
117 For many examples of this, see Hess 1993.
58 Unburning Fame

linguistic milieu of Northwest Semitic. The fact that the name of the “Victorious
Baal” at Ugarit could be construed as a confluence of (etymologically identical)
poetic material from these two Indo-European cultures would fit very well with
such a view. In the next chapter, I will provide some further examples of dual
Hurrian/Indo-European influence on poetic motifs in Ugaritic literature and in
the Hebrew Bible.118
The other type of correspondence—that which does not concern details of
mythology that are easily traceable but larger and more abstract mythemes and
motifs—may go back to a much earlier phase of Indo-European/Semitic
interaction. This type of explanation is much more difficult and far-reaching,
and we are talking now of the earliest type of cultural correspondence
mentioned in section 2.2—that which may have occurred already at the proto-
language level. Such interactions are, of course, much harder to study with
methodological rigor.

4.8 Phrasal Correspondences and Watkins’ Proto-Myth

Even though this is so, however, I shall allow myself to suggest that such earlier
correspondence (going back to very early Indo-European times) may in fact be
demonstrable as part of the Northwest Semitic material itself. Again, the way of
discussing this should ideally be based not in general semantic similarity or
(even worse) just in apparently parallel ways of thinking, but in
methodologically studiable, borrowed phraseology. One could object that such
an enviable state of affairs would be an impossible thing to hope for when it
comes to very early interactions or retentions such as this, yet I would argue that
there may in fact be a very viable example.
To find it, we must go to the most famous reconstruction there is of the
putative Proto-Indo-European serpent/dragon slaying myth, the one proffered in
Calvert Watkins’ seminal study How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-
European Poetics, which looks at the serpent myths in their various Indo-
European incarnations and tries to reconstruct an Proto-Indo-European Vorlage
from which they may have been derived.119
As we have already seen, Watkins makes the point of the weapons of the
serpent slayers being important, but he does more than this: he actually argues
that a specific Proto-Indo-European formula underlies the preserved Indo-
European serpent slaying stories, a euphonically impressive piece of poetic
diction that Watkins reconstructs as:

118
The Hurrians/Mitanni as a possibe vector between Indo-Aryan and Northwest
Semitic chaos battle traditions (in the former case, the Indra-Serpent battle especially) is
also stressed in Töyräänvuori 2016: 427-428, though it should be noted that her view of
the interaction is quite different than mine.
119 Watkins (1995: 10) quite fittingly refers to this method of etymological poetics—

reconstructing proto-language poetic formulae on the basis of their attested reflexes in

daughter languages—as “genetic intertextuality.”
 4. Chaos Dragons 59

*egwhent ogwhim120 He slew the serpent.

The most direct basis of the reconstruction is the Vedic phrase ahann ahim, with
which we have already made an acquaintance; the reconstructed Proto-Indo-
European phrase is, in fact, the exact phonological “parent” of the Vedic
expression. The Hittite reflex is also rather close to the proposed Proto-Indo-
European parent phrase; Illuyankan kuenta has modified (somewhat)121 the title
of the serpent, but the verb (“slew”) is etymologically identical, though lacking
the so-called augment marking past time, which does not exist in Hittite and
appears to have been optional in Proto-Indo-European itself. Remnants of the
phrase also occur in Greek myth, especially in the use of the noun ὄφις to
designate the serpent, this being the exact cognate of Vedic ahi- and thus a key
component in the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European noun *ogwhi-.122
Even though an inherited poetic formula meaning “he killed the serpent”
may seem less than revolutionary, one should not discount the importance of the
proposition. The appearance of the phrase in Proto-Indo-European itself may
serve as a kind of sign in the same direction, the phoneme *gwh being one of the
rarest sounds of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language, which makes
it extremely significant that the reconstructed phrase includes no less than two
instances of this sound, thus providing a beautiful and very distinctive poetic

120 Watkins 1995: 154, 301-303, 365.

121 One notes with some interest Katz’ suggestion that the second half of the word
illuyanka- (“serpent”) is in fact derived from a word related (though not identical) to the
Proto-Indo-European *ogwhi-, which has been combined with the element appearing in
English as eel (Katz 1998, esp pp. 320-329). If this is so, the step from Watkins’ proto-
phrase to the attested Hittite one is a short one indeed. One should note, however, that
Kloekhorst (2008: 384 [s.v. MUŠillui̯ anka-, MUŠellii̯ anku-]) does not accept this derivation
of the Hittite word but postulates a loan from some unknown, non-Indo-European source.
The same view (that the word is “[a]utochthonous” and not derived from Indo-
European), can be found in Puhvel (HED) vol 2: 358-359 (s.v. illuyanka-, elliyanku-).
122 If one follows the Leiden school of Indo-European linguistics, one would object to

an *o-vowel in the reconstructed word for “serpent” and prefer a vowel-coloring

laryngeal *h3 followed by an *e (the Leiden school in general is quite prone to finding
laryngeals—for structural and formal reasons—in places with other Indo-Europeanists
would not). In fact, the Greek etymological dictionary of Beekes, who is part of the
Leiden school, reconstructs the word in this very way, as *h3egwhi-, based on the absence
of Brugmann’s law in Sanskrit (a contested and somewhat unreliable sound-law, which
would ideally have yielded a long vowel in Sanskrit as a result of an *o in an open
syllable, i.e., the nonexistent **āhi-)—see Beekes 2010: 1135 (s.v. ὄφις). For the
purposes of the reconstruction of Watkins’ proto-phrase, it does not matter greatly
whether it was *egwhent ogwhim or the more “Leiden-esque” *h1egwhent h3egwhim: both
provide the word play on the *gwh-sounds discussed later in the main text. In fact, a
laryngeal *h3 could possibly even strengthen that factor, as the sound appears to have
been labialized (due to its o-coloring effects) and may well have been pronounced
something like [γw], thus providing yet another sound quite similar to *gwh as part of the
same phrase!
60 Unburning Fame

“sound” in the proto-language itself.123 This phonological distinctiveness is not

preserved unadulterated in any of the descendent languages, increasing the
probability that the phrase actually goes back to Proto-Indo-European, as the
totality of the euphonic wordplay would only be discernible in the reconstructed
proto-language.

4.8.1 The Formulation of a Possible Northwest Semitic Proto-Phrase,

and Its Reconstruction
Now, if we are to examine ways in which the dragon/serpent slaying motif may
have moved from an Indo-European to a Northwest Semitic context, I believe
that it would serve our purposes to carry out a similar exercise to the one
discussed by Watkins, i.e., to think about what an early Northwest Semitic
formulation of the serpent slaying motif may have sounded like. This is of
course a very difficult task, yet one cannot disregard the fact that we possess
quite a viable candidate for such an inherited phrase preserved both in the
Hebrew and in the Ugaritic material. This is in the famously connected passages
KTU 1.5 I 1-8 (quoted earlier) and Isa 27:1, one of the most famous Hebrew-
Ugaritic parallels of all, including as they do the extremely striking
correspondence of terminology (ʿăqallātôn/ʿqltn for “twisted/writhing” and
bārīaḥ/brḥ for “quick, fleeing,” the first of which is a hapax legomenon in
Hebrew, making an accidental correspondence practically impossible):

k tmḫṣ . ltn . bṯn . brḥ As/because you smote Litan, the fleeing serpent,
tkly . bṯn . ʿqltn . killed off the writhing serpent,
šlyṭ . d . šbʿt . rašm the ruler with seven heads,
tṯkḥ . ttrp . šmm . the heavens will burn hot and shine/be weakened.
krs ipdk . ank . I, even I, will tear you to pieces—
ispi . uṭm ḏrqm . amtm . I will swallow elbows, blood, and forearms.
l yrt b npš . bn ilm . mt . You will surely descend into the throat of
divine Mot,
b mhmrt . ydd . il . ġzr into the gullet of El’s beloved, the hero.
(KTU 1.5 I 1-8)

Bayyôm hahûʾ yipqōd YHWH On that day, YHWH will punish

bĕḥarbô haqqāšâ wĕhaggĕdôlâ
wĕhaḥăzāqâ with his hard, great and strong sword,
ʿal liwyātān nāḥāš bārīaḥ Leviathan, the fleeing serpent,
wĕʿāl liwyātān nāḥāš ʿăqallātôn Leviathan, the writhing serpent,
wĕhārag ʾet-hattannîn
ʾăšer bayyām he will kill the Dragon in the sea.
(Isa 27:1)

123 See Watkins 1995: 365 for the importance of the *gwh-sounds.
 4. Chaos Dragons 61

As I have argued in greater detail in Wikander 2017, these correspondences are

neither due to coincidence (which would be almost impossible) nor to
borrowing from Ugaritic into Hebrew (which would be highly unlikely due to
the great distance between the places of origin and temporal situations of the
texts).124 Rather, the correspondence must be regarded as an instance of shared
poetic inheritance, i.e., as testimonies to the shared and inherited Northwest
Semitic poetic language that both Ugaritic and Hebrew poets could take
recourse to—and which underlay their respective poetic traditions. This means
that the correspondence is of the same sort as the one that Watkins posited for
the Indo-European serpent killing phrases: various inherited instances of an
original, poetic proto-phrase, which served to carry the mythological motif with
it as it developed into different languages/linguistic cultures.
The apparently poetically inherited formulations that the Hebrew and
Ugaritic passages share are after all the name of the Serpent (ltn/liwyātān), a
verb for committing violence, and certain stock epithets of the Serpent. The fact
that that the verb pāqad in Hebrew carries a certain theological load that fits
well with the specific context of Isaiah 27 (a proto-apocalyptic eschatological
vision of the end of days) would render it probable that the original Proto-
Northwest Semitic phrase included a verb with a more simple meaning of
“fight” or “slay,” quite possibly the same verb mḫṣ that the Ugaritic text uses (in
its Hebrew incarnation, mḥṣ), as I shall argue below.
As hinted at above, if we want to compare the preserved Northwest Semitic
serpent slaying data with the Indo-European material, it will not do simply to
compare attested texts from various ages. To be able to carry out a comparison
at an earlier level (cf. sections 2.2 and 4.7), we must try to go behind the
Ugaritic and Hebrew instances of the serpent myth and try to reach at a common
Northwest Semitic proto-formulation. To do this, we will be carrying out a
parallel reconstructive search to that attempted by Watkins in the Indo-European
linguistic sphere. And, as we shall see, such a search may in fact tell us
something new about certain textual entities from the Hebrew Bible, showcasing
the exegetical applicability of “etymological poetics” as we perform our search,
which may finally help explain the connections between the biblical story and
its Indo-European parallels..
Even though the various biblical text examples of the dragon story (or
better: the preserved biblical pieces of reception of that story that must one day
have existed) use a number of different Hebrew verbs when describing the
striking/slaying/piercing action of the storm god YHWH against the Serpent, I
believe that we can postulate that behind all these there probably lies an original
phrase or number of phrases quite similar to the Ugaritic one quoted above. As,
mentioned, I would find it very plausible that this reconstructed proto-phrase
originally included the verb *mḫṣ, “to strike, slay,” the same verb used in the
Ugaritic text. We have already looked at a couple of places in the Hebrew Bible

124 This means that I disagree with Barker (2014: 214-216), who posits the possibility

of an actual, historical connection between the Ugaritic text and the Isaian one.
62 Unburning Fame

that suggest nqb, “to pierce,” as a more specific possibility for describing the
mode in which the battling was thought to have occurred, but I think that the
more general fact of YHWH (or storm gods generally) having slain a serpent
may well have been expressed using *mḫṣ,
The reasons for this are multiple. For one, the various other verbs used in
the bits and pieces of reception of the dragon story that the Hebrew Bible
actually preserves are very often specializations of the general meaning
“slay/kill/strike,” when applied to specific forms of weaponry (as discussed
above). Behind these different verbs—which appear to be used in order to
preserve specific types of “anti-dragon violence” inherent in the weapons used
(or certain theological implications, such as in the use of pāqad in Isa 27:1)—
there should probably once have been a single proto-phrase. For this, the verb
*mḫṣ (Hebrew mḥṣ, “smite, strike, slay”) is a likely candidate, as that verb is (a)
clearly tied to ancient Northwest Semitic poetic diction, (b) more general in its
meaning, (c) attested in the same context in the Baal Cycle, and (d) actually
attested itself in one of the biblical dragon slaying passages (Job 26:12). Also, it
is a verb used generally in archaic or archaizing Hebrew poetry for destroying
enemies: we have examples such as Deut 33:11, Judg 5:26, 2 Sam 22:39, Pss
18:39, 68:22, 110:5, 6, and Hab 3:13.
Even though these instances of *mḫṣ do not in themselves concern a
dragon or serpent, some of them may show traces of such a reference in a sort of
subliminal way. Take the case of Deut 33:11. The second half of this verse says
(of Levi; the one addressed is YHWH):

Mĕḥaṣ motnayim qāmāyw

ûmĕśanʾāyw min-yĕqûmûn

Smite the loins of his adversaries

and his enemies, so that they cannot rise up!

The syntax of this passage is rather strange: the absolute state of motnayim
(“loins”) stands out. One would expect the construct state motnê (a form which
is in fact represented in the Samaritan Pentateuch).125 One possible solution to
this problem—which would fit extremely well with the search for a Northwest
Semitic dragon-slaying proto-phrase—would be to argue that motnayim here is
actually a textual corruption of tannīnîm, so that the half-verse would read:

125See Ronning 1997: 112, in which it is argued that this word is to be analyzed as a
part of a double accusative (if one does not follow the Samaritan text). It is rather
interesting that Ronning adduces this passage when discussing the cursing of the serpent
(!) in Gen 3:15, which also appears to include such a double accusative. He also includes
mḥṣ as a relevant verb of comparison. He does not, however, try to amend the text in the
way that I suggest above.
 4. Chaos Dragons 63

Mĕḥaṣ tannīnîm qāmāyw

ûmĕśanʾāyw min-yĕqûmûn

Smite the serpents, his adversaries,

and his enemies, so that they cannot rise up.

After all, the root qwm is used of the enemies of the Storm God at Ugarit,126
which would fit very well with such a reconstruction. The emendation would
only entail a change from attested MTNYM to reconstructed TNNYM in
unpointed Hebrew.
There is contextual support for such an emendation, as well. As pointed out
by Kloos,127 the context of the line argues for an association with the sphere of
water motifs (note the mention of tĕhōm in 33:13, which speaks of Joseph;
Kloos does not, however, bring 33:11 into the discussion of that line, but rather
focuses on “beneficent moisture”).
2 Sam 22:39 and Ps 18:39 are variants of the same line, both of which have
Psalmist declare that he “smote them [the enemies]” (wāʾemṣāḥēm/ʾemṣāḥēm);
it should be noted that this is used in a psalm abounding in Northwest Semitic
storm god imagery (including the destruction of the sea), which is of course one
of the reasons that I quoted it above in section 4.2. Even though the subject of
the sentence(s) with mḥṣ here is a human being and not the deity himself, it
shows the association of the verbal root with this type of poetic diction and with
the motif sphere of the raging, chaos-battling god of the storm.
A similar context can be found for the attestation in Ps 68:22. The verse
and the one following it run:

ʾak-ʾĕlōhîm yimḥaṣ rōʾš ʾōyĕbāyw

qodqōd śēʿār mithallēk bĕʾăšāmāyw
ʾāmar ʾădōnāy mibbāšān ʾāšîb
ʾāšîb mimmĕṣūlôt yām

Yes, God strikes the head of his enemies,

the hair-covered skull of him that walks around in his shame.
The Lord said: “From Bashan/the Serpent I will bring [them] back,
I will bring them back from the depths of the sea. […]”
(Ps 68:22-23)128

126 KTU 1.10 II 24-25. The collocation involving enemies and qwm also occurs in
Exod 15:6-7, as part of the biblical Song of the Sea, a text not without relevance in the
present context (a parallel noted, e.g., in Kloos 1986: 133).
127 Kloos 1986: 79-80.
128 The MT includes the verb again in 68:24, but this is probably a textual corruption

for tirḥaṣ (cf. BHSApp and LXX).

64 Unburning Fame

Here, the context of the chaotic sea (with which the serpent monster is almost
always associated in the Northwest Semitic tradition) is quite clearly stated. The
echoes of the combat myth are, to my mind, quite clear. If the “enemies” are to
be regarded as human (with “hair-covered skulls”), they proably represent a
historization of the enemy par excellence, the Dragon. The word bāšān itself
has been plausibly suggested to be a reflex of the same word as the Ugaritic bṯn,
meaning “serpent,” which would fit very nicely indeed with a “serpent battle
interpretation” of these lines.129 And the verb used is, again, mḥṣ.
One may note that Deuteronomy 33 (which we just looked at) has also
been suggested to include a reference to the Serpent under the guise of the word
bāšān in 33:22,130 strengthening the possibility that Deut 33:11 indeed includes
a reference to the Serpent battle tradition.
In Ps 110:6b-7a, we find another possible connection between the verbal
root and the battle against the sea (subtextually, as the context ostensibly deals
with human kings):

Māḥas rōʾš ʿal ʾereṣ rabbâ

minnaḥal badderek yišteh

He strikes head(s) over the great land.

From a brook on the way he drinks.

The root also occurs in Hab 3:13; again, its objects is the “head” of enemies, yet
the text clearly abounds in imagery from the chaos battle tradition, and vv. 8-9
clearly name the “rivers” (nĕhārîm) as YHWH’s enemies. This, again, means
that the verb mḥṣ is associated with the motif of the chaos battle, supporting its
reconstruction in a Proto-Northwest Semitic formulation of the same.

So, we are on our way to a probable reconstruction of what such a reconstructed

version of the serpent motif may have sounded like. We have:

129 As noted by Robert D. Miller (2013: 207), following Charlesworth 2004: 355-
356, 358 (note also the summary on pp. 370-372). The idea that the word bāšān here has
to do with the serpent monster is far older, though, going back to Albright 1950/1951:
27-28, also mentioning the importance of mḥṣ. It was followed in Dahood 1968: 131,
145-146, where an even more “Ugaritoid” interpretation was argued (translating the
second ʾāšîb of the MT as “muzzled,” from the root šbm, reading the following m as part
of the word). The serpent interpretation can also be found, e.g., in Seybold 1996: 261-262
and Wakeman 1973: 83-84. As pointed out by Miller in his footnote 7, however, there is
the problem of Ugaritic bṯn perhaps having a cognate in Hebrew peten as well. However,
the sound correspondences in the latter case would be anomalous, rendering the equation
difficult (Ugaritic ṯ should equal Hebrew š, which indeed it would in bāšān, and the b-p
correspondence is non-standard, too). Borrowing may well be involved in the peten case.
The “Bashan as serpent” interpretation has not been without detractors: Day (1985: 115)
rejects it, partly due to the existence of peten.
130 Proposed, based on a suggestion from Albright, in Cross and Freedman 1948: 208

and followed, e.g., in Mayes 1981: 409.

 4. Chaos Dragons 65

*Mḫṣ (3rd person singular), a word for “serpent” and (possibly) a weapon.

What I would suggest now is the following: if one strips this Northwest Semitic
phraseology down to its bare bones, one arrives at this semantic load:

HE (the hero) SLEW THE SERPENT (with WEAPON)

4.8.2 The Proto-Phrases as Connected

This, in effect, is exactly the same type of poetic phrase that Watkins postulated
for Proto-Indo-European, and I would argue that this is no coincidence. What if
the background of the “Leviathan-phrase” (in its different guises) actually
represents a calque of the very phrase that Watkins reconstructed—or at least a
descendant thereof?131 The correspondence is perfect. 132 And it would explain
why, in both Indo-European and Northwest Semitic, a poetic formula about
slaying a serpent or dragon is one of the clearest instances of “etymological
poetic” inheritance to be found: it is, in essence, the same phrase.
If this is so, we have yet another sign that the question is not simply one of
a motif having been borrowed. In combination with the terminology used to
refer to combatants (see section 4.6), I would say that this is highly significant
evidence for the dragon-slaying motif having been borrowed from Indo-
European to Semitic cultures. The distinctiveness of the terminology in the
Indo-European versions (the *gwh-sounds, the use of the verb *terh2-u in both
Anatolian and Indo-Iranian) points strongly to the Indo-European version being
primary. Also, I would argue that it is quite probable that the transmission of the
motif occurred in stages: the bare-bones version of the “Watkins formula” could
theoretically have been transmitted at a very early period (perhaps temporally
closer to Proto-Indo-European itself than the attested Indo-Iranian and Anatolian
versions of the story), but this possibly very early borrowing could then have
been “buttressed” by later influence, probably both from Anatolian and Indo-
Iranian sources.

131 To be specific, both the calqued Semitic phrases and the original Indo-European

phrase from which they are herein argued to be ultimately derived/calqued may be
“descendants,” each in its own sense: the Indo-European phrase that was calqued may
well be a descendant of the oldest Proto-Indo-European version (though still probably
very early, near the proto-language level, if one counts with the euphonic word play upon
*gwh having been reflected in the Semitic calque, as argued below), and the Semitic
phrases are descendants of an early calque which was subsequently inherited within
Northwest Semitic. That is: the calquing in all probability took place at a point earlier
than both the Ugaritic and the Hebrew passages.
132 And the correspondence is even better if one accepts the arguments of García-

Ramón (1998), who is of the view that the original root meaning of Proto-Indo-European
*gwhen- is not simply “slay, kill,” but an iterative one, “wiederholt schlagen,” “töten.”
This would match the semantics of Semitic *mḫṣ very well, as that verb can (in different
stem forms) mean both “kill, smite” and “fight with.” For further variants of the Indo-
European phrase (with “splitting,” *bheid-), see Slade 2008 [2010].
66 Unburning Fame

If one wishes to allow oneself a little further leeway in speculating, one may
consider the possibility of a reconstructable Proto-Northwest Semitic serpent
slaying formula having included some piece of distinctive word-play similar to
the one probably found in the Proto-Indo-European phrase. As mentioned
earlier, the Proto-Indo-European phrase appears to have involved a playing and
beautifying use of the highly unusual sound *gwh in both its major constitutent
parts (the verb “slew”, *[e]gwhent, and the accusative form of the “serpent”
word, *ogwhim). If, as I have suggested, the Proto-Northwest Semitic formula
was in fact loan-translated from the Indo-European one (at some stage of its
development), it could possibly be suspected that the borrowers would try to
create a parallel piece of word-play in their own, Semitic, language. If one looks
at the etymological material that appears to have been used when describing
serpent battles in the Northwest Semitic ambit, such a possible playing
collocation actually suggests itself.
Whereas the use of the root *mḫṣ as the verb for expressing the battle itself
is highly likely to represent an ancient piece of Proto-Northwest Semitic diction
(see above), the word used for the serpent (the object of the verb) is less clear.
One finds various terms: the name Leviathan/Litan, the word nāḥāš/nḥš, the
Ugaritic bṯn (also meaning “serpent”), and others. However, one of these
possibilities would provide just the sort of distinctive wordplay mentioned
above as having been present in the Proto-Indo-European template of the
borrowing, namely nāḥāš/nḥš.133 If one reconstructs the poetic phrase in Proto-
Northwest Semitic using that particular lexeme, one arrives as something like
the following collocation (presupposing a narrative short-yaqtul as the verbal
form used and adding the accusative -a):

*yimḫaṣ naḥaša “He killed the Serpent.”

Such a phrase would form almost as beautiful a play on phonemes as Proto-

Indo-European *egwhent ogwhim: both words would have at their core a sequence
of (1) a nasal sound, (2) an unvoiced “guttural” fricative, and (3) a sibilant. This
would constitue a highly loaded phonetic sequence indeed. If one presupposes
the somewhat less likely yet still possible case of the verb having been put in the
qatala form instead, the correspondence between the sounds becomes even
more apparent:

*maḫaṣa naḥaša “He killed the Serpent.”

The phonemic patterning would be beautiful indeed:

133 Note, though, that the Ugaritic version quoted above has created a piece of

wordplay of its own, manifested in the alliterative phrase bṯn brḥ (“fleeing serpent”).
This, though differing from the reconstructed phrase that I posit above, may well show a
surviving propensity for expressing the chaos battle in wordplay—or it is possible that
this phrase is of Proto-Northwest Semitic provenance as well.
 4. Chaos Dragons 67

NASAL-a-GUTTURAL-a-SIBILANT-a (*maḫaṣa)
NASAL-a-GUTTURAL-a-SIBILANT-a (*naḥaša)

It is certainly hard to prove beyond doubt that such a formula existed, but it
would fit the preserved textual data very well as well as provide a perfect vector
for Watkins’ reconstructed Indo-European phrase to have entered Northwest
Semitic: it carries the same semantic load while providing a counterpart to the
phonetic wordplay inherent in its presumed Vorlage. The latter could also be
said (to an extent) for the version of the phrase including the verb nqb:

*naqaba naḥaša “He pierced the Serpent.”

However, the fit with *mḫṣ is better—so good, indeed, that it suggests a
historical dependency, which must then go back to a period when the Proto-
Indo-European wordplay was “hearable,” which means that the borrowing
would have to have been quite early indeed. Later, the Ugaritic poets (or their
forebears) imported the “Conqueror”-terminology and buttressed the
mythological pattern with even more Indo-European material. And finally, the
motifs ended up in the Hebrew Bible. Only through following the etymological
poetic material can this great river of mythological tradition be uncovered, and,
as we have seen, such a study can be of direct exegetical relevance for our
understanding of biblical texts. The slayers of serpents become pointers to
religio-historical tradition, and that tradition helps us read the texts as preserved
for us.
 5. Beings of Smoke:
Terms for Living Breath and Humanity
in Indo-European, Ugaritic and Hebrew—
and Remarks on Fatlings and Merciful Bodies
From dragons and serpents, we move on to the semantic sphere of anthropology,
as expressed in mythological terms, and to its intersection with that of liturgy.
This chapter will deal with a number of Ugaritic and biblical mythological
motifs concerning life and bodies that may have an Indo-European background.
The most important is that of “smoke” as a piece of imagery illustrating the life-
spirits or vital force of humankind and that of animals growing “puffed up,”
overfed or swollen as an illustration of upstart, rebellious and ungrateful
behavior. These two motifs are both interesting enough in and of themselves to
merit individual sections or chapters; I have, however, chosen to discuss them
“in tandem,” as some of the textual passages that I will analyze include both of
them, which results in it making better sense to do a bit of jumping back and
forth between the two. As a point of departure, we shall begin with the “life as
smoke” motif at Ugarit, and see where that takes us.

5.1 “Life as Smoke” in the Ugaritic Aqhat Story

The Ugaritic Epic of Aqhat—that deals with the exploits of the hero Danel, his
quest for a son, and the subsequent murder of that son (the young hero Aqhat) at
the instigation of the goddess Anat—includes a recurring passage concerning
the duties of the ideal son in relation to his father, a passage that has become
well known among students of Ugaritic by virtue of its rather amusing
description of those duties including having to mend one’s father’s roof, as well
as supporting him when he is inebriated. As the Epic is to a large extent
centered on the question of the importance of producing an heir, the relation
between masculine generations, and the role of somewhat stereotypical
“manliness,” it is no wonder that such a list turns up and is repeated a number of
times. This formulaic passage does, however, not only discuss the above-
mentioned rather mundane aspects of filial duty: there are also references to
overtly religious practices that are to make up parts of the ideal relationship
between a son and a father. Indeed, these religious duties stand at the beginning
of the list, which says the following when describing the ideal son:

nṣb . skn . ilibh . One who can set up a stele for his father-god,
b qdš ztr . ʿmh . a ztr for his kinsman in the sanctuary OR: in
the ztr-sanctuary of his kinsmen/the sanctuary
for the “lying down” of his kinsmen,134

134 See below, section 5.2.1, for a detailed excursus on my views of the enigmatic and

much-discussed word ztr and its relevance to the present passage.

68
 5. Beings of Smoke 69

l arṣ . mšṣu . qṭrh one who can bring out his “smoke” from
the earth/netherworld,
l ʿpr . ḏmr . aṯrh . who protects/sings forth his remains from
the dust.
(KTU 1.17 I 26-28)

As with many (most?) passages of Ugaritic poetic text, there are many
uncertainties of interpretation in these lines. The one that concerns us here is the
expression l arṣ mšṣu qṭrh, which is made up of the adverb l arṣ (“from the
earth/netherworld”), a masculine singular participle of the causative Š stem of
the verbal root yṣʾ (“to exit, to go out” and thereby in the present form “one who
brings out” or “one who can bring out”) and a direct object qṭrh, meaning
something like “his smoke” or “his incense.”
The main debate concerning this expression has centered on what this
“smoke” or “incense” is referring to. There have basically been two lines of
argument proposed here. The first is that the expression refers to some form of
physical incense ceremony (which also implies that arṣ is here to be translated
“earth” or “land”) and the second one is that the word is meant to signify the
spiritual “smoke” or, in a way, the soul of the deceased father, who would then
be brought out of the earth (in the sense of “netherworld”) by the means of ritual
action.135

5.2 An Anatolian Background for the “Smoke” Motif

The common Hittite word for “human being” is interesting to bring into the
discussion at this point. The word in question is antuwaḫḫaš- (with a later by-
form antuḫša-), and it is almost unanimously interpreted as representing a
univerbation of an old Indo-European compound involving the root *dhweh2-
(more common in the zero grade of Indo-European Ablaut, as *dhuh2-), a root
having to do with “smoke.” The Hittite word is usually explained as
representing the expression *h1n-dhwéh2-ōs (with the genitive *h1n-dhuh2-sós),
which would literally mean something like “having smoke inside [him].” 136 The
root itself appears in words like Sanskrit dhūma- (meaning “smoke”), Latin
fūmus, etc. As pointed out by Kloekhorst (following an analysis by Eichner),
there is an almost perfect parallel to the Hittite word for “human” (“having
smoke inside”) in the Greek expression ἔνθυμος, “spirited” (=“having spirit

135
For an overview of the different positions, with references to earlier scholarlship,
see Schmidt 1994: 60-62.
136 See Kloekhorst 2008: 188-189 (s.v. antuuaḫḫaš-/antuḫš-), including the formal

reconstructions; the same root etymology is cautiously endorsed as “more suggestive”

than other proposals in Puhvel (HED), vol. 1: 82 (s.v. antu(wa)hha-, antusa-). The
etymology goes back to Heiner Eichner 1979 (see next footnote). One notes with some
surprise that NIL does not include any instance of the *dhweh2-root.
70 Unburning Fame

inside,” where “spirit” is the old “smoke” word).137 One may also note with
some interest that there is a quite similar Indo-European root *dhwes-, meaning
“breathe”; that root is the background of the Germanic word that appears in
Swedish djur, “animal,” and English deer, and it has been suggested that this
root is related to the “smoke” root. 138 A connection between “breath” and
“smoke” is not hard, after all (as shown by the Hittite word discussed above—
and note that the Hittite verb tuḫḫai-, from the “smoke” root, means “to
cough”).
What I would like to propose is that the fact of a root having to do with
“smoke” serving as derivational basis for a word for “human being” in Hittite
may create a background for the strange expression about “bringing out the
smoke” in the Aqhat epic. If we reckon with the possibility of an Anatolian
influence on the (background of) the text, the reference to “bringing out the
smoke” of the dead father is no longer that much of a conundrum: it is not a
matter of smoke or spirit—it is both at the same time. The human being would
be a thing with “smoke” inside, and the act of bringing that smoke out could
refer both to some necromantic/ancestral worshipping ritual and to the role of
“smoke/incense” in a liturgical setting. However, we have to adduce some
further arguments for this interpretation to convince. Are there other signs that
Anatolian influence could be in play here?
I believe that there are. Another indication that the Anatolian conception of
human beings as ones “with smoke inside them” could be obliquely referenced
here is the fact that there is another word having to do with “smoke” or incense
in the Aqhat epic, one which has a clear and definite Hittite pedigree. This is the
word dġṯ, which only occurs in two places in the entire Ugaritic corpus, both of
them in the Aqhat text (close to each other: KTU 1.19 IV 24 and 1.19 IV 31).
This word is used to describe the incense (?) that Aqhat’s father Danel sends up
into the sky after wailing women have visited his house as a result of the young
hero Aqhat having been slain by the goddess Anat. It is normally regarded as
representing a loan from Hittite tuḫḫuiš (nominative of the stem tuḫḫui-), a word
meaning “smoke” (or, by extrapolation, “offering of smoke”),139 that is derived

137 Kloekhorst 2008: 189 (s.v. antuuaḥḥaš-/antuḫš-); Eichner 1979: 77 (the latter

renders the literal meaning of the compund as “der Atem in sich hat”). Also mentioned in
Puhvel (HED), vol. 1: 82 (s.v. antu(wa)hha-, antusa-).
138 So, apparently, Lehmann 1986: 92 (s.v. *dius). A relationship between the roots

also seems to be implied in Starostin’s IE database, s.v. *dhū (starling.rinet.ru, Proto-

Indo-Hittite *dhuH, last accessed Dec 10, 2016). The LIV however, clearly regards the
two roots as separate.
139 The origin of this idea is found in an article by Harry A. Hoffner (1964). One

should note, however, that Hoffner’s suggestion entailed an interpretation squarely

situating the Sitz im Leben of the term in a cultic context. He even argues (p. 68) that the
Hittite term was transferred to Ugarit and Ugaritic specifically through the mediation of
foreign cult functionaries. The connection with the Hittite word has been further
elaborated by de Moor (1965: 355 and 1970: 200), who specifically looked to the
derivation tuḫḫueššar (allegedly meaning “incense”). It need to be borne in mind,
however, that the translation of Hittite tuḫḫueššar as “incense” is not certain (as opposed
 5. Beings of Smoke 71

from the very same Indo-European root *dhweh2-/*dhuh2- that formed the basis
of antuwaḫḫaš- (“human,” being with smoke inside”). The use of this Hittite-
derived term for “smoke/incense” at another place in the same text strengthens
the possibility of the root being referenced in the “filial duties” passage as well.

The passage from Aqhat concerning Danel’s sending up of “smoke” is

interesting for two reasons:

(1) The use of a Hittite-derived word for the “smoke” that Danel sends up
to the gods shows that an association between the inherited Semitic qṭr
(“smoke, incense”) and the borrowed Indo-European concept could be
made in Ugaritic culture, thus making it easy to identify the one with
the other. To bolster this point, it should be pointed out that there is in
fact an Akkadian/Hittite bilingual in existence which clearly equates a
form of the Hittite word tuḫḫuu̯ai- (a variant stem of tuḫḫui-) with
Akkadian qutra (“smoke,” from the same root as Ugaritic qṭr).140 This
shows that the Hittite and Semitic roots could be identified with each
other outright already in antiquity, reinforcing the connection. 141 This
makes the earlier, filial duty concerning qṭr easy to read with the
Anatolian root in mind.
(2) Given what was stated earlier in the text about a son having as a duty
to bring out the “smoke/incence” (qṭr) from the “earth/netherworld,” a
startling possibility suggests itself: that both these attestations are to be
read as references to the Anatolian/Indo-European concept of the
“smoke” or breath that forms the central life essence of a human being
(as shown in the Hittite word antuwaḫḫaš-). If both these passages
actually refer to that idea, or at least have it as a punning background
when talking of “smoke/incense,” the tragic irony of the text becomes
almost palpable: bringing out the “smoke” of the father was stated to
be the duty of the ideal son, but it is the father who has to perform this
sad duty for his own, murdered heir. Aqhat was an antuwaḫḫaš-, and
now Danel has to bring his tuḫḫuiš out of the earth. Thus the father
takes the role of the son, underscoring the gravity of the situation and

to the relatively clear meaning of tuḫḫui-). It has also been interpreted as meaning
“sponge” (see Kloekhorst 2008: 892-893 [s.v. tuḫḫueššar / tuḫḫueššn-] for a discussion
and arguments in favor of the latter interpretation). The connection with the Hittite root
having to do with “smoke” is followed in Margalit 1989: 446, where it is argued that the
point is not the smoke as such, but the perfume-like fragrance. This view is, of course,
quite different than what I argue above. The DUL (p. 266, s.v. dġṯ) also translates the
word as “offering of perfumes (?)”
140 The Akkadian word has a non-emphatic t due to the operation of Geers’ Law

(causing dissimilation of one of two emphatics in the same Akkadian word).

141 The words occur in KBo X 2 iii 40 and KBo X 1 verso 23—see Kloekhorst 2008:

895 (s.v. tuḫḫuu̯ai- / tuḫḫui-).

72 Unburning Fame

showing how the murderous plans of Anat metaphorically turn the

world of the story upside down.

These points show a deeper poetical level to the Aqhat story and also hint at a
piece of religio-historical interaction: the Ugaritic poet appears to have taken
over a piece of philosophical anthropology from his or her Anatolian-speaking
neighbors. The deep and sad irony in the text only becomes understandable if
one knows something of this background of cultural interaction.
Taken by itself, this idea might seem like an attractive but somewhat
farfetched connection. It is, however, directly supported at another place in the
Aqhat text itself. At KTU 1.18 IV 24-26, Anat instructs her hired-hand Yatpan
and describes their forthcoming murder of the young hero Aqhat using the
following words:

tṣi . km rḥ . npšh May his life/soul go out like wind,

km . iṯl . brlth . like spittle of his gullet,
km qṭr . b aph like smoke from his mouth!

Here, Aqhat’s vital power/soul (npš) is identified outright with the “smoke”
(qṭr) that will exit his mouth. Note also that the verb used is yṣʾ (“to go out,” “to
exit”), exactly the same verbal root that occurred in the list of filial duties (albeit
in a different stem form). A clearer confirmation of the above analysis could not
be asked for. One should also note that this passage also includes a probable
Hittite loanword, iṯl from Hittite iššalli-, meaning “spittle.” This becomes even
more poignant when one realizes that this Hittite word is etymologically derived
from Hittite aiš (“mouth”), making the word fit exactly in the context.142
The lines said by Anat show clearly that killing someone is, in the mind of
the Aqhat poet, the same thing as driving his “smoke” out. Aqhat is, for lack of
a better word, an antuwaḫḫaš-. He is a being “with smoke inside.”
One of the most poetically impressive features of this use of the “smoke”
imagery is the fact that it in a sense combines anthropology and liturgy. Using
the simile of the “smoke” brings an etymologically motivated expression of the
nature of humankind (at least from the Anatolian point of view) into contact
with the liturgical/sacrificial idea of the incense offering. Therein, I argue, lies
much of the dramatic irony. This association between a specific view of the
nature of human life and a certain form of ritual or liturgical practice in a way

142 This fitting relationship as well as the beautiful and perfect poetic parallelism

between the second and third cola are convincing signs that Margalit’s (1989: 342-343)
objection against the common translation “spittle” (and the Hittite etymology) is wrong.
Margalit is of the view that “spittle” does not fit with the “soul” and “smoke” words.
This, however, misses the point of the poetic parallelism (the combining factor being
things exiting through the mouth). The suggestion of iṯl being a loan from the Hittite
“spittle” word was made by de Moor (1965: 363-364). For the etymological connection
between Hittite aiš (”mouth”) and iššalli- (“spittle”), see Kloekhorst 2008: 166 (s.v. aiš /
išš-).
 5. Beings of Smoke 73

brings to mind the majestic conception of the Priestly author in Genesis 1,

which uses its vision of the creation of the world as a motivation for a recurring
Sabbath service.
The liturgical sense of the passage is even more clearly underscored if we
presuppose the interpretation of the verb ḏmr to be “to sing” (rather than the
other common proposed translation, “to guard, to protect”). In that case, the line
containing this word could actually refer to an act of ritualistically calling forth
the “smoke” of the dead ancestor by means of song, a kind of “musical
necromancy,” so to speak. If this interpretation is correct, one cannot help but
associate it with the interesting fact that the one clear description of necromancy
in the Hebrew Bible, Saul’s visit to the witch of Endor in 1 Sam 28, describes
the necromancer and her acts using one of the Hebrew words not seldom
explained as representing a borrowing from Hittite (or possibly Hurrian): the
witch is called a baʿălat ʾôb, and the word ʾôb is itself used as a reference to the
action that she performs. This word may well be identical with the Hittite āpi-,
meaning “sacrificial pit” (as mentioned, possibly a Hurrian word originally). A
concept of “singing” forth the “smoke” of the dead would fit very well with
Hittite-derived expressions for the power of life itself. Was perhaps this type of
“singing forth the smoke” exactly what the story about Saul and the witch of
Endor was meant to convey? 143

The tendency to use the root *dhweh2-/*dhuh2- to denote the vital force of
humanity is not restricted to the Anatolian subgroup of Indo-European. As
mentioned in passing earlier, we also find it in Greek, where the word θυμός
(from Proto-Indo-European *dhuh2-mo-) is used to mean “spirit”, “soul” or even
(in the words of Liddel/Scott) “the principle of life, feeling and thought.”144
Given what was stated earlier about the “smoke” motif integrating anthropology
with liturgy and ritualism, one should note the Greek verb θύω, which means “to
sacrifice (especially by burning),” and also the noun θυμίαμα, meaning

143 A “necromantic” interpretation of the filial duty of “bringing out the smoke” in

Aqhat can be found, e.g., in Margalit 1989: 217 (talking of the ilib or “father-god”). The
interpretation of ʾôb as a Hurro-Hittite loan can be found in 1963: 115-116. On the
Hurrian origin of the Hittite word (at least in the first instance), see Puhvel (HED), vol. 1:
100-101 (s.v. api-); note also that Ugaritic ilib (see below) has also been drawn into the
discussion. The classical study on the possible background of ʾôb is Hoffner 1967. A
conservative—to say the least!—attitude towards discussing the etymology of ʾôb can be
found in Cryer 259-260, esp. n. 1; Cryer does not accept a borrowing as proven but gives
many references (sometimes acerbic) to contributions on the subject. Beal (2002: 204, n.
41) accepts the connection. For a rather recent discussion of the Hurro-Hittite term in
relationship to archaeological remains from Urkesh, see Kelly-Buccellati 2002, who
speaks of a “Hurrian passage to the netherworld” (in the English version of the article),
also accepting the relationship of the Hebrew word with the Hurro-Hittite one as more or
less given (p. 136-137, n. 8, also pointing out the Hurrian background of the term).
144 Liddel and Scott 1996: 810 (s.v. θῡμός); they give, among other possibilities,

“soul” and “spirit” as well (and, it should be noted, the “physical sense” of “breath,
life”). Beekes (2010: 564 [s.v. θῡμός]) defines the word as “spirit, courage, anger, sense.”
74 Unburning Fame

“incense.” We shall return to the Greek cognates of the “smoke” root later on in
the chapter.

5.2.1 An Excursus on one Possible (and one Impossible) Anatolian Background

of the Word ztr and a note on ilib
If, before moving on to the reception of the “life as smoke” motif in the Hebrew
Bible, we return once more to the passage on the duties of the ideal son (given
in section 5.1), there is one other possible Anatolian influence which could
make the present argument even weightier. The passage also includes the much-
debated hapax legomenon ztr, which has been suggested to be a loan from
Hittite: Tsevat connected the word with Hittite šittar, or šittar(i)-, as he writes
the word, supposedly meaning “votive (sun) disk.” 145 This suggestion has been
followed by others,146 and it would indeed be nice for the present argument if it
could be shown that another technical religious term directly derived from
Hittite occurred in the same passage as the “smoke” terminology. The meaning
of the original Hittite word has been called into question, however, and it now
appears clear that it never meant “sun disk” at all, but rather was a word for
some sort of pointed object, perhaps as part of a spear, a meaning which would
make no sense at all in the Ugaritic passage.147 Attempts to argue for ztr as a
borrowed Anatolian term for a cult object in Ugaritic would thus appear to have
reached a dead end.
However, the problem of the identity of the Ugaritic word still remains.
Attempts to find a Semitic etymology have been forced at best.148 What I would
like to propose in this context is another interpretation of the word based on an
Anatolian prototype—one involving no sun disks whatsoever. Rather, I want to
suggest the possibility of Ugaritic ztr representing a loan from Luwian (rather
than its relative, Hittite). The hypothetical prototype word that I am thinking of
would be *zittar-, a lexeme that is sadly not in itself attested in Luwian, but is
built in a completely regular way and may very probably have existed in that
language. It is made up of the verbal root zī-, “to lie down,” (from Proto-Indo-
European *k̑ei-, appearing in Hittite form as ki-, in Palaic as kī-, and in Lycian

145 Tsevat 1971: 352.

146 For example, see the DUL: 985 (s.v. ztr), which gives “cippus, votive stela”
(referring to the Hittite word) as its first option and Watson 1995: 542, though later
rejected in Watson 2007: 124, due to the same reasons I describe above in the main text.
147 See Starke 1990: 408-416 and, following him, Kloekhorst 2008: 761-762 (s.v.

šittar(a)-). Kloekhorst translates the word as “sharp pointed object” or “spear-point(?).”

The same rejection of Tsevat’s hypothesis can be found in Tropper 2012: 106-107. Also,
the initial z would be uncommon as a rendering of the Hittite sibilant (except for the ztr
possibility, which he rejects, Tropper gives only two quite uncertain cases).
148 One idea that has been put forward is to connect Ugaritic ztr with Akkadian zatēru

and Arabic zaʿtar, meaning “thyme” (Pope 1977: 164, later reiterated in Pope 1981:
160), which would demand a loan via Akkadian to account for the loss of the pharyngeal
present in the Arabic word. There are various other suggestions.
 5. Beings of Smoke 75

as si-)149 and the common deverbal suffix -ttar (in the nominative, -ttn- in the
oblique cases).150 Combined, *zittar- would have to mean something like “act of
lying down.” This would fit extremely well in the “funerary” context of the lines
in which the Ugaritic ztr occurs. One could even reinterpret the words qdš ztr as
a construct chain: “sanctuary of lying down,” i.e., “mortuary sanctuary.” The
whole phrase qdš ztr ʿmh would then be “the mortuary sanctuary of his
kinsmen” or “the sanctuary of his kinsmen’s lying down.” This makes excellent
sense in the passage, it would explain the strange hapax, and it would provide
another piece of Anatolian-derived context for the phrases about “smoke.”
Alternatively, one could translate the putative *zittar- as “thing lying, thing
placed,” which would then refer to the stele (skn) that the ideal son is to set up
in the sanctuary (or be in antonymic parallelism with it: standing stele vs. lying
object). Either way, an Anatolian ritual term seems somehow to be in play in the
Ugaritic text.
Yet another such “Anatolianism” may actually be present in the passage.
The word ilib (mostly translated “father-god” or “father’s god,” or something
similar) has drawn much attention over the years; in this context, I would like to
point out the expression tadinzi massaninzi, “father-gods, fatherly gods,” in
Hieroglyphic Luwian. As the Ugaritic expression ilib is rather special (otherwise
only occurring in a few god lists with literal translation into Akkadian and
Sumerian), the Luwian expression may be a worthy comparandum.

5.3 A Few Points Thus Far

We thus have, in the same contexts:
(1) “Smoke” as an image of life, especially the vital spirit after death,
(2) An originally Hittite word used to signify this in one instance,
(3) This very root for “smoke” underlying the Hittite word for “human,”
(4) A hapax that can be explained as a Luwian loanword meaning “lying
down,” i.e. dying., or a “placed object” in the shrine,151

149 And, outside of the Anatolian subfamily of Indo-European, as Greek κεῖμαι and

Sanskrit śī-.
150 For this Luwian suffix, see Yakubovich 2015: 14 and (in great detail) Starke

1990: 435-525. There is also another suffix -ttar- which does not have the nasal in the
oblique stem, based on Indo-European *-tro- (cf. Starke 1990: 399-418) that could
alternatively be involved here. I would like to thank Craig Melchert for an illuminating
discussion concerning these suffixes. As pointed out by him (email Aug 9, 2016), the
possible objection that the long vowel in the root would cause the -ttar to “lenite” to -tar
(which would probably be rendered at Ugarit as **-dr) carries no weight, as the Luwian
word is probably of late provenance, -ttar already being the ensconced form of the suffix.
151 One may note that the word skn (often translated “stele,” as above) has been

suggested to have Anatolian connections, as well (regardless of its origin; cf. the Hittite
writing NA4.zi-kin—the suggestion was made in Durand 1988). However, as argued by
Watson (2007: 123), a West Semitic background is probable for this word. See DUL:
747-748 (s.v. skn [II]) for further possibilities. See also Schmidt 1994: 50-51.
76 Unburning Fame

(5) A probable reference to “singing forth” the smoke of the dead one,
similar to what happens in the Endor story, in which a Hurrian or
Hittite word is used in context of the necromancy,
(6) An Anatolian loanword being used for the “spittle” that signifies the
life that Anat wants to drive out of Aqhat’s mouth,
(7) A possible parallel between the “father god” and an Anatolian
expression.

All in all, I would say that the Anatolian influence on these Aqhat passages is
undeniable, and that the etymologically grounded image of “life as smoke” is
prominent in it, harking back to Proto-Indo-European imagery concerning life or
vital breath and its transience. We shall now look at how this imagery has lived
on in Israelite literature, probably having been carried there through the shared
Northwest Semitic poetic heritage of which Ugarit is also a part.

5.4 “Smoke” as a Simile for Life in the Hebrew Bible and the Deuterocanon
There are not too many clear and unambiguous examples of the “soul as smoke”
imagery in the Hebrew Bible itself. There are some, to be sure, and we will look
at a number of them. One can, however find a very similar motif in the
Deuterocanonical literature, in a text written in Greek, at that. In the Wisdom of
Solomon, we do find this type of imagery in vv. 2:2-3, when the text poetically
states the reasoning of the unenlightened and ungodly ones, who say the
following:

ὅτι αὐτοσχεδίως ἐγεννήθημεν

καὶ μετὰ τοῦτο ἐσόμεθα ὡς οὐχ ὑπάρξαντες·
ὅτι καπνὸς ἡ πνοὴ ἐν ῥισὶν ἡμῶν,
καὶ ὁ λόγος σπινθὴρ ἐν κινήσει καρδίας ἡμῶν,
οὗ σβεσθέντος τέφρα ἁποβησεται τὸ σῶμα
καὶ τὸ πνεῦμα διαχυθήσεται ὡς χαῦνος ἀήρ.

For we came to be through chance,

and after this we will be as though we had never existed;
for the breath in our nostrils is smoke,
and thought is a spark in the movement of our heart,
and when it is extinguished the body will turn to ashes
and the spirit will be dissolved into empty air.

At the outset, this isolated instance of the “spirit as smoke” motif could be
regarded as no more than a chance resemblance to the Anatolian-derived motif
seen in Aqhat, especially given the great temporal distance. However, it is
interesting to note that it occurs in the very context that it does. I have argued
earlier that lines occurring later in this passage from the Wisdom of Solomon
contains a number of very old motifs (specifically concerning drought and the
 5. Beings of Smoke 77

sun as symbols for death), which I believe to be inherited from ancient North-
West Semitic mythological material—but here put into the mouths of the
ungodly, whom the author of the text wishes to oppose. 152 If I am correct in that
assumption—that the author of Wisdom chap. 2 uses ancient mythopoetic
material to make his points, or rather the points that he puts into the mouths of
his ideological enemies—then the present instance of “smoke” as an image of
the human breath of life could theoretically also be ancient. This would mean
that a chain of transmission has carried the motif as a quiet river through the
centuries.
One link in this chain is clear enough. As I mentioned above, the “smoke”
imagery is not very common in the Hebrew Bible, but we do find one interesting
example in the passage Hos 13:3-6, which, amongst other things, speaks of what
will happen to the Ephraimites by saying that they will go away like “smoke
from a window.” In this passage, “smoke” appears as a symbol of life, and (as
will later be the case in the passage from the Wisdom of Solomon quote above)
this is used to underscore its inconstancy. The Wisdom of Solomon passage’s
use of the motif is certainly borrowed from the Hosea text. Later in this chapter,
I will provide an in-depth exegetical discussion of this pericope from Hosea
based on what I believe to be its religio-historical background, but in order to do
so, I must first digress and talk a bit about the role of the Hurrians in the
transmission of Indo-European mythopoetic material into Ugaritic and Hebrew
literature, as well as of their own contributions.

5.5 The Hurrians as Middle-Men—and the Motif of Fattened Animals

Before moving on to other relevant Old Testament texts, we must do a detour
outside of the realm of direct Indo-European/Northwest Semitic interaction.
When discussing spread of words, motifs and ideas between Indo-European and
Old Testament culture, one at one point or another has to ask oneself which
paths these interactions and borrowings may have taken. There are, of course, an
almost innumerable amount of such possible avenues of interaction in addition
to direct contact (cf. section 2.2), but, for the present purposes, there is one of
these that really stands out, as mentioned at the end of the chapter on dragon
slaying: the Hurrians and Mitanni.
The Hurrians were not an Indo-European people, nor were they Semitic (or
Afro-Asiatic-speaking in any sense). Their language, Hurrian, has only one
certain linguistic relative, namely Urartian, the language of the first millennium
BC kingdom of Urartu on Lake Van (a kingdom much involved in military
conflict with the Neo-Assyrian empire). Outside of that, there have been
suggestions that the Hurrian language has some sort of distant relationship with
some of the modern languages of the Caucasus (specifically, the Northeast
Caucasian languages), but this suggestion is highly uncertain and has not met
with any sort of consensus acceptance.

152 See Wikander 2014: 215-217.

78 Unburning Fame

However, regardless of the linguistic relationships of the Hurrian language

itself, it is an incontestable fact that the Hurrians as a culture were ideal carriers
of Indo-European motifs, ideas and influences into the milieu of the Old
Testament. As mentioned earlier, this is because the Hurrians had a special
relationship with not only the Indo-Aryan cultures (through what appears to be
an Indo-Aryan social superstrate) and with the Anatolian ones (due to their
longstanding interaction with the various Anatolian-speaking peoples of the
Hittite empire).

I have argued elsewhere 153 for one piece of direct influence on a text in the
Hebrew Bible from the Hurrian/Hittite bilingual textual entity known as the
Epic of Liberation or Song of Release (or traditions very similar to it).154 This is
the case of an expression from one of the animal fables that make up a large part
of the preserved text of that epic, which shows a close parallel with an analogy
used in Deut 32:15, so close, indeed, that it can hardly represent a case of
accidental similarity.
The parable in the Hurrian/Hittite text talks of a roe-deer (Hurrian nāli,
Hittite aliyan-) that pastures on a mountain, grows fat, and subsequently leaves
its mountain, going to another. The animal then utters curses directed either
towards the old or the new mountain that fattened it (the text is somewhat
unclear as to which of the mountains is involved here). The mountain utters a
curse of its own, pointing out the ungracious behavior of the animal and wishing
that various hunters destroy it. The narrator of the story then interjects that this
story is not really about a roe-deer but about a human being, who leaves his city
and spurns its gods.
In Deut 32:15, extremely similar imagery is used (Jeshurun as ungrateful
grazing animal), and the context even contains references to YHWH as a “rock.”
Actually, the parallel between the two passages is even closer than what I
argued in my 2013a article. I pointed out that the Hurrian triple phrase fūru tēlu
tapšū, rendered in the Hittite version of the text as šullēt, meaning something
like “he grew arrogant,” provides the direct model for the words šāmantā ʿābîtā
kāśîtā (“you grew fat, you grew thick, you grew obstinate”) of Deut 32:15.
However, what I didn’t point out there is the fact that at least one of the
Hurrian words—tēlu— seems actually to mean something along the lines of
“swell”, “become big” or “go over one’s limits” (based on an original root
meaning of something like “make much”), as cogently and convincingly argued
by Mauro Giorgieri, who translates the entire phrase as “er wurde auffällig”, “er
ging über die Maẞen hinaus” and “er überschritt/empörte sich.” 155 Thus, the
parallel between Deut 32:15 and the Hurrian text is even greater and is
manifested not only at the level of narrative and motifs but at the lexical level as
well: both texts include tripartite phrases, consisting of three verbs that describe

153 Wikander 2013a.

154 The Epic of Liberation is edited in Neu 1996.
155 Giorgieri 2001, esp. p. 132-133.
 5. Beings of Smoke 79

the metaphorical “swelling” of the richly fattened animal. This would be very
hard to explain indeed without positing a direct influence from the Hurrian text
(or a tradition very close to it and using the same type of language) on the
biblical one.
One may note with some interest that the Hittite (Indo-European!) text in
this case does not involve the same artful tripartite lexical collocation. Thus, the
influence must be directly from the Hurrian source. It might be argued that this
points only to Hurrian influences in the Israelite literary milieu, not Indo-
European ones as such, and that the animal fable tradition represented in this
cultural interaction was a purely Hurrian phenomenon in origin. However, I
would like to point out that we know for a fact that animal fables such as the
ones in the Epic of Liberation and in Deut 32:15 were in occurrence in purely
Hittite texts as well. One (admittedly fragmentary) example of this can be found
at the end of the Hittite text known as “The Indictment of Madduwatta” (CTH
147), which includes what appears to be a sort of cautionary tale about a stag
and a pig. The fable is too broken to be understood, but in genre it looks quite a
lot like the moralistic animal fables of the Epic of Liberation.156
Also, the use of the Hittite word šulle- points to the motif of the fattened
animal having been internalized in Anatolian Indo-European thought as well.
To be sure, it does not consist of three parts, as do the Hurrian and Hebrew
expressions, but this verb, which contextually means something like “to grow
arrogant” is etymologically derived from a root that actually means “to swell,”
as has been shown in a brilliant article by Craig Melchert (2005). Thus, both the
Hittite and the Hurrian tradition in this text attest to the imagery of the fattened
animal reacting in an arrogant way towards the one who has given him shelter
and pasture.

5.6 Smoke and Fatlings in Hosea 13

All this brings us back to Hos 13:3-6, a passage of the Hebrew Bible that shows
not only the influence from Hurrian/Hittite literature but also its integration with
inherited “etymological poetic” material from the Northwest Semitic
background:157

Lākēn yihyû kaʿănan-bōqer Therefore they will be like a morning cloud,

wĕkaṭṭal maškîm hōlēk and like the dew that goes away early,
kĕmōṣ yĕsōʿar158 miggōren like chaff blown from the threshing-floor,
ûkĕʿāšān mēʾărubbâ and like smoke from a window.
wĕʾānōkî YHWH ʾĕlōhêkā But I am YHWH, your God,

156 For the text (with translation and discussion), see Beckman, Bryce and Cline
2011: 69-100. The animal fable itself can be found in §37 (lines 91-94), pp. 96-97 in that
edition.
157 As do Anderson and Freedman (1980: 633), I regard the chapter as basically

making up a redactional unity, albeit one including motifs of differing backgrounds.

158 Read as puʿal with BHSApp.
80 Unburning Fame

mēʾereṣ miṣrāyim from the land of Egypt,

wēʾlōhîm zûlātî lōʾ tēdaʿ and you know no God but me,
ûmôšîaʿ ʾayin biltî and there is no one to save except me.
ʾănî rĕʿîtîkā159 bammidbār I shepherded you in the wilderness,
bĕʾereṣ talʾūbôt in the land of dry heat.
kĕmarʿîtām wayyiśbāʿû As they pastured, they were satiated,
śābĕʿû wayyārom libbām they were satiated, their heart grew proud:
ʿal-kēn šĕkēḥûnî thus they forgot me/grew hot against me.160

In this passage, we find an astonishing collection of motifs, some having a

background in Northwest Semitic mythopoetic diction and some representing
borrowings from the Anatolian/Hurrian background represented in the Epic of
Liberation.161 In Wikander 2014, I studied how the Ugaritic texts—our foremost
window into the poetic world of the extra-biblical Northwest Semitic cultures—
express the relationship between drought and death, and how these ancient
motifs survived into the Hebrew Bible. The chapter in which the present passage
appears was important in that study as well, and I will discuss the passage here
as an example of how biblical authors could combine material from their
inherited Northwest Semitic “etymological poetic” background with extra-
Semitic borrowings. First, I will provide a “bird’s eye” list of these differing
motifs, and then work through them in order and detail.

The passage contains a combination of:

 The description of the inhospitable, drought-stricken land, reminiscent

of Ugaritic “drought theology.”
 The imagery of life’s inconstancy as “smoke” (cf. Aqhat and the Hittite
terminology of humans as “beings of smoke,” as well as the reception
of the motif in the Wisdom of Solomon, chap. 2); note also the
connection with “smoke from a window,” which brings to mind the
expression luttauš kammaraš IṢBAT (“smoke seized the windows”)
which occurs at the beginning of the Hittite Tale of Telepinu as part of
a description of the terrible, lifeless fate of the world when Telepinu,
the Storm God’s son, has gone into hiding.162

159 Conjecture according to LXX, which has ἐποίμανόν σε, suggested as possibility in

BHSApp.
160 See below for an argument concerning the latter translation.
161 Which is not to say, however, that the motifs are in any way alien to their context

in the Book in which they appear; to quote Dearman (2010: 320), the imagery in 13:3 is
“vintage Hosea” in its “literary expression.” Again, it is not a question of the author of
the text importing something foreign or extraneous but of that person reaching into the
shared background of Northwest Semitic poetic diction, a background which, I argue,
imported (and assimilated) Indo-European motifs.
162 Normalized; text available in EIET (Telepinu); printed edition in Laroche 1969:

29-50. Note also that tuḫḫuiš (“smoke”) occurs in the next line!
 5. Beings of Smoke 81

 The use of the verb škḥ, which may possibly have a (punning)
background in the verbal root appearing in Ugaritic as ṯkḥ, meaning
something like “be burned, be exceedingly hot or parched” (see further
on this in chapter 9).
 And last, but certainly not least, the motif of the arrogant, over-fattened
animal, which the passage has in common with the parable from the
Epic of Liberation and with Deut 32:15.

The first of these points puts us squarely in Northwest Semitic, “Ugaritoid”

mythological territory. YHWH has guided his people through an arid land,
devoid of greenery, the metaphorical “dead land” (later in Hosea 13, personified
Death is even addressed outright). 163 As seen from the perspective of inherited
motifs, this is the land of Death itself (as I have argued at length in my 2014
study). Hosea 13 generally contains much of the old Northwest Semitic imagery
concerning this problem sphere (drought and death).
But this type of imagery is joined by another motif that we have seen to be
connected with Indo-European (Anatolian) traditions: the imagery of life as
“smoke.” In his commentary to Hosea, G.I. Davies states that the smoke in this
instance “is a common image for what is transitory,” and refers to Ps 37:20 and
Isa 51:6.164 The first of these certainly does provide a parallel to the “smoke” of
Hos 13:3 (and the second perhaps also, though not quite as compelling an
example), but be that as it may: such motifs may still have a prehistory, and (as
noted above) the motif is actually not that common in the Hebrew Bible.
In the Ugaritic Aqhat text, this motif was associated not only semantically
with what I believe to be its Anatolian language origins, but also etymologically
(using Hittite loanwords). Hosea 13, however, is one of the clearest examples of
how this motif was received and developed in the Hebrew Bible.
It appears that the author of Hosea 13 has wed the idea of “smoke” as a
piece of imagery for life and the breath of being (a là Hittite antuwaḫḫaš-) with
the drought motif as known from the Northwest Semitic literary tradition
represented at Ugarit. Life is smoke as it disappears (just as in Aqhat, into which
I argued that the motif was borrowed from Indo-European Anatolian sources),
but this happens as the “dew” (ṭal) goes away (a piece of dryness imagery), and
the motif of the dry Exodus desert is directly invoked. By combining these
motifs with that of the over-fattened, ungrateful animal, the poet has created a
most artful fusion of mythopoetic material from various Ancient Near Eastern
cultures.

163 Note the use of the strange expression ʾereṣ talʾūbôt, the second half of which is a

hapax legomenon. I personally believe that this word may harbor an earlier, religio-
historical piece of “etymological poetics”; for more on my arguments concerning this
word, see Wikander 2014: 165-168.
164 Davies 1992: 288.
82 Unburning Fame

5.7 The Fatling Motif in the Song of Deborah

The motif of the animal that has grown too fat (and thereby arrogant) may
perhaps have an echo in the Song of Deborah as well: Judg 5:6-7 talks of the
rulers of Israel having “grown fat” (root ḥdl) until the rise of Deborah:

Bîmê šamgar ben-ʿănāt In the days of Shamgar, son of Anat,

bîme yāʿēl in the days of Jael,
ḥādĕlû ʾŏrāḥôt the roads had ceased to be,
wĕhōlĕkê nĕtîbôt yēlĕkû and wayfarers used to walk
ʾŏrāḥôt ʿăqalqallôt on crooked roads.
ḥādĕlû pĕrāzôn bĕyiśrāʾēl The warriors/people165 of Israel grew fat,
ḥādēllû ʿad šaqqamtî they grew fat until166 you167 rose,
dĕbôrâ Deborah,
šaqqamtî ʾēm bĕyiśrāʾēl until you rose, O mother in Israel!

The root ḥdl meaning “to become fat” is not common; there are seven known
instances of this root (cognate with Arabic ḫadila/ḫadula, with similar
meaning). Here, it appears in wordplay with the more common verb ḥdl
meaning “to cease, to stop.” Another case, Ps 36:4, may also represent an
instance of the same motif. The occurrence in the Song of Deborah is especially
interesting, given that Jael/yāʿēl (literally “ibex”) also appears. Is Jael the
prototypically “good” unfattened animal in 5:6, to be contrasted to the fattened
rulers in 5:7? Such a possible pun must be reckoned with, especially as the
reference to Jael is situated so near the one to “growing fat.” Freedman and
Lundbom (in TDOT) convincingly compare with the “fattening” (root šmn,
hipʿîl) of the people in Isa 6:10.168 It is a fascinating perspective to imagine that
this type of imagery, occurring as it does at a number of important points in the

165The exact meaning of pĕrāzôn is unclear in the extreme. One comes across
translations and explanations such as “yeomanry” (Freedman 1980: 150) or “a collective
term for the unwalled villages […] or their inhabitants” (Stager 1988: 225). The Vulgate
has fortes (“brave ones”). There are many others (see Stager 1988: 224-225 for an
overview of various suggestions, including some that presuppose loanwords into
Hebrew; another overview of widely divergent suggestions can be found in Lemche
1985: 278; HALOT has a good overview on p. 965 [s.v. pĕrāzôn]). The exact translation
of the word is not of essential relevance for the present purposes, however, and thus I
have chosen the more general “warriors/people.” The main point is that the word is some
sort of reference to Israelite people, of whatever social class or stratification.
166 Unless, of course, it is a question of being prosperous and fat because Deborah

rose (for an example of this view, see the translation of the New Revised Standard
Version).
167 Taking the forms in -tî as archaic 2nd person singular feminine of the suffix

conjugation.
168 See, generally, Freedman and Lundbom 1980: 220-221 for a discussion of the root

ḥdl, its attestations and etymology. They also mention the wordplay with the root
meaning “cease.”
 5. Beings of Smoke 83

Hebrew Bible, may at least partly owe its background to motifs represented in a
Hurro-Hittite wisdom tale!
One should note that the Song of Deborah also speaks of people leaving
their God (Judg 5:8). Precisely as the fattened animals in Deut 32:15 and the
Epic of Liberation, the reference is to being inconstant towards one’s divine
protector(s).
The appearance of the “fatling” motif in the Song of Deborah is in itself
hardly surprising. I am among those who do not discount the possibility that the
Song is quite ancient indeed (as I believe to be the case concerning the Song of
Moses in Deuteronomy 32, though I would not dare give a responsum as to their
relative chronology). If this is so, two of the archaic poems of the Hebrew Bible
carry in their midst a motif inherited from a Hurro-Hittite background. And one
text in which this motif occurs, Hosea 13, also includes the very Indo-European
imagery of life as smoke, which was borrowed (earlier) into the Ugaritic Aqhat
epic, in which it was combined with physical incense (expressed using a Hittite
loanword!) as an ironic remark on the inverted relationship between life’s
inconstancy and the ideal liturgical state of the world. The motifs seem almost
to be alive.

5.8 The “Smoke” and “Fatling” Motifs in the Psalms

There are a few more examples to be found of the “smoke” imagery being
applied to life (or its end in the Hebrew Bible). One of these is found in Ps
102:4, which uses the imagery of a burning furnace:

Kî-kālû bĕʿāšān yāmāy For my days disappear in/like smoke,

wĕʿaṣmôtay kĕmôqēd169 niḥārû and my bones burn as (in) a furnace.

This verse, which I have earlier argued to be part of a greater piece of reception
of the ancient Northwest Semitic drought motif, 170 uses the imagery of the
smoke in a very fitting context: that of a burning furnace. It is quite difficult to
know whether this instance of the simile is an expression of the same borrowed
motif we studied earlier or if it is only a matter of chance resemblance. The
main point here could well be the destroying heat rather than smoke as a symbol
of life. The matter is, however, not quite easy to decide one way or the other.

There is another verse from the Psalms that uses “smoke” as an image of
(disappearing) life in a way that may also involve a hot furnace. This is Ps
37:20, which reads (according to the MT):

169 Read as a single word with many manuscripts, as opposed to the reading of Codex

Leningradensis.
170 Wikander 2014: 60-61.
84 Unburning Fame

Kî rĕšāʿîm yōʾbēdû For evildoers will be destroyed,

wĕʾōyĕbê YHWH and the enemies of YHWH.
kîqar kārîm kālû Like the choicest of lambs they are lost,
beʿāšān kālû they are lost in smoke.

The reading kîqar kārîm (“like the choicest of lambs”) has understandably been
challenged. A reference to lambs does sit oddly in the context, and there has
been a suggestion that one should read the word kîqar as kîqōd (“like a burning”
or perhaps “like a furnace”).171 Some authors propose emending the following
word as well, but that is not of material importance here.
The main question is whether or not we should keep the MT (which speaks
of “the choicest of lambs”) or emend the text into referring to smoke emanating
from a glowing furnace. At first glance, the change to kîqōd seems almost self-
evident; it would match the imagery in Ps 102:4, and references to a drought
motif similar to that in Psalm 102 appear in other verses of the text (vv. 2 and
perhaps 19). Also, a misreading of a dālet as a rēš is quite easy to imagine. This
is perhaps the most probable reading.
However, I believe that there is still is a possibility of defending the MT
reading. The text in the Hebrew Bible that reflected the Anatolian “life as
smoke” imagery in the clearest way of all—Hosea 13—did, after all, include
what appears to be a reference to the motif of the overly fattened animal. What
if the kārîm of the MT to Ps 37:20 also represent an instance of this motif?
In that case, the dynamics of the verse would change. The smoke-like
inconstancy of the lives of the evildoers would then be implicitly due to their
wayward arrogance, their “overfedness.” And if we also presuppose a thinly-
veiled reference to the sacrificial cult here (choice lambs and smoke!), we are
once more back at the integration between anthropology and liturgical
terminology that we found at Ugarit, when the “smoke” terminology was used
in the Aqhat epic.
If we allow ourselves some more freedom to speculate, we may look at
another verse from Psalms, which could actually represent a very spriritualized
version of this combination of smoke imagery and liturgy. In Ps 141:2, the
Psalmist says to the Israelite God:

Tikkôn tĕpillātî qĕṭōret lĕpānêkā Let my prayer be incense before you,

maśʾat kappay minḥat-ʿāreb the raising of my hands be an evening
sacrifice!

This verse does, to be sure, not express the life of the supplicant in terms of
smoke or incense; however, his prayer, his “spiritual offering,” so to speak, is
talked of in this way. The words that he is offering up are presented as a sort of
metaphorical incense and burnt offering. Given that the rest of the Psalm talks a

171 See HALOT: 430 (s.v. yĕqōd). Also mentioned, e.g., in Dahood 1965: 230 (though

he did not necessarily accept the emendation).

 5. Beings of Smoke 85

great deal about the “inner” psychological workings of the praying individual, it
may perhaps be possible to regard the “incense” of this passage as a reference to
the inner, mental being of the supplicant as well—perhaps something akin to the
concept of a “soul” (even though this is, it must be added, quite an anachronistic
term).172
Thinking of the “smoke” of a human being in these terms of course opens
another pathway: that of associating this motif with the idea, occurring in many
places in the Hebrew Bible, of the “breath of life” that has been blown into the
nostrils of humans. Too clear an equation of these concepts does, however, run
the risk of getting too far from where we started. Still, I would regard it as very
probable that the idea of a human as a “being of smoke” was associated with the
idea of the “breath of life,” making the concepts somewhat difficult to
distinguish.

5.9 Later (Hermetic) Reception of the “Smoky Offering” Motif

as an Image of the Life of the Petitioner
Later on in this book, I will discuss what is sometimes known as the “pizza
effect,” which is what happens when cultural loans are subsequently reborrowed
into its source culture. Already at this juncture, I would like to give one such
example, having to do with the idea of “spiritual offerings” as “smoke.” The text
comes from the late antique Corpus Hermeticum, from the majestic prayer at the
end of Poimandres, the first Hermetic tractate. After the anonymous narrator has
undergone a mystical and salvific experience, having had the titular being
Poimandres explain the mysteries of God and man to him, he utters an extatic
prayer of thanks in chapter 31. At the end of this prayer, the following words
can be found:

Δέξαι λογικὰς θυσίας ἁγνὰς ἀπὸ ψυχῆς καὶ καρδίας πρὸς σὲ ἀνατεταμένης,
ἀνεκλάλητε, ἄρρητε, σιωπῇ φωνούμενε.173

Receive spiritual, pure sacrifices from a soul and a heart lifted up towards
you, O unspeakable, unutterable one, expressed in silence!

172 It has been pointed out (North 2001: 411) that Hebrew ʿāšān and qĕṭōret never

occur in parallel, which would allegedly show that they refer to two types of completely
different smoke (an unpleasant and a pleasant one, respectively). However, I do not
believe that this dichotomy needs to be absolute. The Anatolian-derived Ugaritic
concepts do not appear to be so absolute (at least, the Indo-European root underlying
them is not), and given that I believe that the examples enumerated here of “life as
smoke” in the Hebrew Bible represent pieces of reception of that motif, I think it unwise
to draw an absolute line between the two types of smoke. North points out that “[s]moke
is also a symbol of transitoriness and evanescence,” referring to some of the texts I
discuss here, and in this he is certainly right. However, as seen in this chapter, I believe
there to be more to the story.
173 Text edited in Nock and Fèstugiere 1960.
86 Unburning Fame

In these words from the Hermetica, the “sacrificial smoke,” so to speak, is

identified with the “spiritual sacrifices” that the poet is offering up in the form
of his prayer. The offerings come from his heart and soul, from his innermost
being. It is clear that the Poimandres tractate includes numerous biblical and/or
Jewish references,174 and I would propose that these majestic words represent a
reinterpretation of the Old Testament imagery, ultimately received and
transformed from Indo-European sources, of the inner essence of a human being
appearing similar to smoke, and of that “smoke” being offered up to God and
identified with the smoke of a sacrificial cult (as in Ps 141:2). The reference to
the “heart and soul” of the speaker makes this association even more salient.
Note that the text uses the word θυσία, which is derived from the very root
*dhweh2-/*dhuh2- with which we began. Here, inherited Indo-European
terminology seems to have been remarried to its own biblical reception, a
phenomenon to which we will be returning in chapter 10, on the “pizza effect.”

5.10 A Late Example from Jewish Liturgy

The tradition of motifs discussed here has given rise to even later reminiscences.
The passage from the Wisdom of Solomon mentioned earlier uses the imagery
of life as fleeting smoke as a kind of “straw man” representation of what the
ungodly are saying (probably representing some type of Hellenistic Hedonist or
Epicurean philosophy). However, the borders between orthodoxy and the
dangerously cynical attitude of this text were apparently not too strict after all.
This is shown by the fact that wordings extremely similar to Wisdom 2 appear
in a somewhat different form in Jewish prayer liturgy, in the Ûnĕtanneh Tôqep
prayer, a piyyuṭ recited on Yom Kippur and Rosh HaShana and representing the
day of judgment, a poem which includes references to man being as transient as
a drifting cloud. 175 The prayer, which is of a later date,176 uses imagery quite
close to that in the second chapter of the Wisdom of Solomon—and to the
imagery of the drying vegetation in Isaiah 40—in order to paint a picture of the
transience of man.177 It does not speak of “smoke” as such, but when one reads
it, one gets an inkling that the tradition appearing in Wisdom 2 (which did use
“smoke” overtly) is here carried on further:

174 See Pearson 1981 and (recently) Wikander 2013b.

175 This parallel was first suggested to me in as unscholarly a place as the Wikipedia
articles “Book of Wisdom” and “Unetanneh tokef” (accessed latest May 25, 2016). I
have tried (in vain) to find a more reputable source for the connection, but it is quite
apparent when the two texts are compared.
176
The terminus ante quem of the prayer is given by the fact that fragments of it have
been recovered from the early parts of the Cairo Geniza in a manuscript tentatively dated
to the late 8th century CE—see Werner 1959: 253. According to M. Zulay, quoted (p.c.)
by Werner, the traditional dating of the poem to the end of the 11 th century (based on a
semi-legendary story about Rabbi Amnon of Mayence) is not convincing, as the legend
only states that R. Amnon recited the poem, not that he wrote it.
177 For the text, see e.g. Birnbaum 1989: 361-364.
 5. Beings of Smoke 87

ʾādām yĕsôdô mēʿāpār A man—his source is dust

wĕsôpô leʿāpār and his end is dust.
bĕnapšô yābîʾ laḥmô By risk of his life/breathing he wins his
bread,
māšûl kĕḥeres hannišbār he is like a broken potsherd,
kĕḥāṣîr yābēš ûkĕṣîṣ nôbēl like parched grass and like a wilting flower,
kĕṣēl ʿôbēr ûkĕʿānān kālâ like a fleeing shadow and like a dissipating
cloud,
ûkĕrûaḥ nôšābet and like a blowing wind
ûkĕʾābāq pôrēaḥ and like flying dust
wĕkaḥălôm yāʿûp and like a fleeting dream.

This piece of text includes the dust/ashes, the wind, the shadow and the
dissipating cloud as metaphors for the ephemerality of human life, just as ch. 2
of the Wisdom of Solomon does. As I mentioned, it does not explicitly say
“smoke,” but I would argue that the lack of the word itself is not of great
consequence. The underlying motif is the same. This close parallel shows that
much of what the author of the Wisdom of Solomon attributes to godless
Hedonists is actually poetic material that could very much be a part of the
Jewish literary and religious milieu, and thus substantially diminishes the
chance that the use of the drought and smoke imagery in Wisdom 2 is simply a
coincidence and an invention of the author without an earlier history behind it,
as it occurs together with extensive material that is demonstrably part of a
greater tradition.178

5.11 Merciful Laps and Bodies:

Some other Metaphors of Anthropology in Hebrew and Indo-European
Before we end this chapter, I may be fruitful to look at some other metaphorical
or semi-metaphorical expressions for living beings and their characteristics that
may attest to contact with speakers of Anatolian Indo-European. It has long
been noted that the Semitic languages abound in expressions originating in body
metaphors. Expressions like ʿal yad (“by the hand of,” “beside”), lipnê (“to the
face of,” “before”), ḥārâ ʾappô (lit. “his nostril burned,” meaning “he was
angry”) are quite typical of Classical Hebrew. I here intend to look at a few
collocations of this type in Anatolian.
An interesting parallel between Biblical Hebrew and Anatolian when it
comes to body metaphors is the one connecting someone’s “lap” or female

178
The other possible explanation, that the author of ûnĕtannê tôqep was actually
quoting literally from the text of the Wisdom of Solomon, is to my mind much less
probable than there being a common poetic tradition: it is asking rather a lot to propose
that a Jewish payṭān would use as his Vorlage a text that is stated outright to represent
the views of heretical thinking, and a text that was originally written in Greek, at that.
Rather, I think that this is yet another instance of the type of shared poetic milieu I
presuppose for earlier Northwest Semitic literature.
88 Unburning Fame

reproductive system with the abstract idea of “mercy.” This connection is very
well known indeed from the Hebrew Bible: the classical example is the word
reḥem, which appears originally to have meant “lap” or even “uterus,” but is
commonly used to express the idea of compassion. The same thing happens with
derived terms such as raḥămîm, a plural that has become the normal Hebrew
word for “mercy.” These expressions form the nucleus of a type of theological
thinking that has sometimes been regarded as expressing a more “feminine” side
of the Israelite God, by implying that he has feminine physical attributes, or
rather that metaphors concerning such can be suitably applied to him.
It just so happens that an extraordinary parallel to this phenomenon occurs
in the Hittite language as well. The Hittite word genzu- is defined by Kloekhorst
as “abdomen, lap”; it is etymologically derived from the Indo-European root
*g̑enh1- (“to beget, to give birth, to procreate, to bring into existence”), the root
underlying words such as Latin genus and (g)nātus, Greek γίγνομαι, Sanskrit
janati (“generates”) and others. From genzu-, Hittite has created a further
derivation, the adjective genzuwala-, which means “kind,” “merciful” or
“gracious.” Literally, this adjective must mean something like “lap-like,” i.e. the
attribute of kindness or graciousness is associated directly with the same parts of
the body signified by Hebrew reḥem.
Just as the Semitic rḥm root is used to express theological aspects of the
relationship between the divine sphere and humans, the Hittite word genzuwala-
is applied in a theological context. The Great Hymn to the Hittite Sun God says
in line 7: zik-pat genzuwalaš dUTU-uš, “you are the merciful Sun God.”179 Just
as raḥămîm is ascribed to the Israelite God despite him not being imagined as
female, the male Hittite solar deity is associated with the root of genzu-.
Even though there are Indo-European languages outside the Anatolian
subfamily that use derivations from the *g̑enh1-root to express notions of
kindness and graciousness (Latin gentilis, for example), they are usually not
built upon the use of the root to express “abdomen/lap,” which forms the perfect
parallel to Hebrew reḥem and its relatives. This exact correspondence is specific
to Hittite genzu- (“lap”, abdomen”) and genzuwala- (“gracious, merciful, kind”).
The other Indo-European examples of *g̑enh1- being used for expressing this
type of attributes may thus be regarded as separate from the Hittite example. In
fact, there are other Hittite collocations also including genzu- in expressing
notions of kindness (and similar concepts), viz. genzu dā- (“take pity on,” lit.
“take genzu-”), genzu ḫar(k)- (“have fondness for,” lit. “have/hold genzu-”),
genzu pai- (“to extend kindness,” lit. “give genzu-”) as well as the derived verb
genzuwae- (“to be gentle with”). 180 This shows that, in Hittite, the “lap” or
“abdomen” word had acquired a much wider type of semantic reference than

179For the text, see Güterbock 1958.

180Examples from Kloekhorst 2008: 468 (s.v. (UZU)genzu-). Transcriptions have been
adapted to the system used here; I have left out Kloekhorst’s superscript indications of
inflection. The semantic translations are Kloekhorst’s, the literal translations are mine.
Note that Puhvel (HED), vol. 4: 155 (s.v. genzu-/ginzu-) also interprets the Hittite
expressions for taking pity, etc., as calques of Semitic (Akkadian, in his case).
 5. Beings of Smoke 89

what is inherent in the Indo-European root *g̑enh1- as such. Anatolian has gone
its own way in Indo-European with regard to this type of expression.
In Semitic, however, the situation is different. Hebrew raḥămîm is
definitely not alone within that linguistic family in uniting the ideas of
graciousness, loving or kindness and the abdomen or lap. In Akkadian, for
example, we find the verb râmu, meaning “to love,” which is derived from that
very same Semitic root.
All this suggests the possibility that it was actually the Anatolian languages
that borrowed (or rather, calqued) this type of expression from the Semitic
family, and not the other way around. The Anatolian languages are alone in their
linguistic family in making the clear association between “lap/abdomen” and
“mercy,” whereas the association is common in Semitic languages.
One case of body metaphorics in which one can, however, regard
Anatolian as the probable loan-giver is in the case of the word appearing in
Hebrew as tāwek (mostly in the construct form, tôk), meaning “center,”
“inside,” or “inner part,” giving rise to the frequent expression bĕtôk (“in the
middle of”). This word appears also in Ugaritic, as tk, but it has no Semitic
cognates outside of the Northwest Semitic subphylum, making it a likely
candidate for being a loanword from some other source. It just so happens that
there is a perfect candidate in Hittite that was suggested by Chaim Rabin: the
rather common word tuekka-, meaning “body.”181 I would regard it as highly
likely that this is indeed the origin of Hebrew tāwek.
If this is indeed so, it would provide an interesting example of a word that
was originally a body metaphor being “de-bodified” as it was borrowed into
Northwest Semitic. After all, the Hebrew word means nothing more than
“center” or “inside,” often having weakened into a part of a prepositional
expression bĕtôk. It is noteworthy, however, that the Hurrian/Hittite bilingual
Epic of Liberation, that has been mentioned earlier, uses the word tuekka- in a
way that does not seem necessarily to imply a physical “body” when it speaks of
the mountain driving away the roe-deer in one of the fable-like paradigmatic
stories:

Aliyan[an]-za apel tuegga[z-šet] ḪUR.SAG-aš awan arḫa šūet182

A mountain drove away a roe-deer from its body.

Here, the body is somewhat abstract even in the Hittite text. The mountain is
personified, to be sure, but the main point of the meaning is still only that the
roe-deer leaves a physical place. Though the text here is a translation of a
Hurrian original (which uses the word idi-, meaning “self” or “body”), it shows
that the Hittite tuekka- could be used as a more general term for the “physical

181 Rabin 1963: 136-137. The idea is mentioned with some apparent liking by Watson

(2007: 123-124), although he also points out as another possibility a relationship with the
Akkadian word tikku, meaning “neck,” a connection that seems less convincing to me.
182 Normalized text of KBo XXXII 14 recto II, line 1, edited in Neu 1996: 75.
90 Unburning Fame

essence” of an object or a person, thus providing an example of both the

movement from Indo-European to Northwest Semitic and perhaps also the
conceptual movement of a view of personhood or human nature, carried through
the medium of specific terminology.

5.12 Conclusions
In this chapter, we have sketched a slow-moving river of motif tradition that can
be traced (at least in part) to Anatolian Indo-European linguistic and poetic
material, specifically terms for smoke and of humans as “beings with smoke in
them.” This motif, appearing in a form quite close to its linguistic origin in the
Ugaritic Aqhat story, recurs in a few places in the Hebrew Bible, and, I argue,
also found a later reception in liturgical texts both from Hermetic and Jewish
milieux. We have seen how imagery concerning the nature of humanity, human
emotions and characteristics appear to have been shared between speakers of
Anatolian Indo-European and Northwest Semitic. In one of the cases (the
“smoke” one), we have studied how such anthropological terminology can cross
the line into liturgical terminology (already at Ugarit and then subsequently in
the Hebrew Bible and later texts).
In the next chapter, we shall look at a very specific, liturgical phenomenon
from Anatolia that may be reflected in biblical writings, and in the one
following that (chapter 7), at the possibility of an important divine name
occurring in the Hebrew Bible having an Indo-European background. The
anthropological thread is taken up again in chapter 8, when we will speak about
terms for boundary-crossers, strangers and people on the fringe of ancient
societies. And yet again, an animal metaphor will come into play there—but in
that case, the matter will not be one of overfed or fattened deers, ibexes or
lambs, but of dangerous, threatening wolves.
 6. When Jeroboam Divided his God
One of the most hated events in Deuteronomistic theology—and therefore, in
effect, in the Hebrew Bible as a whole—is the supposed relocation of the cult of
YHWH from the “sanctioned” temple in Jerusalem to Bethel and Dan said to
have been carried out by Jeroboam:

Wayyōʾmer yorobʿām bĕlibbô ʿattâ tāšûb hammamlākâ lĕbêt dāwīd / ʾim-

yaʿăleh hāʿām hazzeh laʿăśôt zĕbāḥîm bĕbēt-YHWH bîrûšālayim wĕšāb lēb
hāʿām hazzeh ʾel-ʾădōnêhem ʾel-rĕḥabʿām melek yĕhûdâ wĕhărāgūnî
wĕšābû ʾel-rĕḥabʿām melek-yĕhûdâ / wayyiwwāʿaṣ hammelek wayyaʿaś
šnê ʿeglê zāhāb wayyōʾmer ʾălēhem rab-lākem mēʿălôt yĕrûšālayim hinnēh
ʾĕlōhêkā yiśrāʾēl ʾăšer heʿĕlûkā mēʾereṣ miṣrāyim / wayyāśem ʾet-hāʾeḥād
bĕbêt-ʾēl wĕʾet-hāʾeḥād nātan bĕdān
(1 Kgs 12:26-29)

And Jeroboam thought: “Now the kingship will return to the House of
David, if this people continues to go up to perform sacrifices in the House
of YHWH in Jerusalem, and the heart of this people will return to their lord
Rehoboam, king of Judah, and they will kill me and return to Rehoboam,
king of Judah.” The king took counsel, and he made two golden calves, and
he said to them [the people]: “It is enough for you with your going up to
Jerusalem—see here, Israel, your God(s), that brought you up from the
Land of Egypt!” And he put one of them in Bethel, and the other one he
placed in Dan.

Note that the event portrayed as sinful by the Deuteronomist historian is not the
splitting up of the kingdom: this is said in 1 Kgs 12:24 actually to have been the
work of YHWH all along. The sinful behavior consists in moving the worship
of YHWH to another place, all in line with the Deuteronomist ideology of cult
centralization.
But what is the supposedly awful thing that the Jeroboam character is really
doing in this text? His splitting up of the kingdom appears not to be the central
issue. Or, put in a different way: why are the Deuteronomists so preoccupied
with cult centralization? It is always accepted that they are—and, perhaps, that
this has something to do with the reforms of Josiah in 622 BCE—but the
question remains: what is really the problem here?

6.1 A Hittite Background for the Concept of “God-Splitting”

I would ague that what the authors are reacting to here is a cultic practice known
from Indo-European, specifically Hittite, sources, one elucidated by Richard H.
Beal: that of “dividing a god.”183

183 The idea of such a Hittite religious practice is put forward and described in Beal

2002. I am not the first one to note a parallel between this Hittite concept and Israelite
91
92 Unburning Fame

The idea, argued by Beal, is that a difficult and unclear usage of the Hittite
verb šarra- (normally meaning either “to cross,” “to transgress” or “to divide”;
Kloekhorst [2008: 727-729] analyzes it as šārr-/šarr-) when applied to deities in
texts actually has to do with “dividing” them (as opposed to “transferring” them,
or something similar to that). Beal argues convincingly that the point of the
expression is to refer to a specific ritual, by which a deity was thought to be
divided up, so to speak, as a preparation for installing them in a new sanctuary
(without thereby stopping the cult in the previous cult place).

One interesting sign that could work as a piece of circumstantial evidence for
this “dividing a god” interpretation is the fact that the Jeroboam texts uses the
rare construction of a plural verb (heʿĕlûkā) combined with ʾĕlōhîm when the
latter refers to YHWH. Of course, one could argue that the verb is plural
because the golden calves are more than one (this is, for example, the solution
opted for in the JPS translation, which has “behold thy gods”), but this argument
could be thought of as substantially weakened by the fact that the exact same
utterance (including the plural verb) is used in the context of the golden calf
story in Exodus (Exod 32:4 and 32:8), where there is no talk of more than one
calf (note that JPS chooses the singular here).184 However, it is a rather common
stance to regard the text in Exodus as a retrojection of “the sin of Jeroboam”
into a much earlier time, and the plural verb is the lectio difficilior in this case,
which points to that reading indeed being original and at home in the Jeroboam
setting.185

thinking. Beal’s idea is discussed in extenso in Taggar-Cohen 2014: 38, in an article

explicitly devoted to describing possible parallels between Hittite and ancient Israelite
religion, yet the article only contains a short reference to the Jeroboam story in this
context (p. 42). It does, however, use the Hittite concept of “dividing” a god as an
explanatory model for local versions of YHWH, including regarding the YHWH ʾeḥād of
Deut 6:4 as a prohibition against such. Thus, Taggar-Cohen also pointed towards the idea
of Deuteronom(ist)ic ideology reacting negatively towards Hittite style “dividing” of
YHWH, which is the basic idea of this chapter.
184 Also, the fact of Jeroboam’s calves probably only having been meant as thrones

for YHWH as opposed to gods themselves argues against the idea of the number of
calves being the cause for the use of a plural verb (see, eg., Sweeney 2007: 177;
Sweeney, however, still uses the translation “gods” on p. 172!). Of course, the
Deuteronomists probably presented a warped image of this idea, yet the problem is again
why the verb is plural in Exod 32:4 as well.
185 For the plural verb as the preferable reading due to lectio difficilior, see Modéus

2005: 256, n. 112. He also notes that the Exodus text is probably secondary to the
Jeroboam one, and gives many references to earlier literature on the subject. Modéus
himself opts for regarding the matter as involving one “double-calf” (2005: 255-256, nn.
111-112), arguing that the mention of Dan is a secondary insertion, and that only Bethel
is historically relevant here. Given the possible scenario sketched in this chapter—that
the “dividing” and moving of the Israelite deity was construed by the Deuteronomists as
something intrinsically “foreign,” such an insertion could serve to portray Jeroboam’s
actions as even more repugnant: he not only divides YHWH once, but then he does it
again!
 6. When Jeroboam Divided his God 93

The “single ʾĕlōhîm with plural agreement” construction is not common in

the Hebrew Bible.186 It is possible that its use in the Jeroboam passage and its
parallel in Exodus is due to the theological idea of “dividing a god” being
alluded to (regardless of the number of calves). When Jeroboam (and, by
implication, Aaron) tries in a sense to “move” YHWH, they have to “divide”
him, in order for the deity to be available in a new place (without thereby
negating his existence in his former place of worship). Therefore, the god
presented is “temporarily plural” while the dividing ritual is being performed.
All this means that the Deuteronomist authors are probably reacting not
only to an alleged event contrary to their Jerusalemite ideology of cult
centralization but also to a ritual practice that may well have been perceived as
quite “foreign.” As Beal shows, the idea of “dividing a god” was apparently
well-known in official Hittite religion, and it may thus have been present as a
concept in Late Bronze Age Syria-Palestine, whence it could subsequently have
been incorporated into (proto-)Deuteronomist ideology as an image of the
inimical religious views of the “other.”

6.2 Other Ancient Near Eastern Comparanda in the Jeroboam Story:

The Young vs. Old Motif as Known from Gilgamesh and Aga
It could be objected that the distance between the Hittite sources and the biblical
texts from Exodus and 1 Kings is too great, both in geographic and temporal
terms, for it to be plausible that the concept of “dividing a god” could have been
subtextually in play here. One could object that it would be unlikely for so
ancient and un-Israelite a motif to be present in a text so thoroughly
Deuteronomistic as the present one—it is, after all, one of the most clearly
programmatic texts of Deuteronomistic theology, creating the backdrop for
much of the critique that theological tradition offers against the entire Israelite
(and, by extension, Judahite) monarchy. However, one should remember that
ancient retentions of motifs can turn up in more recent texts as well, and it so
happens that there is concrete evidence of that state of affairs in the present
context as well. There is another feature in the Jeroboam text that clearly seems
to hint at the retention of an ancient Bronze Age motif—not an Indo-European
one in that case, but still an ancient extra-biblical motif which may serve as a
“proof of concept” for the possibility of such old material being present in the
text.187
I am referring to the following words in the story of the rupture of the
United Kingdom, in the same chapter as the above passage on Jeroboam’s new
sanctuaries, words that describe the reaction of Rehoboam and two different
groups among his followers when it comes to the question of how the upstart
“party” of Jeroboam is to be dealt with, when the Northeners demand a decrease
in forced labor and taxes:

186 See Waltke and O’Connor 1990: 122 (7.4.2b).

187 The parallel between the Jeroboam story and the Gilgamesh tale was also noted
briefly in, e.g., Nelson 1987: 78, Fleming 2012: 111, n. 61, and Ben Zvi 2006: 136, n. 25.
94 Unburning Fame

Wayyiwwaʿaṣ hammelek reḥabʿām ʾet-hazzĕqēnîm ʾăšer-hāyû ʿōmĕdîm ʾet-

pĕnê šĕlōmōh ʾābîw bihyōtô ḥay lēʾmōr ʾêk ʾattem nôʿāṣîm lĕhāšîb ʾet-
hāʿām-hazzeh dābār / waydabbĕrû 188 ʾēlāyw lēʾmōr ʾim-hayyôm tihyeh-
ʿebed lāʿām hazzeh waʿăbadtām waʿănîtām wĕdibbartā ʾălêhem dĕbārîm
ṭôbîm wĕhāyû lĕkā ʿăbādîm kol-hayyāmîm / wayyaʿăzōb ʾet-ʿăṣat
hazzĕqēnîm ʾăšer yĕʿāṣūhû wayyiwwaʿaṣ ʾet-haylādîm ʾăšer gādĕlû ʾittô
ʾăšer hāʿōmĕdîm lĕpānāyw / wayyōʾmer ʾălêhem mâ ʾattem nôʿāṣîm
wĕnāšîb dābār ʾet-hāʿām hazzeh [ … ] / waydabbĕrû ʾēlāyw haylādîm
ʾāšer gādĕlû ʾittô lĕʾmōr kōh-tōʾmar lāʿām hazzeh [ … ] wĕʿattâ ʾābî
heʿmîs ʿălêkem ʿōl kābēd waʾănî ʾôsîp ʿal-ʿullĕkem ʾābî yissar ʾetkem
baššôṭîm waʾănî ʾăyassēr ʾetkem bāʿaqrabbîm
(1 Kgs 12:6-11)

And King Rehoboam took counsel with the old men that had stood before
his father Solomon when the latter was alive, saying: “How do you suggest
we answer these people?” And they said to him: “If today you agree to be
the servant of these people, and serve them, answer them and speak
pleasing words to them; then they will be your servants for all time. But he
rejected the counsel that the old men gave him, and he [instead] took
counsel with the young men who had grown up together with him, those
who stood before him. And he said to them: “What do you suggest we
answer these people? […]” And the young men who had grown up together
with him said to him: “Thus you shall say to these people: “[…] And now,
my father laid on you a heavy yoke, yet I will increase your yoke [even
more]. My father chastised you with lashes—I will chastise you with
scorpions!”

The motif shown in this passage—that of the older men in a ruler’s council
being afraid and urging moderation whereas the younger men urge aggressive
confrontation—is clearly a retention of an older Ancient Near Eastern trope. It
occurs in quite a similar way in so early a text as Gilgamesh and Aga, one of the
episodic Gilgamesh stories handed down from Sumerian times, prior to the
composition of the Gilgamesh Epic as such. In that text, the manuscripts of
which are from Old Babylonian times but is itself probably to be dated to the Ur
III period, the following exchange takes place when Gilgamesh, ruler of Uruk,
has been challenged by Aga, son of Enmebaragesi, ruler of the neighboring city
of Kish:

Lú-kíĝ-gi4-a ag-ga dumu en-me-barag-ge4-si-ke4 kiški-ta dgilgameš2 unugki-

šè mu-un-ši-re7-eš. dgilgameš2 igi ab-ba irikina-šè inim ba-an-ĝar inim ì-
kíĝ-kíĝ-e. túl til-le-da túl kalam til-til-le-da […] é kiški-šè gú nam-ba-an-ĝá-
ĝá-an-dè-en. ĝištukul nam-ba-an-sàg-ge-en-dè-en. unken ĝar-ra ab-ba iri-
na-ka dgilgameš2 mu-na-ni-ib-gi4-gi4. túl til-le-da túl kalam til-til-le-da.

188 Qere reading.

 6. When Jeroboam Divided his God 95

[…] é kiški-šè gú ga-àm-ĝá-ĝá-an-dè-en. ĝištukul nam-ba-sàg-ge-en-dè-en.

d
gilgameš2 en kul-aba4ki-a-ke4 dinana-ra nir-ĝál-la-e inim ab-ba iri-na-ke4
šag4-šè nu-mu-na-gíd. 2-kam-ma-šè dgilgameš2 igi ĝuruš iriki-na-šè inim
ba-an-ĝar inim ì-kíĝ-kíĝ-e. túl til-le-da túl kalam til-til-le-da. […] é kiški-šè
gú nam-ba-an-ĝar-re-en-zé-en ĝištukul nam-ba-an-sàg-ge-en-zé-en. unken
ĝar-ra ĝuruš iriki-na-ka dgilgameš2 mu-na-ni-ib-gi4-gi4 […] é kiški-šè gú
nam-ba-an-ĝar-re-en-zé-en ĝištukul nam-ba-an-sàg-ge-en-dè-en. unugki ĝiš-
kíĝ-ti diĝir-re-e-ne-ke4 é-an-na é an-ta èd-dè diĝir gal-gal-e-ne me-dím-bi
ba-an-ak-eš-àm. bàd gal bàd an-né ki ús-sa ki-tuš maḫ an-né ĝar-ra-ni saĝ
mu-e-sig10. za-e lugal ur-saĝ-bi saĝ lum-lum nun an-nè ki aĝ. du-a-ni-ta a-
gin7 ní ba-an-te. erin2-bi al-tur a-ga-bi-ta al-bir-re. lú-bé-ne igi nu-mu-un-
da-ru-gú-uš. ud-bi-a dgilgameš2 en kul-aba4ki-ke4 inim ĝuruš iri-na-šè šag4-
ga-ni an-ḫúl. ur5-ra-ni ba-an-zalag

Messengers from Aga, son of Enmebaragesi, came from Kish to Gilgamesh

in Uruk. Gilgamesh put the matter before the old men of his city, searching
out his words: “There are wells to complete, wells of the land to complete!
[…] We should not bow down to the house of Kish—should we not
[instead] strike it with weapons? In the assembled council, the old men of
the city answered Gilgamesh: “There are [indeed] wells to complete, wells
of the land to complete. […] Let us bow down to the house of Kish! Let us
not strike it with weapons!” Gilgamesh, the lord of Kulaba, put his trust in
Inana and did not take the words of the old men of his city to his heart. For
the second time, Gilgamesh put the matter forth, [this time] before the
young men of his city, searching out his words: “There are wells to
complete, wells of the land to complete! […] You have not bowed down to
the house of Kish [at any time]. Should you not strike it with weapons?” In
the assembled council, the young men of his city answered Gilgamesh:
“[…] You [the old men] should not bow down to the house of Kish—
should not we [the young men] strike it with weapons?” Uruk, the
handiwork of the gods, and Eana, the house that came down from heaven—
it was the great gods that created their form. You watch the great wall
founded by An, the majestic dwelling place laid out by An. You are its
heroic king, a person that thrives, a prince beloved by An. When he [Aga]
arrives, what fear will he experience! That army is small, its rear is
scattered. Its men will not be able to confront [us]!” Then Gilgamesh, the
lord of Kulaba, was happy in his heart at the words of the young men of his
city; his innards rejoiced.189

189 “his innards rejoiced”—literally “his liver shone,” an expression showing the

closeness of metaphorical diction to what later became the world of the Hebrew Bible.
The Sumerian text is based on that of the ETCSL, lines 1-41 (with some passages
removed for brevity and clarity, and punctuation added). The translation is mine, but
inspired by the one found at the ETCSL.
96 Unburning Fame

This is, of course, not an Indo-European text in any way, but the extremely close
correspondence of motifs between the Rehoboam passage and this one shows
that so edited, semi-late and ideologically processed texts as that one can still
carry within them ancient motifs inherited from the Ancient Near Eastern world
of which the Deuteronomists were a part. This fact makes a connection with the
Hittite conception of “dividing a god” much less strange as a parallel to the
Deuteronomistic texts.

6.3 Conclusions
Given that the Deuteronomist antipathy towards the sanctuaries in Bethel and
Dan became an important part of the “only YHWH and only in Jerusalem”
ideology that proved so important for later Judaism, one could theoretically
argue that the denunciation of “god-dividing” argued here was instrumental in
the religio-historical development that led to Jerusalem-centered mono-
Yahwism that subsequently came to influence the entire world. If this is so, then
Indo-European religio-historical influence on the Hebrew Bible—though
projected as an enemy image—is a part of some of the most important
ideological developments of the religious history of the world.190 The idea of the
most unpardonable idea in Islam—širk—is after all exactly what the Hittite texts
appear to be talking about: dividing up divinity. This, of course, is taking the
idea very far indeed, but it is certainly fascinating to imagine what religious
history would have looked like if the Deuteronomist authors had not minded the
concept of “dividing a God.”

190 Theoretically, and even more speculatively, one could argue that this antipathy

towards dividing the Israelite God is reflected (much later) in the words of Paul of
Tarsus, when he rhetorically asks (1 Cor 1:13) whether “Christ has been divided”
(μεμέρισται ὁ Χριστός;). This, however, takes the motif so far as to be quite untestable.
7. Dagan/Dagon as a Possibly Indo-European-Derived
Name, and Some Methodological Questions
Raised by Religio-Historical Etymology
One of the most intriguing—though speculative—proposed borrowings of Indo-
European lexical material into the Hebrew Bible from a religio-historical point
of view concerns the divine name Dāgôn and its possible counterpart in the
Hebrew noun dāgān (meaning “grain”).
The god known as Dagon or Dagan is mainly known in the Hebrew Bible
as the god of the Philistines, but the worship of this divine figure was quite
widespread in the Ancient Near East in the Bronze and Iron Ages. The cult of
Dagan/Dagon appears to have been centered around Syria—there are early
attestations at both Ebla and Mari (as well as Emar and Ugarit). Despite the
many attestations of this divine figure, his character has remained hazy in
modern scholarship. He has no clear role in any mythological text, which has
made it hard to make a case for any type of essentialist-sounding “function” for
him (a state of affairs which may, of course, be taken as an instructive warning
against theologizing too essentialist a picture of any divine being just based on
mythological material). The largest modern study of Dagan’s character and
attestations is Feliu 2003, quite a skeptical piece of scholarship that concentrates
on creating a very impressive digest of Ancient Near Eastern textual snippets in
which Dagan appears in one way or the other but shies away from making too
many clear pronouncements on the “character” of the god, besides stating the he
was one of the main deities of many Syrian panthea. It has often been common
to regard Dagon/Dagan as some sort of agricultural god based on the
proposed—but not certain—equation between the name of the god and the
Northwest Semitic word appearing in Hebrew as dāgān, “grain,” but even this
link is rejected by Feliu, who is generally negative towards etymological
speculation concerning the name of the deity in question.
It has, it must be said, proven hard to establish the correct etymology for
these words (both the divine name and the “grain” word). The first question is,
of course, whether or not they are related at all. Even if that is granted, however,
difficulties remain. There have been various suggestions as to the origin of the
name of the god Dagan. The name has been connected with the “grain” word by
many scholars (an interpretation that goes all the way back to Philo of Byblos),
but it is highly uncertain whether the name of the god would then originally
have been derived from the “grain” word or the other way around. Another (and
much more speculative) suggestion has been to connect the divine name with
the Arabic verb dajana (“to be cloudy, to be rainy”) and, thereby, to see a sort of
storm god character as being inherent in the name. 191 Some scholars have given

191 See Healey 1999: 216 for an overview. The connection with the Arabic dajana

originated in Albright 1920: 319 n. 27, but was later apparently abandoned by Albright
himself (see Singer 2000: 25 n. 4). The idea implies some sort of weather god function
for Dagan, which is, however, not apparent in the texts at all. There was also once the
97
98 Unburning Fame

up the question of Dagan’s etymology and just resign to the solution of the
name being pre-Semitic and pre-Sumerian, without taking a stand in any clear
direction.

7.1 The Proto-Indo-European Word *dh(e)g̑hom- (“earth”) as a Possible

Source for Dagan/Dagon
There is, however, another suggestion for the background of the name Dagan,
that will be the focus of the present chapter. It has been proposed that the
solution to these questions is that the word has an Indo-European origin, more
specifically, that it has its background in a borrowing from some reflex of the
well-known Proto-Indo-European word *dh(e)g̑hom-, meaning “earth.” 192 This
Indo-European word occurs in various branches of that linguistic family in
forms and derivatives such as χθών (Greek), tkaṃ (East Tocharian), tēkan
(Hittite), tiyammi- (Luwian), kṣam- (Sanskrit), and others. Itamar Singer argues
rather persuasively for this seemingly far-fetched idea in a 2000 article;
specifically, he points out that the Akkadian form of the name occurs on a
number of occasions written using the Sumerogram dKUR, 193 i.e., “land” or
“mountain,” which would possibly express the literal meaning of the word
almost perfectly. Singer writes that “[i]n the context dealt with here the
important point is, that two of the oldest Indo-European languages in the eastern
Mediterranean, Hittite and Greek, possess an etymon, which is both phonetically
and semantically very similar to the Semitic earth-god Dagan.”194
Another factor that would fit with an etymological meaning having to do
with “earth” is the association that appears sometimes to have existed between
the figure of Dagan and agriculture (note that Singer appears to take this for
granted in the above quote). The evidence for this association is, granted, not
enormous—and it has sometimes been overstated—but it is there. Philo of
Byblos translates the name Dagon as σῖτον (“grain”), but this in itself is not
conclusive, as it could be interpreted as an etymologizing back-formation from
the Northwest Semitic “grain” word, which may or may not have anything

idea that the name Dagon should be derived from dāg (“fish”)—such an interpretation is
found in Jerome, Rashi and other mediaeval commentators, but has no support
whatsoever in actual pre-Common Era sources. It is today rightly rejected as a folk
etymology. One may note, however, that the interpretation of Dagon as a fish god has
influenced his modern pop-cultural portrayal due to his being presented in this way in the
fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. On the iconographic evidence for Dagan (which does not tell us
much about the questions that are the focus of the chapter), see Otto 2008 (preprint
version of article for the Iconography of Deities and Demons in the Ancient Near East,
with accompanying image file).
192 Most clearly in Singer 2000, but, as noted there, the idea was mentioned earlier

(and somewhat differently, limiting the idea to a Hittite origin) in Schmökel 1938: 99.
Schmökel did, however, not appear to believe in the possible connection himself. Note
also that Singer gives Schmökel the incorrect date 1934 instead of 1938.
193 Singer 2000: 222.
194 Singer 2000: 228.
 7. Dagan/Dagon as an Indo-European Name 99

originally to do with the name of the god. More interesting, perhaps, is the fact
that he also identifies the god as Ζεῦς Ἀρότριος (“Zeus of the plow”). Earlier
evidence for some form of agrarian features of Dagan can be found in the
personal names Yazraḫ-Dagan and Yaṭṭa-Dagan (“Dagan sows” and “Dagan
plants”) occurring at Mari195 and in the identification that was made between
him and the Hurrian god Kumarbi (Kumarve), who in turn appears partly to
have been a model for the Greek Kronos (who was definitely associated with
agriculture), especially in Hesiod.196
The idea of this type of semantically transparent onomastic data moving
from Indo-European to Semitic sources is certainly not impossible. In the
Ugaritic Epic of Kirta (KTU 1.14-1.16), there is a name of a (human, but still
mythological) figure which may be interesting as a parallel case. This is the
name of one of the daughters of Kirta, the hero himself. The text tells us that he
has seven daughters, and then an additional one bearing the significant name
ṯtmnt (often transcribed as Thitmanit or Thitmanitu). This name is a direct
feminine formation from the common Semitic word for “eight,” and, therefore,
its direct semantic meaning is “The eighth one.” There has sometimes been a
(somewhat unncecessary) habit of translating her name into English as
“Octavia.” As shown by the “Octavia” translation, this type of name has made
modern scholars think of Roman naming conventions. However, it is probably
not insignificant that there is an early Anatolian name very similar to Thitmanit
in its structure. In the early texts from the Assyrian merchant colony at Kanesh,
one finds a feminine personal name Šaptamanika, which probably means “The
seventh sister” (being a compound of an Anatolian reflex of an ordinal based on
the Indo-European word *septm̥, “seven,” and the Hittite word nika- or neka-,
meaning “sister”). 197 This example suggests that this type of “meaningfully
borrowed name” could well travel between mythological/linguistic traditions.

7.2 Criticism of the Indo-European interpretation of Dagan/Dagon

The suggestion that the name Dagan/Dagon was somehow derived from some
Indo-European source has been criticized from various angles. One of these is
represented by Gregorio Del Olmo Lete, who argued that the connection is
unlikely on chronological grounds. The name Dagan is attested in Eblaite
sources that come from a period quite some time earlier than the earliest positive

195 As pointed out by Feliu (2003: 283), the reading of the second name is uncertain,
however. He entirely rejects using these names as evidence for an agrarian association of
Dagan.
196 The possible association between Kumarbi/Kumarve, Kronos and Dagon is

mentioned e.g., by Dietrich (1974: 63), who, however, unnecessarily brings El into the
mix as well. There is little to suggest that El was ever thought of as an agrarian god.
197 It should be pointed out that the old idea that names such as Sextus and Decimus

(and their familial derivatives, such as Octavius) originally referred to the sixth or tenth
(etc.) child has been proven wrong; rather, Roman names of this sort appear originally to
have alluded to the month in which the child was born (see Petersen 1962, and, following
him, Salomies 1987: 114). On Šaptamanika, see Kloekhorst 2008: 756 (s.v. šiptamii̯ a-).
100 Unburning Fame

identification of Indo-European linguistic material in the Ancient Near East, and

this, he argues, makes the connection untenable. 198 The earliest attested
instances of Indo-European in the area date from the 19th century BCE, whereas
the Eblaite texts are from the middle of the third millennium. This line of
reasoning, though seemingly hard to counter, is, however, not quite compelling.
In today’s scholarship, it is normal to reckon with the speakers of Anatolian
Indo-European having been present in Asia Minor from quite an early period,
and if this view is accepted,199 the possible presence of a divine name derived
from Indo-European in the third millennium becomes much less of a problem.
The writing of Dagan’s name as dKUR (“land” or “mountain”) has, as we
have seen, been adduced as support of the name having to do with the Indo-
European “earth” word. Lluis Feliu, however, rejects this line of reasoning,
positing instead that it is derived from Dagan’s association with Enlil, whose
name is sometimes written in this way (but with the sense of “mountain”). Feliu
does, however, not argue very extensively for this point—he just says that the
writing of Dagans name using dKUR must originate with a title of Enlil having
to do with mountains, and leaves it at that. I personally see no difficulty in
imagining two meanings being present in the writing, one of which could have
to do with “land” and could subsequently have been identified with Enlil’s title.
The two possibilities are hardly mutually exclusive, and I believe that Feliu is
perhaps too hasty in rejecting the one involving “land.” 200

198 Del Olmo Lete 2001: 86.

199 See Melchert (forthcoming), with references to further literature propounding this
view. Melchert writes: “Contrary to earlier views, there has now developed a consensus
among linguists that entry of Indo-European speakers into Asia Minor was much earlier
than previously assumed. […] The gist of the argument is that the attested degree of
differentiation of the IE Anatolian languages such as Hittite and Luvian already by the
beginning of the second millennium requires at a minimum that their divergence from
Proto-Anatolian began by the middle of the third millennium. It may easily have begun
as early as the end of the fourth.” (Note that this quote is from the 2012 preprint version
of the article).
200 On pp. 215-216 of Feliu 2003, the author simply states the commonality of the
dKUR writing (as well as dKUR-GAL) as applied to Dagan and Enlil. On p. 285, he says

that it is “quite clear” that the writing “must be related to one of Enlil’s epithets (‘The
Great Mountain’) and not with one of Dagan’s attributes in connection with ‘land.’” As
mentioned above, this need not be the only possibility. It must, however, be conceded
that the interpretation “mountain” was demonstrably present in antiquity, as shown
through the Akkadian (phonetic) writing šadû rabû (“the great mountain”), appearing in
a bilingual letter from Mari (A.1258+ :9) as the equivalent of Dagan’s Sumerian title kur-
gal. So if the dKUR writing could be read as “earth,” it must have been a question of a
dual interpretation or superimposition, so to speak, as argued above. It could be pointed
out that Akkadian šadû may on occasion mean “open country” as well (cf. CAD, vol. Š I:
58-59 [s.v. šadû]), which would perhaps allow for some similar possibility of semantic
superimposition in Akkadian as well (although the “mountain” meaning was certainly the
most apparent one in the expression). On the Mari letter, see Fleming 1994.
 7. Dagan/Dagon as an Indo-European Name 101

Thus, I do not think that these counterarguments are in themselves weighty

enough to reject an Indo-European connection out of hand. There is scattered
but clear evidence for Dagan/Dagon as a god connected with grain or sowing—
and thereby with the arable land, and the etymology of the name is unclear.
Therefore, I believe that the impulse to search for a background in neighboring
Indo-European languages is not unsound as such.

7.3 The Questions of Vocalization and Phono-Semantic Matching

As pointed out by Singer,201 Hebrew makes a clear lexical distinction between
the use of the word to signify “grain” generally and the divine name Dagon
specifically: in Hebrew, “grain” is dāgān, whereas “Dagon” is, of course,
Dāgôn. Singer interprets this difference in vocalization as consisting in the
name of the god having undergone the Canaanite *ā->ō shift, Hebrew being the
only language that attests to an ō-shifted version of the word. This, by itself,
seems well and good, but one has to ask oneself: why would Hebrew show this
double reflex of what appears to be the same word? The easiest answer to this
question is, of course, to posit that Dāgôn is a borrowing from whatever
language the Philistines were speaking, as the Hebrew Bible only refers to him
as being a Philistine god (which is in itself somewhat surprising).
In an article published earlier, Itamar Singer argued that the Philistine
figure of Dagon was actually a composite character from a religio-historical
point of view. Singer argued that the figure was originally a feminine deity,
carrying an Indo-European-derived name, who was subsequently fused with the
natively Semitic Dagan known from elsewhere. 202 Whether or not such a
complex development really took place is difficult to say; however, I would
propose that the dual vocalizations of Dāgôn and dāgān in Hebrew could point
obliquely in a similar direction. One possible explanation for the discrepancy in
vowels could be that the Dāgôn variant does not actually represent any
Canaanite shift (at least not originally) but rather a loan from an Indo-European
source that actually retained the o-vocalism of the original, Proto-Indo-
European word. Additionally, such a form could also be attested in the
Babylonian variant version of the name, Daguna.
In fact, it is my belief that the forms with o/u vocalism may be necessary
for understanding where the divine name really came from. For the fact is that it
can hardly be denied that there may be a sound inner-Afro-Asiatic etymological
origin for the “normal” word dāgān (“grain” or “corn”); the suggestion that one
comes across in the literature is that the “grain” word is to be connected with a
(Proto-)West Chadic word *dang- (“corn”) which, according to Orel and
Stolbova, represents a metathesized reflex of the same word found in Hebrew
dāgān (they actually reconstruct the Proto-Afro-Asiatic form as *dagan-).203 If

201 Singer 2000: 224.

202 Singer 1992, esp. pp. 445-446.
203 Orel and Stolbova 1995: 143 (no. 620). The online lexical corpus of Militarev and

Stolbova (2003) proposes a wider array of cognates, including Egyptian dd.w (“a kind of
102 Unburning Fame

this is really the source of dāgān (etc.), one will have to reckon with a situation
in which the borrowed dāgôn word was secondarily identified with the inherited
Afro-Asiatic root. Indeed, the dual vocalizations could very well support this,
and such a scenario would fit quite well with the account proposed by Singer in
his earlier, 1992 article. Such a scenario is really not very strange: if an early
Semitic language borrowed an Indo-European word meaning “earth” and used it
as a name for a divine figure while at the same time possessing a similar-
sounding word meaning something like “corn,” it would be hard not to associate
them with one another. It might be objected that this would obviate any need to
bring Indo-European into the equation at all, but it should be pointed out that (a)
the attested writing dKUR of Dagan’s name does not mean “grain” but possibly
“land/earth,” and that (b) the “grain” word is unattested in East Semitic, whereas
the name of the god occurs there as well. The Afro-Asiatic etymology
mentioned above is not very certain, either. A simple equation between the
divine name and the “grain” word seems too easy to me, whereas a secondary
identification between the two words appears more plausible.
This type of adaptation, identifying a borrowed word with a phonetically
and semantically similar inherited one in order to associate not only the
meanings of the words but also their phonological shapes with each other,
actually has a specific name in linguistic theory: phono-semantic matching. This
term, created by Ghilʿad Zuckermann in reference to Modern Hebrew (or
Israeli, as he likes to refer to the language) is used to describe a situation in
which one language borrows a word from another but modifies the borrowing to
fit with a word in the inherited lexicon that both sounds somewhat like it and
has a similar meaning.204 In essence, a phono-semantic matching can be thought
of as a sort of folk-etymology in action while borrowing takes place. One of
Zuckermann’s examples from Modern Israeli Hebrew is the Mediaeval Hebrew
word dibbûb (“speech” or “inducing someone to speak”), which produced the
Modern Israeli word dibbuv, “dubbing,” partly because of its phonetic similarity
to precisely that English word.205 Similar cases occur in other languages as well.
This, I argue, is a relevant possibility for dāgôn in relation to dāgān. We shall
return to the idea of phono-semantic matching later on, as I believe that it may
be relevant as an analytical tool for understanding other Indo-European
influences in the biblical world as well.

grain”), a reconstructed Proto-Berber word *digi(n) (“leguminous plant”), words for

“beans” in Central Cushitic and Saho, etc. They reconstruct the original Proto-Afro-
Asiatic form of the word as *da/ingw-. Many of these suggestions seem rather far-
fetched to me.
204
For a presentation of the concept (and examples from various languages), see
Zuckermann 2003: 34-37. Further presentations can be found in Zuckermann 2009: 58-
60, in which phono-semantic matching is described (p. 58) as a case/process “in which a
lexical item derives simultaneously from two (or more) sources which are (usually
serendipitously) phonetically and semantically similar.”
205 Zuckermann 2009: 59. The notations of the words are my own, the translations are

Zuckermann’s.
 7. Dagan/Dagon as an Indo-European Name 103

7.4 Baal and Dagan at Ugarit, and the Title ḥtk dgn
A very interesting fact in the context of Dagan/Dagon as a possibly Indo-
European-derived name is the association that appears to have existed between
the divine figures of Baal and Dagan. 206 At Ugarit, for example, Baal is
consistently associated with Dagan in a familial sense, being called bn dgn (“son
of Dagan”) and once ḥtk dgn (often translated as something along the lines of
“descendant of Dagan”). One may well argue that this is to be read in the
context of (a) the story of Baal’s descent into the netherworld and (b) his title
zbl bʿl arṣ (“the prince, Baal/Lord of the earth/netherworld”). If one posits the
possibility that dgn originally means something like “earth,” these associations
between Baal and the earth/netherworld and the name Dagan become different
ways of expressing the same idea.
Regarding the unclear expression ḥtk dgn, it has been suggested that the
first half of the expression is actually derived from the verbal root ḥtk, meaning
“to rule.” Thus, a meaning “Lord [i.e., ruler] of rain” has been proposed by
Nicolas Wyatt (interpreting dgn as “rain”). 207 However, if we posit that the
actual meaning is “earth,” this line of reasoning would lead to the rather
startling possibility that ḥtk dgn means “Ruler/Lord of the Earth,” thus providing
an exact parallel to zbl bʿl arṣ (“Prince, Lord of the Earth”)!
Such an implied meaning could provide yet another clue to the strange fact
of the Ugaritic Baal being said to be the “son” of both El and Dagan at the same
time. This fact has been well elucidated by Noga Ayali-Darshan as having a
background in Hurrian ideas concerning Teššub/Teššob (the closest Hurrian
analogue of Baal), who appears to have been thought of as having two fathers,
Anu and Kumarve 208 (and I agree with her conclusions), yet the present
argument may have made the expressions even more fitting in Ugaritic, thus
leaving the Ugaritic version of the relationship less of a “fossil” than Ayali-
Darshan argues.209

7.5 Dagan and the Netherworld

Especially interesting from this point of view is the expression dgn pgr, which
appears in KTU 6.13, line 2. A reference to pgr in connection with dgn also
occurs in KTU 6.14, line 2.The exact meaning of this word is hotly debated and
unclear, but most analyses of the word associate it in some way with death or

206 Pointed out, e.g., in Green 2003: 205-206.

207 Wyatt 1980: 378.
208 The fact of the Hurrian storm god Teššob being described as having two fathers is

due to the mythological story (preserved in Hittite translation in the text called Kingship
in Heaven) of Kumarve biting off the penis of his own father Anu and thereby becoming
“impregnated” by him, giving birth to Teššob. This story is usually seen as having
influenced the tale of Kronos castrating his father Ouranos in Hesiod’s Theogony. More
on this will follow later in the chapter.
209 Ayali-Darshan 2013; the remarks about the Ugaritic state of affairs representing a

mythological “fossil” are found on p. 657.

104 Unburning Fame

funerary characteristics.210 The text here thus seems to associate Dagan/Dagon

with the sphere of the netherworld, which would be highly relevant if the name
did indeed carry a connotation of “earth” (cf. the use of Ugaritic arṣ to designate
the land of the dead). In the same way, it could be argued that Baal’s association
with dgn could have to do with the stories about his death and sojourn in the
netherworld.
It is a rather often recurring idea that Dagan was in some way or another a
deity of the netherworld, or at least one intimately connected with the religious
sphere of death and dying. The most important point that has been argued in this
direction is the fact that the type of sacrifice known as pagrû(m) (etc.) is attested
many times as having Dagan as their recipient—not only at Ugarit but also at
other Syrian sites such as Mari. This type of reasoning is, however, flatly
rejected by Lluis Feliu in his large study of the Syrian attestations of Dagan
worship. He contends that Dagan was the recipient of these sacrifices simply
because he was the greatest and most central god and not because of any
specifically chthonic characteristics. Feliu states that “Dagan is the recipient
because he is the creator father god [sic],” an explanation that I personally find
rather weak. 211 Another piece of evidence associating Dagan with the
netherworld is the fact that a reference to a temple of Dagan occurs in
connection with a bīt kispi (a funerary temple) at Terqa in an inscription of
Adad-Nirari I.212 In sum, if one accepts some form of netherworld connection as
being associated with Dagan, the proposed Indo-European “earth” background
fits extremely well. The god Dagan is the ruler of things connected with the
earth since his name actually means “earth.”
If one looks at the epithets that Dagan is given in early texts from the
Ancient Near East, one finds one in particular that fits well with an
interpretation of the god as being connected with the “earth,” both in the sense
of the physical earth and in that connected with the “earth” as underworld. This
is the expression (occurring at Emar) Dagan bēl ḫarri, which appears to mean
something like “Dagan, lord of the hole.” 213 This title goes together well with an
image of Dagan as being related to the earth in general, and the netherworld
more specifically.

7.6 An “Indo-European” Dagan/Dagon and the Hebrew Bible

An analysis of the name Dagon as being derived from (some form of) the Indo-
European “earth” word may provide more than an etymological curiosity. If one
presupposes that the original meaning was alive or present at some level in the
Hebrew use of the name also, the passages in which Dagon appears in the
Hebrew Bible gain a new level of possibly intended meaning.

210 For an overview, see suggestions and references in DUL: 655 (s.v. pgr).
211 Feliu 2003: 306.
212 Healey 1999: 217.
213 Feliu 2003: 106, 242. Notably written dKUR EN ḫarri, using the “earth/mountain”

Sumerogram as the writing of his name.

 7. Dagan/Dagon as an Indo-European Name 105

The name of the Philistine Dagon appears in 1 Sam 5, in the story about
how the Ark of the Covenant ended up in the hands of the Philistines in Ashdod.
Here we read:

Ûpĕlištîm lāqĕḥû ʾēt ʾărôn hāʾĕlōhîm waybīʾūhû mēʾeben hāʿēzer ʾašdôdâ /

wayyiqḥû pĕlištîm ʾet-ʾărôn hāʾĕlōhîm wayyābîʾû ʾōtô bêt dāgôn
wayyaṣṣîgû ʾōtô ʾēṣel dāgôn / wayyaškīmû ʾašdôdîm mimmoḥŏrāt
wĕhinnēh dāgôn nōpēl lĕpānāyw ʾarṣâ lipnê ʾărôn YHWH wayyiqḥû ʾet-
dāgôn wayyāšībû ʾōtô limqômô / wayyaškīmû babbōqer mimmoḥŏrāt
wĕhinnēh dāgôn nōpēl lĕpānāyw ʾarṣâ lipnê ʾărôn YHWH wĕrōʾš dāgôn
ûštê kappôt yādāyw kĕrūtôt ʾel-hammiptān raq gēwô214 nišʾar ʿālāyw / ʿal-
kēn lōʾ-yidrĕkû kōhănê dāgôn wĕkol-habbāʾîm bêt-dāgôn ʿal-miptan dāgôn
bĕʾašdôd ʿad hayyôm hazzeh
(1 Sam 5:1-5)

The Philistines took the Ark of God and brought it from Eben Haezer to
Ashdod; the Philistines took the Ark of God and brought it into the temple
of Dagon, and they placed it before Dagon. The Ashdodites awoke early on
the following day, and Dagon had fallen on his face towards the earth
before the Ark of YHWH. They took Dagon and returned him to his place.
They awoke early in the morning on the following day, and Dagon had
fallen on his face towards the earth before the Ark of YHWH; the head of
Dagon and his two hands were [lying] severed on the threshold. Only his
central trunk was left on him. For this reason, the priests of Dagon and the
people who come to the temple of Dagon do not step upon the threshold of
Dagon—until this day.

This embarrassing defacement of the statue of Dagon may carry with it an even
more subtle association if the possible Indo-European background of the name
is taken into account. If one reckons with the possibility that the author of the
text was at some level aware of a connotation “earth” inherent in the name of
the god, the repeated phrase wĕhinnēh dāgôn nōpēl lĕpānāyw ʾarṣâ (“Dagon
had fallen on his face towards the earth”) suddenly represents a cruel irony: the
god called “Earth” has fallen to the earth! The collapse of the statue becomes
even more poignant, and it appears that the old, etymological meaning was used
for literary purposes (as a pun) by the author. 215

214 Reading follows, among others, McCarter 1980: 119; MT has dāgôn here as well.

The adopted reading is based on Vulgate (truncus) and LXX (ῥάχις, normally something
like “lower part of the back”). The MT reading is clearly secondary and represents the
lectio simplicior in this case. The reading dĕgô (something like “his fish” or “[the part of]
him that was a fish”), originally proposed by Wellhausen and appearing in BHKApp, has
been rightly rejected in BHSApp, probably due to its being based on the folk-etymology
deriving the name Dagon from dāg (“fish”); for the latter point, see Healey 1999: 218.
215 This, of course, is not the only instance of a combination of the verb nāpal and

ʾarṣâ, but the background sketched here may make it especially poignant.
106 Unburning Fame

This possible dual layer of meaning becomes even more suggestive, as we

know from other texts in the Hebrew Bible that mock non-Israelite divinities
that this is often done by arguing that they fail within their own supposed sphere
of competence—see, e.g., how Elijah mocks the worshipers of Baal on Carmel
in 1 Kings 18 by implying that Baal cannot bring rain and battle drought and
how the “anti-idol” texts in Deutero-Isaiah complain that the Babylonian gods
can neither eat nor speak (though offerings were made to them and oracles were
supposedly received from them) and that they have to be carried around the city
by their devotees, being themselves unable to walk.216 If a god etymologically
associated with the earth falls to the earth, this could be construed as a similarly
embarrassing situation.
A similar reference may perhaps be found in another passage 217 that
mentions Dagon, i.e. the story of Samson and his capture by the Philistines.
Judg 16:23 says the following:

Wĕsarnê pĕlištîm neʾĕspû lizbōaḥ zebaḥ-gādôl lĕdāgôn ʾĕlōhêhem

ûlĕśimḥâ wayyōʾmĕrû nātan ʾĕlōhênû bĕyādēnû ʾēt šimšôn ʾôyĕbênû

The governors of the Philistines gathered together to offer up a great

sacrifice to Dagon, their god, and for a feast. And they said: “Our god has
delivered Samson, our enemy, into our hands!”

Note here the clear opposition between Dagon, the Philistine god, and Samson,
the Israelite warrior. Again, if we look at the etymologies of these two names,
an artful literary construct appears. The name Samson/šimšôn is derived from
the noun šemeš, “sun,” which means that the name etymologically signifies
something like “the little sun” or “the one of the sun.” 218 And if Dagon means
“earth,” the above verse becomes in effect an artful juxtaposition of earth and
sun. The god Earth and the hero Sun are doing battle with each other.
Such a juxtaposition can be read in (at least) two ways, which are not
necessarily mutually contradictory. The first possibility is seeing the binary
opposition of earth and sun as symbolizing the one between the fertile land (and
grain!) and the burning, destructive sun. Such appears to be the point of view
articulated by Philippe Guillaume in his exegesis of the Dagon texts of the Old
Testament. 219 Another possible reading would be to think of the proposed
“netherworld” aspect of Dagon (and of his putative etymological origin in the

216 I want to thank Blaženka Scheuer (p.c.) for pointing this aspect out to me. My

analysis of the Carmel narrative and Elijah’s mocking of Baal in that text (in relation to
Ugaritic narratives) can be found in Wikander 2014: 131-143 (esp. pp. 136-137).
217 A further reference to Dagon also occurs later on in 1 Sam 5 (in v. 6).
218 For an overview of the discussion concerning Samson’s name, see HALOT: 1592-

1593 (s.v. šimšôn), with many references to further literature.

219 “The Samson cycle presents another one of the grain’s enemy [sic]: the scorching

sun that regularly dries up the ears before the full development of the grain.” (Guillaume
2005: 190).
 7. Dagan/Dagon as an Indo-European Name 107

Indo-European word for “earth”) in combination with the well-established

“chthonic” characteristics of the figure of the sun in many Ancient Near Eastern
religious traditions (the sun passing into the realm of the dead at night).
As I have argued in Wikander 2014, Northwest Semitic religious tradition
(especially the Ugaritic texts) symbolically combine the idea of the sun
travelling into the subterranean land of the dead with the role of the sun in
bringing death-inducing drought to the land.220 If one presupposes that the name
Dagon did at some point actually mean “earth” (and thereby, by implication,
“netherworld”), the fact of a god with that name being overpowered by a hero
bearing a name meaning “little sun” provides quite an interesting mythological
parallel to the Ugaritic motifs of the sun goddess Shapshu burning the land
while serving the god of death, Mot.221
In the above-mentioned biblical cases, then, reading the name Dagon as
being derived from the Indo-European word for “earth”—and presupposing that
this meaning was at some level known to the authors—renders the text deeper
and more significant and exposes yet another layer of literary sophistication in
them. Doing so may in fact reveal yet another subtext to the narrative of Samson
(“the little sun”) overcoming Dagon. In early Indo-European sources, it is not
uncommon to divide the world of deities and humans into two spheres, that of
the “heavenly” (i.e., divine) and “earthly” (i.e., human) beings, respectively.
Such is the thinking underlying a word occurring in a Gaulish inscription from
Vercelli, mentioning TEUOXTONION (“heavenly and earthly beings,” i.e., “gods
and humans”), in which the second half (-XTONION) represents a derivation
(“earthly”) of exactly the complex *dh(e)g̑hom-word which is the subject of the
present chapter, and the first half is derived from the Proto-Indo-European
*deiwo- (“heavenly, i.e., divine”).222 If we toy with the possibility of such an
Indo-European-derived thinking being alive under the surface of the Samson
text, another stratum of meaning suggests itself. Samson, the “little sun,” bears a
name that is decidedly “heavenly,” yet he is the mortal man. The divine being,
Dagon, is the “earthling” that is defeated. The story thus mocks this Indo-
European theological idea by inverting it. The heavenly one is the man, and he
conquers the earthly one, who was supposed to be a god.

A possible later sign of the interpretation of the words/names Dagon and dāgān
as having a chthonic association can perhaps be found in the early Jewish
reception of Hos 14:8, a verse that includes the following words about those
who dwell “in his [YHWH’s] shadow”:

220
For a brief presentation of my results in this area, see esp. pp. 247-257 in
Wikander 2014.
221 For my exegesis of the relevant texts from the Baal Cycle, see Wikander 2014: 23-

47.
222 On the Indo-European division into heavenly gods and earthly humans, see, e.g.,

West 2007: 124-125 (also mentioning the Gaulish inscription, as well as other examples
of the phenomenon).
108 Unburning Fame

[…] yĕḥayyû dāgān They shall make grain live (=grow?),

wĕyiprĕḥû kaggāpen and they shall bloom like a garden.
[…]

The words are quoted according to the MT, which is almost certainly textually
corrupt here; however, it is that specific text which concerns us, as it seems to
be the one reflected in the rather free rendering of Targum Yonathan, which
instead of talking of “making grain live” tries to interpret the strange expression
yĕḥayyû dāgān using the Aramaic phrase yēḥôn mîtayyâ, “the dead shall live.”
Apparently, the translator had trouble understanding what yĕḥayyû dāgān
meant, and inserted a reference to the resurrection of the dead. It seems that the
word dāgān carried with it some kind of association with the semantic sphere of
the netherworld or dying. This could be a sign that the possible background of
the words dāgān and/or dāgôn as having to do with earth or the netherworld was
conceptually alive in the mind of the targumic translator, even though the
different vocalizations (dāgān and dāgôn) appear here to be conflated. If the
figure of Dagan/Dagon—or rather his name—once carried a lexical connection
to “earth,” this could be yet another reflex of that background. 223

7.7 Excursus: Methodological Issues Inherent in Searching for Etymological

Meanings of Divine Names
These possibilities do, however, raise several methodological questions. Even if
one does accept that the name Dagan/Dagon is derived from the Indo-European
“earth” word, the question remains how much of such an “original” meaning
can have been preserved into the time of the writing of the Deuteronomistic
history. There appears to be no sign of the name ever meaning “earth” in
ordinary Hebrew discourse.224 This means that it is highly unlikely indeed that
an Israelite audience “heard” the name Dagon as referring to “earth” when the
text was read to them. However, one may well imagine a situation in which the
name was generally associated with a “chthonic sphere,” as it were, especially
given a possible conflation with an inherited Afro-Asiatic etymon meaning
something like “grain” (vel sim.).
As a typological parallel to such a state of affairs, one can mention the
ancient Norse god Thor (in his various etymological manifestations). Most
speakers of Nordic languages today are probably unaware that this name
etymologically means “thunder” (Old Norse Þorr), but they may still well be
aware of the mythological association that once existed between him and the
powers of thunder and lightning (and in this case, also, there is a contemporary
Swedish word tordön, meaning “thunder,” which is both etymologically and

223 I want to thank Magnus Halle for rewarding discussions concerning the Targum to

Hosea 13-14.
224 This very point (in fact extended to Semitic in general) is made in Feliu 2003:

285. A similar criticism is found in Del Olmo Lete 2001: 86. See however, the above
argument concerning Targum Yonathan.
 7. Dagan/Dagon as an Indo-European Name 109

superficially easily connected with the name of the deity). It could of course be
objected that these associations being alive among modern speakers represents
reception of earlier religio-historical scholarship, but a similar situation may
have been part of the process concerning Dagon as well: even though the
peoples of the Ancient Near East did not know religio-historical method, it is
clear that they discussed and compared the roles of the various deities
worshiped. This has been well pointed out by Mark S. Smith in his book God in
Translation, in which he posits that ancient interpretatio of gods between
various cultures in essence constituted a type of pre-scholarly study of
comparative religion.225
There are other cases in the Hebrew Bible in which “proto-history-of-
religion” type arguments appear to be made—see, for example, 1 Kgs 18:28,
where it is mentioned that the priests of Baal on Mt. Carmel cry and maim
themselves kĕmišpāṭām, “according to their manner.” This expression does
seem to imply that the author of the text (and, implicitly, his audience) were
privy to a form of proto-religio-historical speculation about the believed essence
of Baal and the ways of worshiping him.226 In a similar manner, one could well
imagine a situation in which ancient Israelites knew that the divine figure Dagon
had something to do with earth, ground or grain, without them thereby having
any notion of the original etymology of the name (which would anyway be lost
in the mists of time by the writing of the Deuteronomistic History).
There are, in fact, signs that Dagon’s name could be associated with the
idea of a verdant land (specifically connected to the semantic sphere of “earth”)
even during Old Testament times. An example of this can be found in the
funerary inscription of Eshmunazar II of Sidon, which refers to the plain of
Sharon as “Dagon’s rich land” (ʾrṣt dgn hʾdrt).227

These methodological questions point to a major one: that of the general risk of
falling into the “etymological fallacy” when performing studies of the sort
carried out here. This fallacy consists in consciously or unconsciously
presupposing that there is a “basic” or even “real” sense inherent in a word or a
name, and that this sense is always built into the word, regardless of temporal
situation or semantic change. The idea that words have an “actual” and
unchangeable meaning has been justly criticized, especially when used for doing
history of religion. However, I believe that it is possible to work with
“etymological poetics” without falling into this trap.
It is a fact that a word, name or mythological construct can carry multiple
levels of meaning with it. In this context, I would like to refer to the argument
made in section 4.6 about the multilayered meanings of the name of the Hittite

225 See esp. Smith 2010: 47, where it is stated that ancient translating deity-lists (in
this case, those from Ugarit) represent “an implicit theory of typology of divinity, and
thus an indigenous form of analysis corresponding to the classification of deities found in
the modern study of comparative religion.”
226 I made this point previously in Wikander 2014: 139.
227 Pointed out in Guillaume 2005: 190. The words are found at KAI 14:19.
110 Unburning Fame

Storm God (called “the Conqueror”) and the title of the Ugaritic Baal as aliyn
(“Victorious,” “Conqueror,” or “extremely powerful”)—as well as relevant
cognates of the Anatolian epithet in Indo-Aryan—in connection with the names
of the serpents they battle. That argument shows, I believe, how etymological
meanings can lie behind names and titles as a source of references and puns,
without them actually “controlling” the contemporary meaning of a particular
word, name or title.

7.8 Phonological Implications for the Source Language

If the various Dagon/Dagan words do, indeed, represent a loan from some Indo-
European language or other, the form of the word may yield some interesting
results when studied from a linguistic perspective. In that case, it is quite
important that the Semitic versions of the word consistently show two voiced
consonants—a d and a g—when representing some sort of reflex of Proto-Indo-
European *dh(e)g̑hom. This fact means that the putative Indo-European language
or dialect from which the word was borrowed was one in which (a) the complex
phonotactic structure sometimes known in Indo-European linguistics as a “thorn
cluster”228 had the sound order “dental-dorsal” (as in Anatolian and Tocharian)
and not “dorsal-dental” (as in Greek) or other variants (such as Indo-Aryan,
which puts the dorsal first and turns the other sound into a sibilant) and (b) one
in which the reflexes of the “voiced aspirate” sound here appearing in such a
cluster at least appeared to have voice as a relevant phonetic trait. The only
known Indo-European sub-family for which both of these criteria are probably
true is the Anatolian one, and even in that case the evidence is very convoluted
when it comes to the question of voice. It is highly unclear if voice was really
phonemic in Anatolian languages or if the corresponding distinction was rather
one of geminate/non-geminate or fortis/lenis (Proto-Indo-European voiced and
voiced-aspirate stops falling together as “voiced”/fortis/non-geminate in
Anatolian), and Craig Melchert also posits a possible “de-voicing” of initial
consonants over the whole sub-phylum.229 Also, as mentioned above, the forms
of the name showing an ô-vowel could possibly point to different routes of
transmission having been involved. Still, Anatolian languages provide the most
plausible background for a borrowing. 230

228 Thorn clusters are combinations of sounds in Proto-Indo-European that appear in

some descendant languages as a dorsal followed by some kind of sibilant, wheras others
have a both a velar/dorsal and a dental stop (cf. the relationship between Sanskrit kṣam-
and its Greek cognate χθών, both representing the “earth” word). Anatolian and
Tocharian has shown that the clusters in question were apparently originally of the
structure dental-dorsal, which was later metathesized and changed in various ways.
229 Melchert 1994: 18-20.
230 One may note with some interest that in Hittite, the locative form of the reflex of

*dh(e)g̑hom- is actually no less than dagan (=dgan?). This form does, however, seem an
unlikely source of a divine name: it is hard to imagine somebody calling their god “in the
earth.” More interesting would be the oft-occurring compound dagan-zipa, meaning
something like “earth-spirit,” with the second part of the compound being a borrowing
 7. Dagan/Dagon as an Indo-European Name 111

7.9 The Question of Gender

As I see it, one of the most potent objections to Indo-European as the source of
the name Dagan/Dagon is the matter of gender. In most Indo-European
languages, the reflexes of the *dh(e)g̑hom- word are feminine. Hittite is, it must
be granted, an exception (in that language, the word is neuter), but the
compound daganzipa- (the “earth spirit”) was regarded as a feminine being,
even though Hittite does not show a morphological distinction between
masculine and feminine. This means that—if we want to accept a derivation of
Dagan from *dh(e)g̑hom- as at least plausible—we must somehow account for
the fact that Dagan/Dagon is universally described as a masculine deity in
Northwest Semitic and Syria-Palestine generally.
This is, I would argue, not impossible, however. Given the presence of
numerous male deities connected with (a) the arable land and (b) the
netherworld in the Semitic-speaking Ancient Near East (the Ugaritic Baal being
a prime example), it is not hard to imagine the word being transferred into the
masculine semantic realm. This would be especially fitting in the Syrian milieu,
given that the solar deity was there often construed as feminine (as in the case of
the Ugaritic Shapshu), whereas the East Semitic Shamash was masculine. The
“sun” word itself is a good example of how easy it apparently was to change the
gender of gods representing natural phenomena—even in the Hebrew language
itself, the word šemeš can be both masculine and feminine. Thus, the apparently
great obstacle of the Indo-European word having been feminine is, I believe, not
as difficult as one might think.

7.10 A Possible Parallel Case: ʿAṯtar(t) and Indo-European *h2ster-

In order to put the possibility of Dagan/Dagon being derived from Indo-
European into perspective, one could compare with the case of the various
Semitic deities derived from the root ʿṯtr (among these are the Ugaritic ʿAṯtar,
his feminine counterpart ʿAṯtart, the Hebrew ʿAštōret/ʿAštārôt and probably the
Akkadian Ištar), which can be plausibly argued originally to be a borrowing
from the Indo-European root reconstructed as *h2ster-, meaning “star” (a root
which actually happens to be the etymological origin of the modern English

from the non-Indo-European Hattic language, which was spoken indigenously in Asia
Minor prior to the arrival of the Hittites. The beginning of this word does, after all, look
exactly like the name of the Syrian god.
There are a number of cases in the preserved textual material about Dagan in which
he is associated with armies or troops—Akkadian ṣābu(m)—or otherwise involved with
warfare. One could image an unattested epithet of Dagan sounding something like
*Dagan ṣābi (“Dagan of the army”), which could in turn have represented a
reinterpretation of a borrowing from Anatolian dagan-zipa. This, however, is entirely
speculative, as no such epithet has been preserved in actual texts, only a general
association with armies and warlike activities, from which such an epithet could
theoretically be reconstructed.
112 Unburning Fame

word “star” itself).231 If the root of the names of these Semitic divine figures
represent loans from Indo-European (which I find highly likely), it provides a
sort of template of comparison for Dagan/Dagon. Also, it would certainly be
interesting if two cases in which Indo-European words have been borrowed into
early Semitic as divine names happen to be (a) a word for the earth and (b) a
word for a star.

One is almost reminded of the famous passage from the Baal Cycle:

rgm ʿṣ . w lḫšt . abn […] A word of wood and whisper of stone,

tant . šmm . ʿm . arṣ a talk between heaven and earth,
thmt . ʿmn . kbkbm from the depths to the stars:
abn . brq . d l . tdʿ . šmm I understand the lightning that the heavens
know not,
rgm l tdʿ . nšm . the word that the people do not know,
w l . tbn hmlt . arṣ . and the masses of the earth do not understand.
atm . w ank ibġyh . Come, and I will reveal it!
(KTU 1.3 III 22-29)

The two concepts envelop the whole world, which could possibly entail the
possibility that they were borrowed together. Also, one may note that the
Semitic deities based on ʿṯtr are both masculine and feminine, thus proving that
the question of gender need not be deciding in and of itself.

7.11 Dagan/Dagon, Kumarve/Kumarbi, and Kronos

One highly intriguing possibility raised by the interpretation of Dagan/Dagon as
having to do with the Indo-European ”earth” word is what such an exegesis
could imply in the light of parallel divine figures and mythological motifs
involving them in the greater Ancient Near East—and in ancient Greece. This
possibility rests upon the equation/syncretism/interpretatio sometimes made in
antiquity between Dagan and the Hurrian deity Kumarve (often rendered,
somewhat incorrectly, as Kumarbi). 232 In mythological contexts, Kumarve is

231 For a recent statement of some arguments for the Indo-European “star” word
being involved in background of the Semitic words, see Wilson-Wright 2015.
232 As mentioned by Feliu (2005: 299), there is no preserved god list that equates

Dagan and Kumarve outright; however, he goes on to mention that he believes that there
is clear indirect evidence for the equation at Ugarit, where the Ugaritic sacrifice order ilib
(“father-god”), El, Dagan is matched by the order in atn, il, kmrb in a Hurrian sacrificial
list, also from Ugarit. The Ugaritic text involved is lines 1-3 of KTU 1.118, which has
exact parallels in KTU 1.147, lines 2-4 and 1.148, lines 1-2 (in the latter cases with some
damaged names). The same order is attested in the Akkadian-language list RS 20.024,
lines 1-3. All of these texts are available for synoptic reading in Pardee (RCU), text
number 1. The Hurrian parallel text from Ugarit is KTU 1.42 (=RS 1004); however, one
should notice that the three deities are not directly adjacent in that text: in atn (“father-
god”) is in line 1, whereas il (El) and kmrb (Kumarve) appear in line 6 (and then again, in
 7. Dagan/Dagon as an Indo-European Name 113

perhaps best known from the story often referred to in scholarship as Kingship
in Heaven but now known to have had a title meaning approximately The Song
of Going Forth;233 it is preserved only in a Hittite version. A central motif in that
story is that of Kumarve emasculating Anu, his father, by biting of his genitals,
which leads to Kumarve being in a sense impregnated and giving life to the
Storm God (referred to in Hittite by a writing with a phonetic complement
clearly implicating the Hittite Storm God, Tarḫunna-,234 whom we have already
met in this study, but probably originally representing the Hurrian Teššob). As
is well-known, this story is often regarded by modern scholarship as having
been the template for Hesiod’s description of Kronos castrating his father
Ouranos and the resulting birth of Zeus in the Theogony.235 What Noga Ayali-
Darshan suggested in her above-mentioned article on Baal’s dual parentage is
that a similar tradition underlies Baal at Ugarit being said to be the son both of
El and of Dagan. This possibility is especially alluring as (a) Dagan and
Kumarve appear at times to have been identified with each other, and (b) the
parallel between Baal and Teššob was common.
A similar story is also recounted by Philo of Byblos about the birth of Zeus
Demarous (the latter a known epithet of Baal, also attested at Ugarit in the form
dmrn). Philo’s story is, however, somewhat different, in that it identifies Kronos
not with Dagon but with “Elos” (i.e. El) and mentions Dagon as a separate
character, who acts as a sort of “extra father” to Demarous. Yet, the basic idea
of Baal/Demarous’s double parentage is present here as well, and Dagon and
Kronos are given as parts of the same generation of gods. 236

the directive case, in line 7). However, the fit may perhaps be good enough to be taken as
a piece of support for the Dagan/Kumarve equation at Ugarit. For a recent study of KTU
1.42, interpreting it as a ritual of anointment of deities, see Lam 2011, who, however,
regards the combination of il and kmrb in the text not as talking of two different deities
but as a single one, “Ilu-Kumarbe” (p. 159, n. 57), an interpretation that would render the
text useless as an argument for a Dagon-Kumarve syncretism. Feliu (2005: 299-300)
does, however, adduce various other pieces of evidence for the Dagan-Kumarve equation
in the Ancient Near East, for example in the form of a common association with the city
of Tuttul.
233 On the ancient title of the work, see van Dongen 2011: 182, n. 3 (whose rendering

of the title I have followed). The original discoverer of the ancient title of the text is Corti
(2007), who renders it (pp. 119-120) as “Song of Genesis/Beginning.” The original
expression (in Sumerograms) is SÌR GÁ×È.A. Strauss Clay and Gilan (2014) use the
rendering “Song of Emergence,” and connect this term to the usage of verbs for making
things “emerge” (ἀνίημι and ἵημι) as signs of the close relationship between the Greek
Theogony story and the Hurro-Hittite background thereof.
234 Pointed out in van Dongen 2011: 182, n. 4.
235 For an early example of the connection, see Güterbock 1948. A modern study

presupposing a very close correspondence is Strauss Clay and Gilan 2014. For a general
survey, see Scully 2015: 50-55.
236 See Ayali-Darshan 2013: 654-655 and Smith 2001: 57-59. The central passage

from Philo of Byblos is preserved in Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica 1.10.18-19.

114 Unburning Fame

The stories, though similar, are certainly not identical. The Philo version,
for example, posits a further generation, represented by Ouranos, which has no
clear counterpart in the Ugaritic story (but does, however, fit very well with the
sky god Anu in the Hurro-Hittite version). There was clearly a conflation of
various generations and stories: is Kumarve to be compared to El or Dagon in
the story, for example?

Regardless of whether one regards Dagan and El as allies in a single divine

generation fighting the sky god (as in the Philo of Byblos version) or believe
that somehow El himself stood in for Anu/Ouranos in a putative Ugaritic myth,
the similarity of motifs becomes even more fitting if one presupposes that the
name Dagan originally carries with it a meaning connected to “earth.” Then, one
would get an even clearer illustration of the concept of an “earthly” or
agriculturally connected deity rising against an elder (heavenly?) progenitor,
thus giving rise to the thunder god. And what does this make of Baal’s
mythological roles, as they are described at Ugarit? The answer is that Baal in
effect becomes the perfect combination of the “heavenly” and “earthy”
characteristics that may have been implicit in his coming-to-be. He is a
Cloudrider (rkb ʿrpt), a thunder god, who yet descends to the dark
netherworld.237 Compare this opposition of “above” and “below” to what was
suggested about Dagan and Samson earlier in this chapter.

7.12 Conclusions
Is there, then, enough evidence to say conclusively that the divine name
Dagan/Dagon derives from Indo-European? To a question put that harshly, one
would have to answer a non liquet; however, such an interpretation fits very
well with many pieces of circumstantial evidence. An interpretation of this sort
would even provide exegetical clues for the two Old Testament texts concerning
Dagon. A god whose name is sometimes written with a Sumerogram that may
mean “earth,” who appears to be associated with agriculture, the etymology of
whose name is unclear—such a god could well represent a loan from an Indo-
European “earth” root that was undoubtedly present in the Ancient Near East.

237 As, indeed, does the Hurrian Teššob in the Hurrian/Hittite bilingual Epic of

Liberation—see KBo XXXII 13 recto I 9-10 (Hurrian)/recto II 9-10 (Hittite), available in

transcription and translation in the edition of Neu (1996: 220-221). In the Hittite version,
the name Teššob as translated as dIM (Storm God, Tarḫunna-), as usual.
 8. Strangers, Boundary-Crossers, and Young
Predators in Hebrew and Indo-European:
gwr, *h3erbh-, and ḫabiru
The purpose of this chapter is to discuss certain parallels between a Hebrew
(Northwest Semitic) and an ancient Indo-European social concept, and possible
avenues of interaction between them, as well as illustrative typological parallels
in their semantic developments. The intention is that such a comparison may
serve to illustrate a few points relevant to the interpretation of both. Certainly,
such terms rarely have a one-to-one correspondence between any two languages
or linguistic cultures, but comparing and contrasting specific terminology
having similar spheres of meaning can help in elucidating these spheres when
they overlap in the relevant ancient languages (whereas they may be missing in
modern western ones, which thus provide no viable comparandum). For an
illustration of this methodology one need not look further than the much-
discussed comparison between the juridical use of the Hebrew verbal root
zʿq/ṣʿq and the mediaeval German concept of Zetergeschrei, which has often
been thought as an illustrative example of a parallel institution which can shed
light on the Israelite one.238
The two concepts that are the focus of the present chapter are:

 the Hebrew verbal root gwr (“to sojourn, to live as a resident alien in a
territory”) with its nominal derivation gēr (“resident alien, stranger,
immigrant”),

and

 the Proto-Indo-European verbal root reconstructed as *h3erbh-, which

appears to have had the approximate meaning “to switch group alliance,
to leave one (social) group and become attached to another.”

In a third instance, I will also touch upon

 the much-debated Hebrew ʿibrî and its putative background in ḫabiru,
etc.

Thus, I will analyze expressions for boundary-crossing, and groups that operate
by performing such actions, in the biblical/Semitic and Indo-European milieux.
As we shall see in this chapter, there are a number of interestingly parallel
developments in the way that the two linguistic/cultural spheres encode these
ideas, and I will also discuss a possible historical connection between them.
Such a connection may have been direct in a linguistic sense (i.e., involving
loanwords), or it may have been more abstract, entailing shared modes of

238 For a retrospective of the Zetergeschrei discussion with references and a critical

assessment thereof, see Albertz 1997: 1091.

115
116 Unburning Fame

encoding social categories (but not necessarily using the same words). Of
course, one must also methodologically be open to the possibility that such
similarities are completely serendipitous and due to chance (or, rather, to similar
social realities requiring some kind of linguistic and/or literary expression);
earlier in the book (see section 4.1), I have questioned attempts to find
Dumézilian trifunctionalism “imported” into the Hebrew Bible on precisely
such a basis. However, in that case, the problem was bigger, as the very
existence of the Dumézilian tripartite division of Proto-Indo-European society is
debatable, to say the least. If one limits oneself to social concepts that are more
or less securely reconstructable for the proto-language, one will perforce stand
on more stable ground, with the comparison/parallel between the two relevant
cultural spheres (Indo-European and Old Testament, in this case) being the issue
to subscribe to or reject, rather than the entire existence of one of the
phenomena to be compared, as in the case of comparing Dumézil’s pattern with
alleged parallels in the Old Testament.

8.1 Hebrew gēr: A Crosser of Boundaries

The Hebrew word gēr has been defined by Frank Anthony Spina in the
following way:

It is generally acknowledged that gēr in the Hebrew Bible refers to people who are
no longer directly related to their original social setting and who have therefore
entered into dependent relationships with various groups or officials in a new social
setting […]. The gēr was of another tribe, city, district, or country who was without
customary social protection or privilege and of necessity had to place himself under
the jurisdiction of someone else […].239

It is the aspect of the gēr as a “crosser of boundaries” that occasions the

comparison that I here intend to make. To perform the action signified by the
verb gwr appears to involve leaving one group, category or social setting and
attaching oneself to another. To be a gēr is to be a boundary-crosser: it is not
merely a question of finding a place to live but one of changing one’s social
status and allegiance, a fact that is underscored by the use of gwr/gēr to signify
religious conversion to Judaism in Rabbinic Hebrew. A convert is not simply
one who is staying in your territory for a shorter duration—it is someone who
has left his old religious community and formally attached himself to a new and
different one. The use of the root gwr to describe the wanderings of Abraham in
Genesis is highly interesting in this context, as his sojourns begin with YHWH’s
famous lek lĕkā exhortation in Gen 12:1 (telling Abraham to leave the land of
his birth and his original social setting) and then involves him striking a type of
“social deal” (a covenant) with that deity, who thereby accepts him into a new
religio-social situation. It is this perhaps somewhat nebulous concept of “leaving

239 Spina 1983: 323. Spina’s references removed for readability.

 8. Strangers, Boundary Crossers, and Young Predators 117

one’s social setting and entering another” that I would like to point out has a
parallel in ancient Indo-European.

8.2 The Root *h3erbh- in Indo-European

The early social sense of the root reconstructed as *h3erbh-240 may have been
most clearly and accurately preserved in the Anatolian branch of the Indo-
European linguistic family, and it is its usage in that branch that has proved
most central in elucidating its original social meaning. In Hittite, the best-
preserved of the Anatolian languages, the root occurs as ḫarp(p)-,241 and—as
established by Calvert Watkins and Craig Melchert—the sense of the verb
appears to have been very similar to what was mentioned above: leaving one’s
own group and becoming part of another. This verb is employed in the Hittite
laws to describe both a husband and a wife divorcing each other and an ox
straying into the wrong pen. In both cases, the question is one of separating
from one group and entering into another. 242
In other branches of the Indo-European family, the social significance of
the verbal root comes especially into focus. Such is the case of the Latin word
orbus (”bereft”, originally “bereft of parents”) and the Greek ὄρφανος (whence
the English “orphan”). Here, the “passing into another group” consists of
leaving one family and being attached to another. Just as was stated in the above
quotation from Spina about Hebrew gēr, the question is one of abandoning the
safe haven of one’s social context and being forced into another, to which one is
in a very real sense a stranger.
One should also note that in some Semitic languages, the root gwr has
connotations having to do with being in a sort of patron-client relationship, a
meaning which expresses a similar type of semantic development to the one of
Indo-European *h3erbh- being applied to orphans entering into another family
than they grew up in.
An especially interesting use of the Indo-European root *h3erbh- in some of
the daughter branches concerns slavery or servitude. In a number of branches of
the Indo-European family, the root has come to be used to signify being a slave
or having to work. Such is the case in Slavic, where the meaning “to work” or
“to serve” has become the primary meaning of the root, as shown in Old Church

240 It could also be quite possible to reconstruct the root as *h erbh-, as highlighted in
2
Weiss 2006: 259, n. 11, though *h3erbh- is probably slightly more likely. I will use the
latter reconstruction here.
241 As pointed out in Melchert 1994: 153 and 2010: 186, the fact that the Hittite root

ends in a geminate stop (pp) is not problematic for the etymological connection, even
though the cognates in other Indo-European languages demand a voiced aspirate (*bh),
which is usually and regularly represented by ungeminated stop in Hittite (the so-called
law of Sturtevant), since there are other examples of this unusual gemination occurring
after the phoneme r.
242 Watkins 2000: 60 (s.v. orbh-); Melchert 2010 (esp. p. 180, 186-187). Melchert’s

article, in particular, is highly illuminating and has created much of the background for
the understanding of the Hittite root here presented.
118 Unburning Fame

Slavonic rabŭ, which means “slave” (representing a Proto-Indo-European

nominal derivation *h3orbho-). From the Slavic use of the root for expressing
this type of connotation comes the loanword “robot”; the Germanic word
appearing in German as Arbeit and in Old English as earfoþe (meaning “work”
or “toil”) may also be derived from the same root.
Craig Melchert and others have put forward the highly interesting (though,
of course, somewhat speculative) idea that this use of a verbal root originally
related to switching (often social) group-allegiances to signify working or
slavery is an indication that this type of non-free hard work was something into
which one was not born in Proto-Indo-European society, but that such work-
forces were so to speak recruited through other means—presumably warlike
ones. That is, slaves in the Proto-Indo-European milieu would primarily have
been people that were coerced into passing from freedom into servitude—or,
perhaps, people who had left their own social group (in which they were free)
and had entered into the hegemony of another one. 243 This would of course not
be the only type of “allegiance change” that the root would have signified in
Proto-Indo-European, but rather an example of a type of such boundary-crossing
that it may originally have indicated.
Another study of the Indo-European root in question has been published by
Michael Weiss (2006). He argues that, while the meaning related to switching
groups is certainly there in Anatolian, there is a simpler and more concrete basic
meaning underlying it. Weiss holds that the Latin word orbis (“circle”) is
derived from the same root—and that this word provides a clue to its original
meaning. This original meaning of the root was, according to Weiss, something
like “to turn” (as said of a wheel), a meaning which was later expanded and
made more abstract—turning from one group to another, so to speak. This
makes him propose a somewhat different analysis of the derivatives of the word
relating to family relations: for example, Weiss regards a number of words for
“inheritance” derived from the root as having semantically developed along the
lines of property that has been handed over (“turned over”, so to speak—note
that Modern English uses the same analogy); the slaves would have been
“handed over” as well.
This reinterpretation of the root is certainly fascinating and, in the main,
appears to me to be quite convincing. However, I find it most probable that the
more abstract meaning related to group switching was present already in the
Indo-European proto-language in addition to the more literal meaning of turning
(as a circle or wheel does).244

8.3 Hebrew gwr/gēr and Indo-European *h3erbh-: Parallel Social Realities

All in all, the semantic spheres represented by Indo-European *h3erbh- show
many parallels with those that appear to be associated with Hebrew gwr. Both
verbs signify passing from one state into another, entering into a new social

243 Melchert 2010: 186.

244 The same view is held by Craig Melchert (p.c., email August 20, 2014).
 8. Strangers, Boundary Crossers, and Young Predators 119

contract, so to speak—and, not insignificantly, often into a socially less

advantageous one (slavery, for example). To be sure, the semantics are not
identical—the notion of living in a place is not inherent in the Indo-European
root as it sometimes is in gwr, for example—but it should be noted that this
meaning appears to be secondary in the case of the Hebrew verb as well (a fact
clearly illustrated by the feeling of surprise that can strike a classical Hebraist
when he or she is confronted with the fact that Modern Israeli Hebrew uses the
verb in the simple sense of “to live [in a place], to reside”, without any implied
notion of that residence being temporary or “foreign” in any way). 245 The terms
can also acquire a juridical nuance.246
I would like to propose that Hebrew gwr and Indo-European *h3erbh- both
represent a common social reality present in the ancient world (not least, of
course, the Ancient Near East): that of one’s social milieu collapsing and of
being forced (by adventurousness or cruel fate) to ally oneself with another such
milieu. They thus encode a similar or identical social circumstance.
If the hypothesis of Michael Weiss turns out to be correct, and the Indo-
European root originally signified a physical movement and not just a social
one, we have another possible parallel between the concepts. All in all, both the
Indo-European and the Semitic root seem to have signified both a physical
movement and a social one, one of transcending boundaries.
One especially interesting parallel (be it historical or just typological) to
this double meaning can be found in the Arabic cognate of Hebrew gwr. The
Arabic verb jāra can mean not only “to depart from” (a physical movement
probably related to the “sojourning” meaning) but also “to transgress” or even
“to commit a crime.” This range of meaning illustrates well the possibility of
using this type of root in both a concrete and an analogical, social/abstract way.
The question is not only one of moving into a different territory but of
transcending socially constructed boundaries as well as physical ones.
As has been pointed out by Karin Tillberg,247 it is highly interesting that the
Israelite exiles in 6th century BCE Babylonia are never referred to as gērîm in
the extant biblical writings, whereas this term is applied to the Israelites when
described as being in Egyptian slavery. 248 Given that the biblical accounts
describe the passage of the Israelites into Egypt as being a question of famines
forcing them to move there—and their subsequent enslavement by the Egyptian

245 In Classical Hebrew, the verb used for such a situation would no doubt be šākan
or yāšab.
246 On Hebrew gēr as a legal term, see particularly van Houten 1991.
247 In manuscript materials meant for her forthcoming doctoral dissertation in Old

Testament/Hebrew Bible Exegesis at Uppsala University.

248 Also pointed out by Spina (1983: 322), who notes two possible (but very weak)

exceptions (one of them in his footnote 2 on p. 332): the first of these is Ez 1:4, which
speaks of the Israelites in the Babylonian Exile using the verbal root gwr (though not
referring to them by means of the actual noun gēr); the second one, Isa 14:1, is even less
relevant, as it speaks not of the Israelites themselves but of the gēr (in a collective sense)
joining with the Israelites in their return from Exile.
120 Unburning Fame

authorities, it is quite easy to see in this alleged process a social change from
one group to another and a consequent loss of freedom (cf. the Indo-European
use of *h3erbh- to designate slavery or servitude). The exiles in Babylon,
however, do not appear to have been enslaved, and neither does their “move” to
Babylon appear to have constituted a conscious leaving of their own group.
Common to the two roots is not only the idea of changing one’s allegiance
(often in a “negative” sense) but also the more general conceptualization of
social movement being conflated with a physical one. The gēr is a person that
physically moves into a new geographic setting, but he is also someone who
crosses a more invisible border. In a similar way, the Hittite language uses
ḫarp(p)- to describe animals accidentally erring into the wrong pen, while also
applying it to more explicitly “social” contexts such as the splitting up of a
married couple. Thus, both roots share this combination of both physical and
social motion.

8.4 The Roots as Expressions of Transcending between the

Realms of the Mortal and the Immortal
An especially interesting illustration of the way in which Hittite ḫarp(p)- can be
used to describe someone playing an unexpected role in an unusual social
context can be found in the tale of the battle between the Hittite Storm God
(dIM, *Tarḫunna-) and the Serpent (MUŠIlluyanka-), a text discussed in extenso
earlier in the book (see particularly sections 4.4 and 4.6). In that story, a mortal
man named Ḫūpašiya is instructed by the goddess Inara to assist her in tricking
the serpent by inviting him (the Serpent) to a feast (whereupon the monster can
be slain by the Storm God). When asking Ḫūpašiya to help her (in an earlier part
of the text than that quoted in chapter 4), Inara uses the expression ziqq-a
ḫar(a)pḫut, meaning something like “come along you too and join with me.”249
Here, the Hittite reflex of Proto-Indo-European *h3erbh- (viz. ḫarp(p)-) is
applied to a human assisting a divine being, i.e., crossing the boundary between
the moral and immortal spheres in a very concrete way. As an additional
illustration how much Ḫūpašiya’s taking part in the plans of the goddess
involves a traversing of the limits between the human and divine worlds, Inara
openly invites him to have sex with her, which subsequently happens. The
mortal man Ḫūpašiya does indeed take part in a very different sphere:

UMMA dInar mḪūpašiya

kāša-wa kīya kīya uttar iyami
nu-wa-mu-ššan ziqq-a ḫar(a)pḫut
UMMA mḪūpašiya ANA dInar
māwa katti-ti šešm[i n]u-wa uwami
kardiaš-taš iyami
[n-aš katt]i-ši šešta

249 For the text on which I have based my normalizations, see again Beckman 1982.

The passage quoted here (§§ 7-8) is directly followed by that quoted in section 4.4.
 8. Strangers, Boundary Crossers, and Young Predators 121

Thus spoke Inara to Ḫūpašiya:

“Look, I am doing such and such.
Come along you too and join with me.”
Thus spoke Ḫūpašiya to Inara:
“If I get to sleep with you, then I will come
and do what your heart desires!”
And so he slept with her.

As a parallel illustration of how this notion of transcending the borders between

immortal and mortal can also be part of the semantic range of Hebrew gwr/gēr,
one can look at a much later example, viz. the name Geradamas, which occurs
as a designation of the prototypical first human in Sethian Gnostic writings from
Nag Hammadi. This name has been plausibly suggested by Howard M. Jackson
to be derived from Hebrew gēr plus ʾādām, i.e. “Adam the Stranger” or “Adam
the Sojourner.”250 If this derivation is correct, the Hebrew gēr is used in this
name to express the presence of a semi-divine being in the conditioned world of
matter, in a way that expresses “transcending of boundaries” in a manner
comparable to what was previously seen.
In fact, such a conception of the human predicament as being one of acting
as a a gēr in the mortal sphere appears to be present in the Hebrew Bible as
well, as can be seen in Ps 119:19, in which the Psalmist states the following:

Gēr ʾānōkî bāʾāreṣ I am a gēr in the earth/land—

ʾal-tastēr mimmennî miṣwōtêkā hide not your commandments from me!

This sentiment is echoed in Ps 39:13:251

250 Jackson 1981. For another view, see Quispel 1986: 412, who explicitly rejects this

interpretation and prefers seeing Geradamas as the Greco-Hebraic hybrid “gerai(os)

adam”, related to the Jewish mystical concept of Adam Qadmon. Jackson viewed a
derivation from the root meaning “old” as nonsensical, writing (p. 387) that it “simply
suggests senility.” He even specifically (p. 390) associates the Ger-part of Geradamas
with the social reality of the Samaritans in Palestine and suggests that the Sethians have
some sort of Samaritan sectarian pedrigree, thus connecting mystical and social concepts
in a very concrete way indeed!
251 I agree with Lindström (1994: 267), who argues that the point of talking of the

supplicant as a gēr in this context is not to imply some special right of being taken care
of by YHWH (humanity as a sort of protected population), but rather that it refers to
humankind’s “restricted rights” and limitations (especially the inevitability of death that
threatens all living things). The idea that the Israelites as a people are the gērîm of
YHWH can also be found (in a juridical context) in Lev 25:23; for a discussion of the use
of this attestation and other uses of the term in the Holiness Code, see Joosten 1996, esp.
pp. 58-60 (though concentrating more on the idea of the Israelites as “tenants” of
YHWH’s land [p. 58]). Joosten also mentions the poetic passages discussed in the main
text, but without deeper analysis. A recent publication in favor of the idea of a sort of
tenant being involved in contexts such as these (in the Holiness Code) is Mayshar 2014,
in which it is argued that the word tôšāb referred to “a rentpaying (farming) tenant” (p.
122 Unburning Fame

Šimʿâ tĕpillātî YHWH Hear my supplication, O YHWH,

wĕšawʿātî haʾăzînâ and hearken to my cry!
ʾel-dimʿātî ʾal-teḥĕraš Do not keep silent at my tears!
kî gēr ʾānōkî ʿimmāk For I am a gēr with you,
tôšāb kĕkol-ʾăbôtāy a guest-stranger, like all my fathers.

We also find a similar reference in a hymnal passage in Chronicles, 1 Chr 29:15:

Kî gērîm ʾănaḥnû lĕpānêkā For gērîm we are before you,

wĕtôšābîm kĕkol-ʾăbōtênû and guest-strangers, like all our fathers.
kaṣṣēl yāmênû ʿal-hāʾāreṣ Our days on earth are like a shadow,
wĕʾên miqweh and there is no hope [for us].

These poetic passages all show the word gēr referring to humanity’s existence
“in a strange land,” so to speak. 1 Chr 29:15 underscores this ontological stance
very clearly, when it expressely refers to human mortality as a characteristic of
the gēr-ness being (metaphorically?) talked of. The gēr-like human being has
come into a world in which he/she is not quite at home. The boundary between
divine and mortal has been crossed, but in the opposite direction from what we
saw in the Illuyanka text.
In the extremely tôrâ-centered context of Psalm 119 (a sure sign of its late
provenance, with the teachings of YHWH appearing as an almost hypostasized
entity), 252 the Psalmist praying that YHWH should not “hide [his]
commandments” becomes a poignant illustration of how the use of gēr can be
taken to imply a sojourn in an ontologically foreign land, in which a human
being cannot make his or her own way without divine guidance. Humankind is
made up of gērîm, and the yearning for the “commandments” of the Israelite
God signifies the crossing of an ontological boundary and the guidance needed
to survive in a foreign land. In this way, Psalm 119 becomes one of the texts of
the Hebrew Bible that most clearly portray the idea of human beings as “aliens”
in a strange land in a way almost reminiscent of later Gnostic thinking. The
human being becomes a boundary-crosser, and it is certainly interesting to note

226), and that the combination gēr tôšāb means “alien tenant.” The question of the exact
meaning of tôšāb is, however, not of direct relevance for the present argument: the point
is the “foreignness” of the alien (gēr). Mayshar argues (p. 236) that the reason for Ps
39:13 and 1 Chr 29:15 including the expression gēr tôšāb is a dependence upon the
Holiness Code and a wish to portray that the Israelites have a “vulnerable hold on on the
land.” Even though I believe that Ps 39:13 is a more general comment on the state of the
human being (rather than just the “juridical” rights of the Israelites in relation to
YHWH), this interpretation actually comes rather close to the one espoused here: the
matter is one of vulnerability, not protection.
252 I would like to thank Erik Aurelius (p.c.) for pointing out to me this aspect of the

dating and ideology of Psalm 119. In Hossfeld and Zenger 2011: 263 it is stated that the
Psalm represents a “proto-rabbinic Judaism.” They date the text to the fourth century
BCE.
 8. Strangers, Boundary Crossers, and Young Predators 123

that this stereotypically “Indo-Europeanized/Greek” way of thinking uses a root

that has a strong parallel with an Indo-European one in order to express itself.

8.5 Parallels in the Typology of Semantic Development

If Weiss’s above-mentioned line of reasoning concerning the original meaning
of Indo-European *h3erbh- as “turn” is correct, there may be an interesting
typological parallel to the semantic background of Hebrew gwr. According to
the—admittedly highly speculative—reconstruction of Proto-Afro-Asiatic
vocabulary published by Christopher Ehret, there is a Proto-Afro-Asiatic root *-
gwar-, to which Ehret assigns the original meaning “turn” (in the intransitive
sense).253 Ehret does not list a Semitic descendant of this root, but limits himself
to alleged cognates in Cushitic, Chadic and Omotic. However, given the
perspectives pointed out here, one cannot help speculating on the possibility of
Semitic gwr somehow belonging here as well. If this is so, an exactly
typologically parallel development has taken place in Indo-European and Afro-
Asiatic: a verbal root originally having to do with “turning” has been
transformed into one used to describe shifting between two social groups.
If one allows oneself a further step on the path of unbridled etymological
speculation, one may note with some interest that such a proto-root would show
great structural similarity with the strangely omnipresent Wanderwort root
probably appearing in Proto-Indo-European as *kwel- (“to turn”, the basis of the
Indo-European word for “wheel”, *kw(e)kwlo-), in Sumerian in the reduplicated
form gigir (“chariot”), and possibly in Hebrew itself as galgal.254 If there really
is some remote connection between this ancient root and the one appearing in
Hebrew as gwr, the typological parallel between the Indo-European term
*h3erbh- would be almost perfect: both roots would originally have denoted
“turning”, which was later (or even, at the same time) expanded into a social
sense of “turn to another social group.”
Another connection or Afro-Asiatic relative of Hebrew gwr (etc.) has also
been proposed, namely the Low East Cushitic *gir-, “be, exist,” 255 but I find

253 Ehret 1995: 192 (no. 302). Note that Ehret also reconstructs a structurally similar

root *-gwil- (p. 191, no. 301), to which he assigns the almost identical meaning “to bend,
turn (intr[ansitive]). He assigns the Semitic root *gl (“to turn”) to this proto-root; if this
and his putative *-gwar- are somehow connected, we may again have to do with early
Wanderwort-like dialectal borrowing (note Hebrew galgal, mentioned in the main text).
254 The possible relationship between these words is noted, e.g., in Gamkrelidze and

Ivanov 1995: 622, n. 32 and (following them) in Mallory 1989: 163. Mallory says that
the words show that “we may be witnessing the original word for a wheeled vehicle in
four different language families.” He also adduces the apparently unborrowed/native
form of the Indo-European word (being built upon a solid, Indo-European root *kwel-) as
an argument for the Indo-European version being primary and, thereby, as a sign that the
Indo-Europeans “were in some form of contact relation with these Near Eastern
languages in the fourth millennium BC.”
255 This etymology is represented in Orel and Stolbova 1995: 210 (no. 932). It is also

supported in Militarev and Stolbova (AAE): s.v. *gir-. Ehret (1995: 186, no. 285) also
124 Unburning Fame

this etymological connection difficult, due to the difference in the meanings of

the roots. The basic meaning of the roots in Semitic languages does not seem to
be “to live (in a place)”, but rather appears to represent a multitude of different
meanings often having to do with being a stranger, a visitor, a client, a neighbor,
etc. 256 This is quite far removed indeed from the meaning of the Cushitic
verb.257

8.6 The ḫapiru/ḫabiru/ʿpr.w Question

One should also note that there is another Hebrew (and possibly wider attested)
term that seems also to provide a close typological parallel to the Indo-European
root *h3erbh-, viz. the well-known ʿibrî and its much quarreled-about possible
“relatives” ḫapiru/ḫabiru/ʿpr.w.258 As has been well described and pointed out

reconstructs a *-gir- root on the basis of, among others, Cushitic “to sit, lie, be low,” but
the Semitic word that he associates with it is not gwr but a *gr to which he assigns the
meaning “to go down.”
256 See the survey in Kellermann 1975.
257 One should be aware that the reconstruction of Proto-Afro-Asiatic vocabulary is

an extremely difficult and contested area. The two main reconstructive lexica (Ehret 1995
and Orel and Stolbova 1995) are testament to this, as they are to a large extent
incompatible with each other (as pointed out in Ratcliffe 2012, which uses the
discrepancies between the two lexica as basis for discussing the methodological problems
involved in reconstructing proto-vocabulary for such an internally divergent language
family). This caveat must be kept in mind when discussing possible Afro-Asiatic
reconstruction.
258 For the possible connection with the Hebrew word, see, e.g., Weippert 1971: 82

(in a linguistic sense) and Spina 1983: 331, who take a positive view of the connection,
and Rainey 1987: 540, who is strongly negative to the idea and refers to it as “utterly
void of validity.” On p. 541, Rainey even refers to the “naïvté” (sic!) of OT scholars who
entertain such a connection. There is of course an enormous literature representing both
camps. One interesting modern take onʿibrî is the one put forth by D.R.G. Beattie and
Philip R. Davies (2011), who argue (esp. pp. 78-83) that the term has nothing to do with
the ancient concept of ḫapiru/ḫabiru but is rather a late (post-exilic) term for an Aramaic-
speaker, having its background in the name of the Persian satrapy referred to in Aramaic
as ʿăbar nahărā (originally representing the Assyrian term Ebernāri, Akkadian for “on
the other side of the river”). According to Beattie and Davies, the term just refers to the
Aramaic speaking peoples of the Levant generally (other-siders, so to speak), and has no
Bronze Age background whatsoever. I find his suggestion in itself alluring, and if it is
true, it would seem that it would defeat any attempt to discuss Hebrew ʿibrî as an ancient
term for peoples who cross over social borders. This, however, is not necessarily so. One
could well imagine a situation in which an ancient expression, the meaning of which was
only partly known, came to gain new prominence because of its similarity (or identity)
with a much younger expression simply referring to the inhabitants of a certain part of
the Achaemenid Empire (again, something like a possible phono-semantic matching,
though at a later stage!). Also, it is a disturbing fact for the Ebernāri explanation that
other Aramaic-speaking populations of the ancient Levant do not appear to have referred
to themselves as Hebrews. Yet (and as noted above), even if Beatty and Davies are right
in supposing that a “Hebrew” came to refer to a Levantine speaker of Aramaic during the
 8. Strangers, Boundary Crossers, and Young Predators 125

by Spina, these terms and gwr have a close conceptual connection with each
other.259 Certainly, the people referred to in the Ancient Near East using the
ḫapiru/ḫabiru/ʿpr.w expression appear to have been defined in a way that
greatly parallels what we know about the Hebrew concept of the gēr and the
Indo-European root here in question. Nadav Naaman writes the following:

Common to all the people designated as “Ḫabiru” is the fact that they were
uprooted from their original political and social framework and forced to adapt to a
new environment. The different traits and social behavior of the Ḫabiru in each area
of Western Asia are the outcome of this adaptation to new circumstances. Among
the reasons for breaking off their former political and social ties were wars,
disasters, famine, debt, heavy taxes, prolonged military service, and so on. 260

This description is certainly very close not only to the concept of the Hebrew
gēr but to the persons subjected to what appears to have been meant by the
Indo-European verb *h3erbh-. Both concepts refer to people who have been
forced to forfeit their original social background, becoming “wanderers” and/or
mercenaries.

8.7 Reasons for the Parallels: Borrowing?

After a comparison such as this, the question of course presents itself: what has
caused these correspondences? Are they the random results of different
linguistic cultures encoding the harsh realities of the plight of the stranger in
similar ways, or are we dealing with some form of cultural transmission in
either direction?
One very audacious idea which does, at least, merit mentioning is that of
viewing the famous ḫapiru /ḫabiru/ ʿpr.w (and thence, perhaps, Hebrew ʿibrî) as
originally representing a borrowing from Indo-European *h3erbh-, an idea that
was suggested to me by Sophia Tranefeldt, and for which she deserves the
credit.

period of the Second Temple, this does not in itself explain why the term is used to refer
to David and Jephthah, for example (see below, section 8.9) and similar proto- or pre-
historical (or perhaps fictional) characters. In April of 2015, I had the pleasure of
discussing these matters with Prof. Davies at a scholarly meeting in Oslo; as I understood
it, his main argument against an earlier history for the term ʿibrî was Occam’s razor: the
Ebernāri explanation is simpler and does not postulate anything not securely known from
well-dated sources. But I would answer (and this echoes sentiments from the Introduction
to the present book) that questions concerning the relationship between text and history
cannot simply be reduced to which explanation makes the fewest postulates (entia non
sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem) but that one also has to reckon with the question
of which viewpoint has the highest explanatory power in making the text more readable.
I would argue that an earlier history of the term (and the motifs associated with it, also in
an “etymological poetic” manner) makes the texts that we actually have preserved more
understandable.
259 Spina 1983: 330-332.
260 Naaman 1986: 272.
126 Unburning Fame

If there really is some linguistic relationship between the Indo-European

and Hebrew/Afro-Asiatic words, it is quite apparent that some sort of metathesis
must have taken place during the process of borrowing. The Indo-European root
ends with the labial plosive, whereas the Hebrew, Egyptian and Akkadian words
end with the r-syllable. One thinkable (though tenuous) way of explaining such
a development could be the fact that the Indo-European laryngeal *h3 appears to
have been pronounced with some sort of labial co-articulation (possibly the
phoneme was somewhere in the phonetic region of [γw] or [ʕw]); the labial
component of the sound could have helped provoke an attraction of the labial
plosive sound, thereby facilitating the metathesis. 261
The reforming of the root with metathesis may also have been facilitated by
the existence of the Semitic verb ʿbr, “to cross” (again, one thinks of the
possibility of a phono-semantic matching of the sort delineated by Ghilʿad
Zuckermann). Of course, the exact background of Semitic ʿbr (from an Afro-
Asiatic standpoint) is not clear; there are suggestions of there having been a
Proto-Afro-Asiatic root *ʕabir-, which would provide the etymon for the
Semitic verb, but this reconstruction seems far from certain. 262 One could
possibly imagine the Semitic root here actually representing an Indo-European
borrowing, or (if the Proto-Afro-Asiatic reconstruction is accepted) an influence
from the Indo-European concept on the specifically social meaning of the term
could well be imagined. One may also, possibly, consider a connection with the
origin of the root ʿrb (“to enter”—Hebrew ʿārab, Akkadian erēbu, etc.), which
does not appear to have any secure Afro-Asiatic etymon. At least, one will have
to be skeptical about the Akkadian verb ḫabāru, which appears simply to be a
denominative formation from the word ḫabiru itself, and thus does not lend
itself well to reconstructing the background of that word.
Regardless of whether one lends credence to a historical connection
between *h3erbh- and ḫapiru / ʿpr.w (and possibly ʿibrî), it is notable that similar
connotations may have been attached to the two concepts. I would like to draw
attention to the explanation of the latter as referring to ones who cross borders

261 Such a putative process would show some parallels to the one suggested for Proto-
Indo-European itself in Cohen and Hyllested 2012. In that case, the question is one of
dissimilation of two labial elements, with the combination *h3w- turning into *h2w-.
Another—and similar—process is the one posited by the same two scholars involving a
dissimilation of *h3 in various Anatolian daughter languages when close to a labiovelar
sound (the latter development is sketched in Cohan and Hyllested 2012: 63, but was
earlier elaborated upon in the as yet unpublished conference presentation Cohen and
Hyllested 2006, building upon Olsen 2006).
262 Such a reconstructed root appears in Militarev and Stolbova (AAE): s.v. *ʕabir-,

where it is translated as “traveling (along a road), passing by, crossing (rivers).” The
etymological material for this putative root (outside Semitic) is made up of Berber words
meaning “road” or “way”, East Chadic words for “go” or “go for a walk”, Western
Chadic words for “escape” or “go out” and a Cushitic (Dahalo) words meaning “go out,
depart.” None of the non-Semitic branches of Afro-Asiatic seem to attest to the
specialized meaning of “crossing.” It is worth noting that neither the etymological
lexicon of Ehret (1995) nor that of Orel and Stolbova (1995) list this reconstructed root.
 8. Strangers, Boundary Crossers, and Young Predators 127

and move into the social spheres of influence of others. Again, the parallel
between the traditions of being unfree or lacking complete social rights attached
to the ʿibrî-expression in the Old Testament and the similar uses of *h3erbh-
mentioned above is interesting and noteworthy.

8.8 Self-Definition and Indo-European “War Bands”

After having compared the social meanings inherent in the Indo-European root
*h3erbh- and the relevant Hebrew/Semitic roots, one can note one great
difference in their use. The social realities encoded by the roots in the two
linguistic cultures are, as has been seen, quite similar, but the difference is that
Hebrew literature uses the idea of the gēr or the ʿibrî in a way that never occurs
in the case of Indo-European *h3erbh-. The two Hebrew terms occur as (at least
in a sense) positive terms of self-identification, which does not appear to be
common for the Indo-European root in its more basic meaning of “group
switching.” However, there is a way in which similar ideas may be present in
Proto-Indo-European culture as well, as we shall see.
One very interesting similarity between the apparent semantics of ḫabiru
(etc.) and certain concepts that are thought to have been part of Proto-Indo-
European society is suggested by the question of the social organization and
leadership structure of the former. Again, quoting Nadav Naaman on the ḫabiru:

As it happened, individuals sometimes moved from their homeland to neighboring

countries and served either in the public or private sector for subsistence of wages.
Usually, however, they did not migrate alone but formed a band. These bands were
independent bodies and were restricted in number and unified, often having a single
prominent leader. No further hierarchy or institutional organization was needed for
this tiny social structure, and it is for this reason that none of the institutions which
typify either clan or tribe ever appeared in connection with the Ḫabiru. The preda-
tory nature of the bands was a direct outcome of their social status.263

If one’s goal is to study parallels and interactions between the Indo-European

and Old Testament worlds, one has to be both blind and deaf not to note the
similarities between the above account and the image formed in scholarship of
the “war bands” of Proto-Indo-European culture (sometimes—and perhaps
rather unfortunately—referred to using the antiquated and ideologically infused
term Männerbund).264 These were certainly not identical with the description
above, but there are definite parallels. The Encyclopedia of Indo-European
Culture speaks of this phenomenon in the following way:

263 Naaman 1986: 273. For typographical reasons, I have removed a footnote of
Naaman’s, in which he refers to Bottéro 1981: 96f as source of his views of lack of tribal
or clan-like institutions among the Ḫabiru.
264 The Männerbund terminology is associated to a large extent with the work of Stig

Wikander (1938; no relation to the present author). A much more modern study of the
concept (based on different data) is McCone 1987.
128 Unburning Fame

[…] a PIE ‘war band’ comprising an age set of young unmarried and landless (but
free) men who lived off the land, engaged in predatory activities, had a particular
association with wolves (less so, dogs or bears), were famous for their berserkr-like
behavior in battle, and might form the ‘shock troops’ in military engagements. This
was a distinct age set which, when married and settled on their land, entered the
*teuteha, the tribal organization of adults who were still liable to military service. 265

The social phenomena described in these two quotations are, of course, not
identical, but there are clear similarities. Both refer to a group of people,
standing outside the normal bounds of society and using this situation as a basis
for “semi-outlaw” activity while still being used by the majority society. They
point to ways in which groups such as these can “serve a purpose” in social
contexts that generally tend to look down on them; both the ḫabiru-groups and
the Proto-Indo-European war-bands make up social groups of a “band-like”
character that were only “semi-members” of the majority society but could serve
a role as warriors.

8.8.1 Warriors as “Wolves” or “Dogs”

Let us dwell a little while on the matter of the Indo-European “war-bands”
referring to themselves as “wolves” or “dogs.” It is hardly surprising that a
group of violent people on the liminal borderlands of society could use this type
of appellation for themselves. The imagery of canines can be applied to violent
warriors in the Hebrew Bible as well (Ps 22:17), but there, of course, the
implication is a strongly negative one. One could, however, imagine that the
author of that verse was actually thinking of a group of a similar nature.266 One
should also note that Spina points out the apparent and highly interesting
similarity in sound between Hebrew gwr and the word gûr or gôr, “whelp” or
“young lion.” He points to texts such as Psalm 59, which uses the analogy of
dogs for the enemies of the psalmist in v. 7. He also mentions Gen 49:9 and
Deut 33:22, both of which refer to the Israelites themselves as gûr. The latter is
highly interesting, given how often the Israelite people is referred to as gērîm.

265 James P. Mallory and Edgar C. Polomé in EIEC: 31 (s.v “ARMY”: “War-

bands”). The views put forth are expressly based on the work of McCone (1987), who
studied the “wolf” and “dog” terminology in great detail.
266 An interesting Bible verse in this context (though probably by coincidence) is Isa

11:6, which begins with the wolf (zĕʾēb) “sojourning” (root gwr) with the lamb. As
pointed out by Kellermann (1975: 448), this verse becomes even more poignant if one
sees gwr not only as a word for living together in a place but factors in the other known
meanings of the root (Kellermann himself suggests that “the wolf is the protected citizen
of the lamb,” based on the attested meaning of the root as referring to “protected
citizens” and possibly to the one attested in some languages having to do with being a
client or protégé, mentioned earlier in the chapter). Given the points mentioned in the
main text above, the co-occurrence of gwr and the word “wolf” in this passage is
interesting, especially if one regards it as referring metaphorically to humans and not to
physical wolves, an interpretation found already in the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides
(šôpĕṭîm: mĕlākîm ûmilḥāmôt, chap. 12).
 8. Strangers, Boundary Crossers, and Young Predators 129

There is also an Akkadian textual passage in which an enemy is described as a

“dog” (kalbu) and subsequently is the subject of an Akkadian reflex of the gwr
word (here in the sense of the “dog” turning against the speaker in a hostile
manner). 267 Thus, it appears that “warring sojourning strangers” were associated
with young predators, such as lions or canines, both in the Indo-European and
OT cultural sphere. This is a highly interesting correlation, of course given
special strength in Hebrew due to the phonetic similarity between gwr and the
“young lion” word.268
One may note with some interest that not only the Ancient Near Eastern
ḫabiru concept but also the root gwr itself appears in certain cases to have
carried with it an association with warlike activity or martial threat. The
Akkadian verb gērû, which is often considered to be at least distantly related to
Hebrew gwr, actually means “to be hostile.”269 Thus, the association between
strangers and warring bands appears here as well. 270 And, continuing our
comparison with the Indo-European root, one finds in Cuneiform Luwian the
word ḫarpanalla/i-, which is derived from *h3erbh- and means something like
“rebel” or “turncoat.”271 The use of the Indo-European root also clearly shows
that “crossing to the other side” could mean being hostile, rebellious, or
dangerous.

8.9 Jephthah and David

Nadav Naaman makes the point that two of the best illustrations of the social
conditions of the ḫabiru-bands can be found in the Hebrew Bible, in the stories
about Jephthah and David (as mentioned by him, David’s band is explicitly—
and derogatively—referred to as “Hebrews” by the Philistines in 1 Sam 29:3).
He describes these conditions in a way quite interesting for the present purposes,
pointing out that Jephthah was the son of a “harlot” and therefore unfit for true
inheritance, this in turn leading to his forming a band (I would like to point out
additionally that Jephthah’s conflict with his half-siblings about the right of
inheritance is explicitly mentioned in Judg 11:2-3, and in verse 4, Jephthah has
to move away, becoming a sojourner, so to speak). Naaman also points out
David’s conflicts with his father-in-law Saul and escape from him.272 Both of

267 Spina 1983: 327-328.

268 The word play between the gwr root and gûr in the sense of “young lion” must
have been very inviting, and it appears in later sources as well. It is used by the 13th
century CE Hebrew poet Todros Abulafia (from Toledo), in his poem ʾāmĕrâ hăkî nôd
rāṣĕtâ, when he has the female character of the poem say: […] ʾāgûr lĕhitgôrēr ʾănî ʿim
gûr ʾărî (“I am afraid to dwell with the whelp of a lion”). This line uses three similar-
sounding words: the gwr that means “to be afraid,” the gwr having to do with dwelling
(as a stranger) that is the subject of this chapter, and gûr as in “young lion.” For the text,
see Carmi (ed.) 1981: 411.
269 See, for example, Kellermann 1975: 440 and Spina 1983: 328.
270 There may be similar evidence in Biblical Hebrew also; see Spina 1983: 326-327.
271 Melchert 1993: 59 (s.v. ḫarpanalla/i-); Weiss 2006: 256.
272 Naaman 1986: 279-280.
130 Unburning Fame

these situations recall the semantic sphere of Indo-European *h3erbh-; remember

the well-attested use of that root to signify changes in familial status (words
both for inheriting and being an orphan). Being a “warring socially transcending
stranger” in this sense could, apparently, be thought of in terms of atypical
family relationships.273 In Jephthah’s case (and in a sense, also in David’s), this
connotation of crossing familial boundaries is joined to the meaning concerned
with “moving”—and starting a war-band. These two characters almost personify
the semantic sphere of the various terms studied in this chapter.

8.10 Orpheus
Earlier, we looked at certain cases in which the Hebrew gwr and Proto-Indo-
European *h3erbh- roots have been used in mythological descriptions of
religious boundary-crossing. After considering the question of ḫabiru/ʿibrî in
this context—and the central religious role attached to the latter in parts of the
development of OT religion—I would like obliquely to mention another such
example from the Indo-European sphere, viz. the name of the divine singer and
traveler to the realm of the dead, Orpheus, whose name has been plausibly
explained as being a reflex of *h3erbh-. Given the reasoning of Weiss, one might
even venture so far as to translate his name as “Turner” (both in the sense of
turning back and forth between the lands of the living and the dead and in the
concrete sense of his having “turned” to look at Eurydice!). Thus, it appears
probable that both Indo-European and OT culture use terms such as these to
reinforce mythological or theological narratives. This is hardly surprising, as
this type of words lends itself excellently to illustrating passages, liminality and
partaking in different spheres in a way well suited for religious rhetoric. 274

8.11 Methodological Implications and Conclusions

An enquiry such as this one certainly raises a number of methodological
questions. For example, to what extent is it possible to prove or disprove that
there is an actual historical relationship between the Old Testament/ancient
Semitic ways of encoding these social categories and the corresponding Indo-
European ones, either at the lexical or more general level? It is certainly no easy
task, as the terms are far removed from each other and have themselves gone
through long processes of internal semantic change. In cases such as these, one

273 One could also note the fact that the reflex of Semitic gwr in various dialects of

Aramaic has developed the meaning “to commit adultery” (Kellermann 1975: 441-442).
This meaning can (as Kellermann points out) be interpreted as a use of the root in a sense
referring to passing between families.
274 For more on the intriguing possibility of Orpheus (as well as the Sanskrit Ṛbhu-)

belonging here (in the latter case in the sense of “one who has left humankind and joined
the gods”), see Melchert 2010: 186, n. 17, with further literature and a reference to a
comment to that effect at a conference by Hisashi Miyakawa (I do not know whether the
formulations within quotes are Miyakawa’s original words or Melchert’s restatement
thereof).
 8. Strangers, Boundary Crossers, and Young Predators 131

sometimes has to limit oneself to carrying out the action that the Danes express
using the verb sandsynliggøre, literally “to render probable.” And this I do hope
to have done—to have shown it to be a probable inference that the similar
conceptualizations of otherness and social transcending described in the two
cultural/linguistic spheres actually have a historical connection.
But one can go one step further. Even if it is hard to prove such a
connection conclusively, the contrastive study of these terms and ideas may
illustrate their meanings, as mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. One can
of course object to such a methodology (and, as mentioned in the Introduction, it
is not the main methodological approach of the present book), but I submit that
it is in any case in itself more historically justified than the today rather common
way of comparing ancient phenomena with mediaeval or even completely
modern instances of a similar nature. In keeping with the main approach of the
volume, the comparison has been rooted in lexical material. In comparing this
type of data from the Old Testament and its world with ancient Indo-European
material, we are at least looking at two cultural areas which we know to have
intersected and which were both present in the Ancient Near East at the same
time.
The fact remains that both OT/Semitic culture and Proto-Indo-European
society appear to have reckoned with similar social constructs involving
boundary-transgressing groups of people who were displaced from their homes,
families or countries of origin, pursued a semi-assimilated existence, being
regarded both as parts of the greater societies and as aliens. This type of group
could apparently play the roles of “mercenaries,” and both linguistic families
show possible traces of a semantic development involving the members of such
groups having in a sense being “turned” from one context into another. In both
linguistic families, groups such as these could be thought of as wolves, young
lions or other dangerous animals.

The way in which both the Indo-European and the biblical terms discussed in
this chapter appear to have been repurposed from simply describing social
realities to becoming metaphors for religious and/or mythological statements
(transcending boundaries between human and divine spheres and, in the case of
gēr, subsequently even signifying religious conversion) brings to mind a parallel
case from the Indo-Aryan cultural sphere, one which may be of methodological
relevance as a model for the feasibility of this type of study of concepts carrying
etymologically charged semantic loads with them at a deeper level whilst
changing in religious or social reference. This is the compound word yoga-
kṣema, which is attested already in the Vedic literature and then reappears in
later Indian religious texts. 275 In a study originally published in 1981 and
subsequently republished in 1988, Jan Heesterman followed the associations of
the parts this word-complex from their original usage, where they appear to

275 I want to thank Martin Gansten for bringing this term to my attention and for help

with references concerning it.

132 Unburning Fame

have had a sociological reference relevant in early Vedic society, at which

period the two parts of the word would have referred to the two modes of life of
a semi-nomadic community: being on the move (yoga) and being settled down
(kṣema). This original meaning was forgotten, however, and later texts (such as
the Bhagavad-Gītā) appear to have used the term as referring to the acquisition
of riches, and in the Taittirīya-Upaniṣad, it was esoterically interpreted as
referring to in-breath and out-breath. In Buddhist Pāli texts, the corresponding
term was thought of as referring to the attainment of peace from attachments. 276
In Heesterman’s analysis, this is not all, however. He saw the original sense of
yoga (literally “yoke” or “yoking together”) in this nominal compound—
originally, according to him, referring to the yoking together of the animals of
the seminomadic warrior when on the move—as having survived and having
been transformed into the inner search of the ascetic, the term yoga thus
acquiring its well-known sense of referring to a spiritual esoteric discipline. The
travelling warrior with his yoga transforms, in Heesterman’s scheme, into the
renunciant ascetic mystic, whose yoga is of a quite different kind. Note that the
opposition between nomadic and sedentary lifestyles (yoga and kṣema) could
then be interpreted as having lived on in the dual religious ideals of the
householder and the ascetic, an opposition continuing in Hinduism to this day
and forming one of the central issues of the Bhagavad-Gītā.
The way that Heesterman argues here is rather similar to what I have
attempted above: tracing terms that originally had sociological import as that
original sense grew into something else, a more spiritualized meaning, in which
the etymologically earlier meaning was still present below the surface. The
same type of methodological and phenomenological analogy could well be
applied to my arguments concerning the possible development of the name
Dagan/Dagon in chapter 7.

Discussing words for strangers and boundary-crossers in the context of a study

involving early (proto)-cultural interaction certainly invites the question of
whether these expressions for strangers and “out groups” could actually involve
meetings between these very cultures. This is, of course, totally unknowable, but
it is definitely interesting to note that both the Northwest Semitic (and,
subsequently, Israelite) and early Indo-European cultures—which both have at
times been regarded as having been highly ethnocentric—included the idea of
“resident aliens” who were, in fact, central to the cultures functioning. When
one imagines situations in which early representatives of Indo-European and
greater OT cultures met each other and interacted, such words for foreigners,
strangers and boundary-crossers may very well have been the terms they used to
describe each other.

276 These later changes are pointed out in White 2009: 76, who gives an exposition on

yoga-kṣema and the history of word-pair/compound.

 9. Fame that does not Burn:
The Verb ṯkḥ, the Drought Motif,
Indo-European *dhgwhei-, and Etymological Poetics
Having touched in an earlier chapter upon the prominent Northwest Semitic
literary and religious motif of destroying drought and its connection with death,
I will now discuss a similar “etymologically poetic” development in the Indo-
European ambit. Like my elaborations on expressions for strangers and
boundary-crossers (chapter 8), this is a case in which it is not methodologically
possible to know with certainty whether the similarity I will discuss is due to
historical contact and transmission or to a mere parallel development. As in the
“stranger” case, I leave this up to the reader to decide for him- or herself (though
I will sketch an argument for such a transmission as a possibility, if nothing
else—again based in lexical material and possible borrowings).
In Wikander 2014, I carried out a large-scale investigation of the
drought/death motif in Ugaritic and biblical literature. As mentioned earlier, the
concept of “etymological poetics” plays quite a central role in that book as well.
I studied a number of verbal roots that seem to carry the poetic motif of drought
and death with them, so to speak. One of these roots, which I discussed rather at
length, is the one appearing in Ugaritic as ṯkḥ and in Hebrew as škḥ II (as
opposed to the much more common škḥ I, “to forget,” which is derived from an
actual škḥ rather than ṯkḥ).277 I argued (as have a number of scholars before me)
that the root in question originally means something like “to be exceedingly
hot,” whence a more general meaning along the lines of “to wither, to waste
away” was sometimes secondarily extrapolated. This root occurs in the Ugaritic
corpus, describing the terrible effects of the rule of personified Death (Mot) in
the land, when Mot threatens Baal in a passage previously discussed in chapter
4. I quote it again here:

k tmḫṣ . ltn . bṯn . brḥ As/because you smote Litan, the fleeing serpent,
tkly . bṯn . ʿqltn . killed off the writhing serpent,
šlyṭ . d . šbʿt . rašm the ruler with seven heads,

277 The Proto-Northwest Semitic phonemes *ṯ and *š fell together in Hebrew as š,

causing the two roots to look identical in that language. My in-depth discussion of the
root (with references to further literature) can be found in Wikander 2014: 56-65. I
discuss its occurrence in the “threats of Mot” passage (KTU 1.5 I 1-8) on pp. 55-58 of the
same work. My quick recapitulation of the uses of the root in the present chapter is based
on the conclusions of my previous study, to which I refer for the fully-argued
philological rationale as well as for references to the many earlier scholars of whose
work I hope to have created a plausible and furthering synthesis. The discussion
concerning this verb and its reflexes in the Hebrew Bible has been very long and
variegated, and it would take up too much space to repeat the entire collection of
references again, so the reader is definitely advised to refer to Wikander 2014 for the
Forschungsgeschichte. It may be mentioned that Pope 1966: 240 and Emerton 1972: 62-
66 are especially important for my arguments there.
133
134 Unburning Fame

tṯkḥ . ttrp . šmm . the heavens will burn hot and shine/be weakened.
krs ipdk . ank . I, even I, will tear you to pieces—
ispi . uṭm ḏrqm . amtm . I will swallow elbows, blood, and forearms.
l yrt b npš . bn ilm . mt . You will surely descend into the throat of divine
Mot,
b mhmrt . ydd . il . ġzr into the gullet of El’s beloved, the hero.
(KTU 1.5 I 1-8)

In this passage, I have translated the relevant verb as “burn hot.” It expresses the
awful demise of verdure and fertility that is the result of Mot’s rule, i.e., it
perfectly captures the drought/death motif in and of itself. The root recurs in its
Hebrew form in a number of places in the Old Testament, such as Ps 102:5 (kî
šākāḥtî mēʾăkōl laḥmî, “I am too hot/burned/dried/weakened to eat my bread”),
Ps 137:5 (tiškaḥ yĕmînî, “may my right hand be burnt/dried out”) and possibly
(with metathesis of two radicals) in Ps 18:45b-46a (bĕnê-nēkār yĕkaḥăšû lî /
bĕnê-nēkār yibbōlû, where the second verb, meaning “they dry up” suggests
such a meaning for the previous one as well). Ps 31:13 has also been suggested
as an instance of this verb.278 Some scholars have translated the verb along the
lines of “wither” or “be weak” generally, but I belong with those who believe
that the idea of extensive heat is inherent in the root in Hebrew as well (as well
seen in the close contexts of Ps 102:5, and also when one reads Ps 137:5
together with the line that follows). All in all: I believe it quite clear that the root
means something like “be exceedingly hot or burnt” and sometimes, thereby, “to
be weak or withered” (though this meaning is only secondary), and that the verb
tends to carry with it a poetical reference to the Northwest Semitic association
between drought and death that is very apparent in the Baal Cycle.
This dual semantic load (drying up and being destroyed) could seem to be
very specific to the Northwest Semitic milieu from which it is attested, with its
characteristic natural characteristics of hot summers, etc. There is, however, an
Indo-European verbal root, very central in the history of Indo-European poetic
diction, that seems to have gone through a very similar sort of semantic
development. This is the root reconstructed into Proto-Indo-European as
*dhgwhei-, the meaning of which is mostly given as something like “to perish” or
“be destroyed.”
The thing that makes this Indo-European root interesting for the present
purposes is the fact that it appears itself to be derived by root extension from
another root also existing in the Proto-Indo-European lexicon, namely the root
*dhegwh-, which means approximately “to burn” or “to subject to heat.” In his
magisterial Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben, Helmut Rix states that
*dhgwhei- (“to perish”) is an extension of *dhegwh- (“to burn”) and that the
semantic development is one of being destroyed by drying or heat, exactly the
development that we have seen for the Northwest Semitic ṯkḥ, an interesting

278 Dahood 1965: 190 and 1970: 271 (though without the larger association to the

drought/death motif). Contra: Roberts 1975.

 9. Fame that does not Burn: The Verb ṯkḥ 135

correspondence indeed. 279 Based on this, one could argue that this parallel
semantic development could be due to some form of linguistic interaction or
calquing (somewhat like what I argued as a possibility in the case of some of the
expressions for “boundary crossers” in chapter 8).
However, if one is so inclined, one can go further. It is certainly interesting
to note that both the Proto-Indo-European roots and the Northwest Semitic one
display a sequence of a dental (or interdental) and a dorsal. In the Semitic case,
the first of these is an interdental fricative, but that could perhaps fit with the
fact that the Indo-European root shows a so-called thorn-cluster (which are
sometimes argued to have included fricative sounds at some point in their
development). 280 Could this be a sign of an actual lexical borrowing being
involved? Such a suggestion is certainly quite speculative, yet the thought bears
discussing. The Semitic form has a third consonant—a pharyngeal ḥ—that has
no clear correspondence in the Indo-European forms, yet one should remember
that the Indo-European root contains two breathy voiced/aspirated consonants
(*dh and *gwh). Theoretically, one could imagine the ḥ of the Semitic root as a
way crudely to represent that “aspiration” in the target language (though this
would, it must be said, be a rather unparalleled rendering). If a borrowing really
is involved, it will have to be from an Indo-European language that kept the
original sequence of the “thorn-cluster” *dhgwh (dental-dorsal) rather than
switching it to dorsal-dental—just as was the case with Dagan/Dagon. There are
only two attested Indo-European subfamilies that meet this criterion, and one of
them (Tocharian) is out of the question (having been spoken in what is today
western China). This, again, leaves Anatolian. The problem is that the dhgwhei-
root is not as yet attested in that subfamily, so one will have to reckon either
with some early and unattested form of Anatolian—or with something close to
Proto-Indo-European itself—as the putative loan-giver. Given that the voicing
pattern does not match (as it did with Dagan/Dagon), another interaction than
with attested Anatolian seems more plausible.
However, I think that a more probable option exists than a pure loan from
Indo-European to Semitic. This is the third case in which I want to suggest a
phono-semantic matching, as defined by Ghilʿad Zuckermann: a case in which a
borrowed word was attached to an existing word in the receiving language, to a
word that had a similar phonetic shape and similar semantics. I do not believe
that Semitic languages imported this verb wholesale from Indo-European:
rather, I would propose the possibility that the roots influenced each other.
Which one was the earlier is not easy to say (even though Indo-European sounds

279 LIV: 151, nn. 1 and 2. One interesting possible sign (mentioned there) of the
semantic connection between the *dhgwhei- (“perish”/“destroy”) root and its background
in a verb connected with “heat” is the existence of the Latin derivative sitis, meaning
“thirst” (also mentioned in Beekes 2010: 1571 [s.v. φθίνω]). However, it should be noted
that this type of semantic combination is not unique to Indo-European and Semitic. In the
Australian language Wardaman, for example, there is a verbal expression meaning (in the
words of Merlan [1994: 205, 207]) “die and dry up.”
280 Albeit after metathesis. For an account of this phonological structure, see n. 228.
136 Unburning Fame

perhaps somewhat more probable, as the root is securely reconstructible with

the meaning discussed here—and a derivational history—back all the way to the
Indo-European proto-language). My point is that I find it probable that the roots
from the two linguistic families influenced each other from an early point, and
the reminiscences of this shared development may be found in texts.

There is one case in the Hebrew Bible where this parallel development of the
roots becomes very salient indeed, and that is the famous expression in Ps
137:5, referred to above:

ʾim-ʾeškāḥēk yerûšālayim If I forget you, Jerusalem—

tiškaḥ yĕmînî may my right hand burn
and wither away/shrivel up!

Here, by use of wordplay, the original Northwest Semitic roots ṯkḥ (“burn hot,
wither from heat”) and škḥ (“forget”) are conflated, as both were transformed by
Hebrew sound-laws into becoming phonologically identical (škḥ).
But how are Indo-European/biblical relationships relevant here? The
answer lies in the choice of poetic metaphors. One of the most celebrated Indo-
European poetic reconstructions of all is that of the “imperishable fame,”
*n̥dgwhitom k̑lewos, a specific phrase that is reconstructable from the Homeric
Greek expression κλέος ἄφθτιτον and its etymologically identical Vedic
Sanskrit parallel śravas […] akṣitam… (or akṣiti śravas, with a slight difference
in the formation of the adjective and the words in opposite order). 281 The word
*n̥dgwhitom is made up of the elements *n̥- (“un-“), the root *dhgwhei- in its
vowel-less, zero stage form, and the participle/verbal noun derivation -to(m),
i.e., “imperishable, not having perished”—and by extension, given what was
stated above about the etymological background of the root, “not having being
burnt, not burning.” The “fame” (*k̑lewos) that the Proto-Indo-Europeans sang
of was, literally, “unburnt” or “unburning.” What is quite remarkable in this
case is how the classical, Proto-Indo-European poetic phrase uses such a verbal
root to express the imperishability of poetic reputation—in quite a similar way
to how Ps 137:5 invokes an ancient Northwest Semitic idiom connected with
“burning” or “drying” as an illustration of the consequences of forgetting the
fame of the destroyed Jerusalem (and rendering it even more fitting, given the
wordplay with the “forget” word). In both the Indo-European and the biblical
contexts, “burning” or “drying up from heat” is used as a metaphor for
forgetfulness, for fame disappearing, as it were, into smoke. Regardless of
whether an actual lexical conncetion is involved or not, the metaphorical
similarity is striking. A borrowing of a motif is probable and, as delineated
above, a lexical relatedness is not implausible either, given the structure of the

281 The startling correspondence was noted already in Kuhn 1853: 467 (in a footnote,

no less). For an illuminating overview of some further possible analyses of how this
phrase was used in Proto-Indo-European, see Watkins 1992: 411-416.
 9. Fame that does not Burn: The Verb ṯkḥ 137

roots in question; howsoever that may be, both traditions seem to be talking
about fame that does not burn.
The parallel motifs of burning or drying out as a linguistically coded
metaphor for life’s inconstancy and the sorrow of nature involved in death and
dying may perhaps be found on a wider scale than the Northwest Semitic ṯkḥ
and the Indo-European *dhgwhei-. As I have mentioned in passing previously,
the semantic parallel in the expressions appears also in the form of the Sanskrit
verbal root śuc-, which carries the dual meaning of “to mourn” and “to dry
up.”282 This means that the connection between destructive heat and dying could
possibly have passed between linguistic families not only in terms of a specific
verbal root but as a more general association (but see above, footnote 279, for a
typologically similar semantic development in a different linguistic setting).
It is certainly not without interest that the Indo-European root dhegwh- (“to
burn”) itself probably underlies the Latin word febris, the ultimate source of the
English word “fever.”283 In my study of the use of the drought/death motif in
Biblical Hebrew and Ugaritic literature, I repeatedly found evidence of a
metaphorical association between the powers of death and heat, as expressed
through feverish heat and illness, and this was also one of my points in my
analysis of the verb ṯkḥ. When that Semitic verb occurs in Ps 102:5b (kî-šākaḥtî
mēʾăkōl laḥmî), it does so in a context that seems directly to involve heat (the
preceding verse expressly speaks of bones burning like a furnace and days
disappearing like smoke—see section 5.8 in the present volume for a discussion
of that Psalm in the context of the “life as smoke” motif). Based on that and
many other attestations, I argued in Wikander 2014 that the main sense of the
verbal root is something like “to be excessively hot,” and that it is one of the
roots that are used in Northwest Semitic literature to express the attacks of
personified Death in the form of drought (of the land) or feverish illness (of the
human being).
The Latin use of the Indo-European root *dhegwh- here under discussion as
the one lying behind the expanded root *dhgwhei- (“to destroy, make perish”) to
express the very phenomenon (fever) that carried with it such a metaphorical
motif load in Northwest Semitic poetry lends some credence to the idea of the
concepts and associations having been imported from Indo-European to Semitic
at a very early point.284 The root connection between the ideas of (a) destruction
and death, metaphorically pertaining, for example, to fame or memory, (b) heat
in general, and (c) fever, as an expression of illness, is too much to be ignored,
especially if one factors in the structural similarity of the Indo-European and
Semitic roots and the on the face of it not quite self-evident metaphorics of a

282
Wikander 2014: 155-156, n. 354. Here, as in that instance, I would like to thank
Martin Gansten for pointing out the parallel to me.
283 For the etymology, see Sihler 1995: 165.
284 It may be of interest that Indo-European *dheg wh- is also the source of the Greek

word τέφρα (“ash”), which certainly carries with it a connection with the motif sphere of
death and dying (see Beekes 2010: 1475 [s.v. τέφρα]). Note that this word occurs in
Wisdom chap. 2, quoted on p. 76.
138 Unburning Fame

memory or fame being “burnt.” I thus argue that this motif may have been
transmitted between Indo-European and Semitic linguistic cultures: probably
(though not certainly) from Indo-European to Semitic, given the early
reconstructed existence of the collocation *n̥dgwhitom k̑lewos in Indo-European.
In Indo-European as well as biblical culture, unforgotten fame could be fame
that did not burn.
 10. Dragons Returning Home:
The “Pizza Effect”
As an ending vantage point for further research and as a view towards later
history of ideas growing out of some of the phenomena delineated in this
volume, we shall take a quick look at some cases of one of the most interesting
aspects of studying patterns of transcultural interaction, the phenomenon
sometimes referred to as the “pizza effect.” This term refers to cases in which a
concept or phenomenon from one cultural sphere is imported into another but is
then subsequently received back into the culture that exported it in the first
place. 285 These ambidirectional instances of cultural borrowing provide an
opportunity for investigating and highlighting how other and more culturally
specific pieces of ideology or narrative material have created accretions in the
original imagery, which then “muddle up” the simple and pure Stammbäume of
ideological or religious borrowing to which one likes to become accustomed.
This means that we will now be looking at a few cases in which it appears that
the main cultural motion we have hitherto been studying, the one from Indo-
European cultures into “the world of the Hebrew Bible,” was subsequently
inverted and in which speakers and writers of Indo-European languages
reborrowed concepts from the Semitic-speaking world of the Hebrew Bible that
other speakers of Indo-European languages had once spread to that world.
The importance of highlighting some of these instances lies not only in the
anecdotal “cleverness” of tracing such dual intercultural borrowing but also in
that it serves as a welcome remedy to the type of linguistic or cultural
exclusivism that somehow serves as a necessary starting point for studies such
as the present ones even to be possible. When we started out investigations, we
had to posit that certain religious or cultural motifs were essentially “Indo-
European” or “Northwest Semitic,” if only for the sake of argument. Because of
the methodology of “etymological poetics,” in which I have tried to look at how
these motifs have been transferred by means of and together with linguistic
material, such a rather artificial duality has been necessary for the purposes of
methodological stringency. Looking at cases in which motifs have been
reborrowed into Indo-European-speaking cultures helps us conceptually to tear
down unncecessary walls between what is thought of as biblical and Indo-
European. We shall look at some such instances now.

10.1 Dragons in Gnostic and Gnosticizing literature

One of the most telling cases of the “pizza effect” in the relationship between
Indo-European and Old Testament thinking involves the dragon or serpent motif

285 The term “pizza-effect” was first used by Agehānanda Bhāratī (1970: 273), with a

special description of the background of the term in the history and development of the
pizza, which was exported from southern Italy to the US and then imported back to Italy
in a thoroughly changed form (in footnote no. 19). Bhāratī himself explains the term
using the alternative expression “re-enculturation.”
139
140 Unburning Fame

with which we have dealt at length in chapter 4. As argued there, the appearance
of this motif in the biblical texts is not understandable without factoring in Indo-
European influence. However, in a fascinating instance of dialectic religio-
cultural interaction, the same motif was much later exported back into the world
of Indo-European thought. I am thinking here of the appearance of the biblicized
chaos serpent in the New Testament (to which we will be returning in a
moment), but perhaps even more of its role in ancient Gnostic or Gnosticizing
literature.286 That religious current does, after all, represent what is almost a sort
of religio-historical locus classicus of Indo-European/Semitic cross-fertilization.
In its many and varying manifestations, Gnostic and Gnosticizing religions often
tended to grow out of the confluence between biblical thinking and imagery and
(often “heretically”) Platonizing philosophy. A clearer example of Indo-
European/biblical cultural interaction can hardly be asked for. I am writing this
not because I believe there to be anything “essentially Indo-European” in
Platonism, but rather because that type of Hellenistic philosophy is often, and
somewhat naively, regarded as the epitome of “Indo-European thought” even
today, even though it has few or none of the trappings of plausibly
reconstructable Indo-European mythology or ideology (no dragons, no world-
trees, no horse-twins, no horse sacrifices, etc.). Rather, and perhaps
astonishingly, it is in the encounter with “biblical” or “Old Testament” ideas
that the central “Indo-European” motif of the dragon is imported into post-
Platonist discourse (in the form of Gnosticism and para-Gnosticism). It was the
Hebrew Bible—and its inheritance from earlier Northwest Semitic mythology—
that transported the perhaps originally Indo-European serpent imagery into those
“hybrid” religions that make up what has sometimes been referred to as the
“‘underworld’ of Platonism.”287

10.2 An Example: The Dragon in the Hymn of the Pearl

One of the most illustrative examples of this type of re-borrowing of the dragon
motif into a milieu grown out of Platonist thinking can be found in the so-called
Hymn of the Pearl, a piece of text that has been preserved as part of the
apocryphal Acts of Thomas (in both Syriac and Greek). In that poem, the role of
the biblically derived dragon or serpent is very prominent indeed. Even though
it clearly represents the chaos dragon familiar to readers of the Old Testament,

286 I am well aware of the current battle over the terms “Gnostic” and “Gnosticism”
that has been waged in the aftermath of works such as Williams 1996 and King 2003
(both of which argue for removing the words entirely from the scholarly lexicon).
However, with Pearson 2007, I remain convinced that the words still have use as loose
terms for certain rather similar Judeo-Christian movements sharing certain ideas about
the world and salvation (even though the similarities between them certainly should not
be exaggerated).
287 For the term, see Dillon 1996: 384. The whole of Dillon’s chapter 8 includes a

presentation of the movements that he describes using it; my point is not that I agree with
that presentation in all its details, but that the term “’underworld’ of Platonism” carries a
certain descriptive weight.
 10. Dragons Returning Home: The “Pizza Effect” 141

the role of the monster has been radically reinterpreted. It is now a symbol of
matter and forgetfulness, the ontological chaos into which the human soul or
spirit has descended. The unnamed hero of the story (who apparently
symbolizes the human soul) descends into “Egypt” (the kingdom of matter) in
order to retrieve a pearl of great price. After at first having been lulled to sleep
by the food and drink of the Egyptians, he then uses magic incantations to put
the dragon itself to sleep, whereupon he finds the pearl and returns to his home,
where he is greeted by his father and the whole divine family. I here quote one
of the most relevant passages from the Syriac version of the text, a few lines
describing the actual “battle” between the protagonist and the serpent, which is
carried out not by means of physical weaponry but using a magical spell,
identified with the name of the divine parent:

W-šarrît mmaggeš ʾnâ leh

l-ḥewyâ dḥîlâ w-sāyqâ
w-ʾanîmteh w-ʾaškebteh
d-šem ʾāb(y) ʿlaw(hy) ʾnâ ʾetdakret288

I started practicing magic upon him,

on the terrible and hissing serpent,
and I soothed him, and I lulled him to sleep,
for my Father’s name I recited over him.

Here, we can note an interesting case of ideological longue durée resilience

despite changes in ontological world-view: just as the sea dragons of old
represented “chaos” as imagined by Old Testament and other Ancient Near
Eastern writers, the dragon of the Gnosticizing Hymn of the Pearl assigns that
symbol as a significator of the “chaos” of that text, i.e., material existence. Even
though the text quoted here is from the Syriac (i.e., Semitic) version of the tale,
that text is part of a Gnostic-like religious milieu that would have been
impossible outside the background of Platonist (stereotypically “Indo-
European”) thinking, and the text was quickly translated into Greek, showing
the synthesis of the two traditions returning to the Indo-European linguistic fold.
It is, perhaps, no coincidence that the “dragon of chaos” motif, which is
one of the clearest instances of shared material between the Semitic/biblical and
Indo-European worlds of Antiquity, appears in Gnostic-like literature, which as
mentioned above is one of the most apparent cases of cross-fertilization between
these two cultures. The Hymn of the Pearl is one of the most impressive
examples of this. As I hope to have made believable during the course of the
present study, the chaos battle against the dragon monster in Northwest Semitic
tradition owed much to Indo-European stories of a similar nature. In the Hymn,
the dragon is, so to speak, given back to the Indo-European world (as the text
was translated into Greek) and “philosophized.” The battle against the serpent is

288 The Syriac text is based on the editions of Kruse 1978 and Wright 1871.
142 Unburning Fame

carried out by means of soothing, spell-like words,289 and the battle symbolizes
the return of the soul to its heavenly abode in a way which feels much more
stereotypically Indo-European (Greek or Indian, actually) than as something that
would have been at home in the Old Testament. Yet, the story includes much
clearly Old Testament material (the hero’s descent into the—symbolic—land of
Egypt, the motif of exile, which ultimately derives from the historical
experiences of the Israelite people in Babylon). 290 Also, the motif of using a
spell to counter the chaos monster probably goes back to older Ancient Near
Eastern conceptions, as evidenced by Ea using a spell to soothe the divine
“chaos parent” Apsû in the Enūma Eliš (as I have argued elsewhere).291
Thus, the Hymn provides a fascinating example of how a motif that was
probably Indo-European in origin (cf. the arguments about the names of the
serpent killers in section 4.6) was borrowed into the Semitic-speaking milieu of
the Ancient Near East, whereupon it was expanded and subsequently (and much
later) reborrowed into the “Indo-European” milieu that grew out of Platonizing
philosophy. The circle thus becomes complete. To be sure, the text quoted
above was originally written in Syriac, a Northwest Semitic language, but, as
mentioned, it was quickly translated into Greek and disseminated in that
language, completing the “re-importation.”

10.3 The Dragon in the Book of Revelation and Christian Dragons

Of course, one of the clearest paths back from the Northwest Semitic dragon
tales to the Indo-European speaking cultural milieu can be found in the New
Testament itself. In the Apocalypse of John, the Dragon is, after all, a very
prominent symbol, appearing in chapters 12, 13 and 16 as an enemy of God and
Christ—and one expressely identified with Satan. Even though these dragon
texts do not include as many overtly Ancient Near Eastern or “Semitic” motifs
as does the story from the Hymn of the Pearl, it would be foolish indeed to
separate it from the Old Testament background of the serpent battle. Given the
Indo-European language used (Greek) and the subsequent spread of the New
Testament across the entirety of the “classical Indo-European world,” one may
safely pose the question whether this extremely famous dragon battle would not
have influenced almost every tale of great battles against monstrous serpents in
the central Indo-European cultural sphere during late Antiquity and the Middle
Ages. This, at least, is one point at which one may quite justly criticize Calvert

289 For this point, see Wikander 2010: 268.

290 Although some scholars today would readily question the actual importance
of a historical Babylonian exile and would argue instead that exile is better viewed
as a type of literary motif or construction in the Hebrew Bible; see for example the
various essays from the 2015 volume Myths of Exile: History and Metaphor in the
Hebrew Bible (ed. by Anne Katrine de Hemmer Gudme and Ingrid Hjelm). See, in
particular, the introduction by the editors to that volume (pp. 1-10) for an overview
of this point of view.
291 Wikander 2010: 267-268; see Enūma Eliš I 61-65.
 10. Dragons Returning Home: The “Pizza Effect” 143

Watkins and those who, in his footsteps, have studied Indo-European dragon
myths: since the reborrowing of the motif from Semitic speaking peoples, it
becomes hard in the extreme to separate that “pizza effect” from actual Indo-
European poetic inheritance. The only way of doing so, to my mind, is keeping
the focus on shared etymological material and poetic formulae squarely in one’s
mind, but, even then, the “inherited” dragons and the “reborrowed” ones have
certainly mated, perhaps making an absolute distinction between them
impossible. Just as speakers of Semitic languages appear to have borrowed
dragon ideas from speakers of Indo-European, so other speakers of Indo-
European reborrowed them. The borders are truly fluid.
This, in itself, proves the necessity of engaging oneself in the type of
etymologically and textually based mythological comparison that I have here
attempted; it helps not only in discerning paths of transmission, but also in
problematizing possibly simplistic views of cultural “integrity.”
The same can of course be said of the entire Christian reception of the
Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, with all of its (implied) serpent mythology. Even
though Calvert Watkins studied the serpent-slaying motif as a specifically Indo-
European phenomenon, in the sense of a semi-direct inheritance from Proto-
Indo-European times into the various attested Indo-European cultures, one
should not ignore the enormous influence of the biblical accounts upon such
stories as that of St George and the Dragon. Here, I believe that it is necessary to
acknowledge that it is not a question of “either” a Semitic “or” an Indo-
European myth: it is one that has been borrowed back and forth and various
versions of which can interact with one another and cross-fertilize. I would like
to compare this with the scenario that I suggested for the “Conqueror”
terminology appearing as titles for the dragon-slayer in Vedic, Hittite and
Ugaritic in section 4.6: it is quite possible that a single “receiving” version of
the story incorporated parts from differing versions and welded them together
into a coherent whole.

10.4 Other Gnostic and Esoteric Reborrowings

A similar reinterpretation of Semitic sea mythology can be found in a Gnostic
hymnal fragment preserved in the so-called Codex Brucianus. Here we read the
following:

Hear me as I sing praises to thee, O Mystery who existed before every incompre-
hensible one and every endless one. Hear me as I sing praise to thee, O Mystery,
who hast shone in thy mystery, so that the mystery which exists from the beginning
should be completed. And when thou didst shine, thou didst become water of the
ocean whose imperishable name is this: …

Hear me as I sing praises to thee, O Mystery who existest before every incompre-
hensible one and every endless one, who hast shone in thy mystery. The earth in the
middle of the ocean was purified, of which the incomprehensible name is this: …
144 Unburning Fame

Hear me as I sing praises to thee, O Mystery who existest before every incompre-
hensible one and every endless one, who hast shone in thy mystery. All the
powerful matter of the ocean which is the sea, with every kind within it, was
purified, of which the incomprehensible name is this: …

Hear me as I sing praises to thee, O Mystery who existest before every incompre-
hensible one and every endless one, who hast shone in thy mystery. And as thou
didst shine, thou didst seal the sea and all things in it, because of the power within
them rebelled, of which the incomprehensible name (is this): …292

In this text, we do not find any clear reference to a serpent—or any trace of the
Indo-European myth. However, there are repeated references to the “water” as
chaos, behind which, I would argue, the Old Testament/Ancient Near Eastern
image of the chaos waters lurks. And note the reference to “every kind” within
the sea: this may well be a veiled indication of the serpent monster. When the
hymnal piece says that God sealed the sea and the rebellious powers within it, it
is impossible not to see a background of this motif in the Chaoskampf stories of
the Hebrew Bible.
This hymnal fragment, then, represents a somewhat different development
compared with the Gnosticizing texts that reintroduced the serpent motif into
“Indo-European” Platonizing milieux. Here, the motif is simply the sea itself,
i.e., the more purely “Semitic” version of the Chaoskampf imagery, which now
occurs in a Gnostic setting (in a text that may well have been originally in Greek,
even though it is only preserved in a Coptic translation). The biblical story once
welded the serpent and the water together, but the text in the Bruce Codex only
carries on the tradition of the water clearly, whereas the Hymn of the Pearl
includes the Serpent himself. The underlying imagery, I would say, is the same,
a convergence of “biblical” and “Indo-European” imagery.
Another interesting Gnostic reception of the biblical serpent imagery can
be found in the so called Ophite Diagram, a schematic of the metaphysical
layout of the world according to the views of the Gnostic group known as
“Ophites” or “Ophians.” This diagram, which is described both by Celsus in his
attacks on Christians and in the Contra Celsum of Origen, is made up of a
number of circles, showing the various planetary spheres, etc. The outermost of
these circles is said to be the Leviathan. 293 Here, the Serpent himself envelops
the “chaos” of the physical world.

292 The translation is quoted from that found in Schmidt and MacDermot 1978: 139-

140 (translation by MacDermot, edition of the Coptic text by Schmidt), also available
online at www.gnosis.org (http://gnosis.org/library/frghm.htm, accessed latest June 12,
2016). The ellipsis dots stand for divine names/voces magicae in the Coptic text (Aēzōa,
Azōae and similar). I have removed the roman type signifying Greek loanwords in the
Coptic text.
293 On the Ophite diagram and its interpretation, see especially DeConick 2013 (with

further references). The description of the diagram is spread across many places in
Contra Celsum; I refer to DeConnick for more specific references to textual passages on
 10. Dragons Returning Home: The “Pizza Effect” 145

This motif of a Leviathan-like dragon marking the outermost sphere of the

cosmos is found in the early Kabbalistic work known as Sepher Yetzirah (sēper
yĕṣîrâ in pure transcription).294 In this text, a dragon-like being known as the tly
forms an important part of the esoteric cosmology presented. This being is
probably in a sense a representation of the constellation Draco, but it is hard not
also to see in it a piece of reception of the ancient Leviathan/Rahab mythology
in a way consistent with what we have seen in the case of the Ophite Gnostics.
This means that, once again, the attestation of the motif in the Sepher Yetzirah
provides an example of the (probably) originally Indo-European serpent
imagery appearing in a context that—although written in a Semitic language—
probably borrows from Greek philosophical thought. The fact that the Sepher
Yetzirah has subsequently become an important text in the (Indo-European
speaking) world of Western Esotericism just serves to make the point even
stronger.
Another possible example of “re-borrowing” could perhaps be found in the
matter of the “stranger/gēr” motif as an expression of human “foreignness” in
the physical world, which occurs in the Hebrew Bible in Ps 39:13 and 119:19
but later became a mainstay in Gnostic and Gnosticizing thought. Perhaps this
motif, if indeed borrowed from the Indo-European ambit (as I very cautiously
suggested in chapter 8), was re-borrowed into that syncretic stream of thinking.
We have already touched upon the expression Ger-Adamas (possibly meaning
“Adam the Stranger”), which would provide an instance of this reborrowing.

10.5 From Borrowing to Fusion: The Case of the Segmented Adam

An even more difficult—yet fascinating—type of interaction is that made up of
mythological/theological material that appears continually to have been fused
together by the blending of ideas originating in biblical and Indo-European
traditions. Such may well be the case concerning the traditions of what is
sometimes known as Adam Octipartite or Septipartite, a type of telling that
appears in many vesions in mediaeval Christian thought and to a large extent
goes back to Jewish mystical speculation (and to the Henoch literature). The
idea is describing Adam, the primordeal human being, as having been created
out of various elements or parts of the world, thus creating a type of “world
man.” The genre appears in many languages; early surviving Western Christian
(Indo-European) versions can be found in Latin and Old Irish; in eastern Europe,
there are also early versions in Old Church Slavonic. 295

the various parts of the figure. One should note that the text also refers to Behemoth
being at the center, and possibly sees this as a sort of Gegenstück to the Leviathan (see
DeConnick 2013: 48).
294 An edition (with translation and an inner-traditional commentary) of the Sepher

Yetzirah can be found in Kaplan 1993. The discussion of Draco can be found on p. 233.
295 For a general introduction to and overview of these traditions, see Macaskill and

Greenwood 2013. An early Irish manuscript of this type of story is London, Additional
MS 4783, folio 7a.
146 Unburning Fame

The fascinating thing to notice from the perspective of this book is that the
segmented creation of Adam, the prototypical Human Being, closely parallels
what is often regarded as a very Indo-European tale indeed: the sacrifice of the
world-man, often known as a “Twin” (Vedic Yama, Avestan Yima, and,
according to some, the Norse Ymir and the Roman Remus, whose name is then
assumed to be a corruption of an original *Yemos, related to Yama and Yima
and thus also, ultimately, meaning “Twin”).296 Given that tales of the slaying of
an early brother by another is by no means foreign in the Hebrew Bible (Cain
and Abel in Gen 4:1-16!), this type of tale is extremely difficult to study in
terms of “who borrowed from whom.” The stories have an almost folk-tale like
character.
However, once the story of the segmented proto-human, Adam, started
appearing in Indo-European languages, in a Christian context, the picture
becomes both murkier and more fascinating. The Old Irish story of Adam being
made up from the various elements of the world has been interpreted in Indo-
Europeanist scholarship as a Christianized remnant of the above-mentioned
Proto-Indo-European mythic scheme. But it also, without a doubt, represents a
piece of reception of Jewish, Semitic language speculation going back go the
beginnings of the first millennium CE. The possibility then suggests itself that
what we have in early Indo-European tellings of the “Segmented Adam” story
(like the Old Irish one) is actually a fusion of an inherited Indo-European tale
and a biblically derived Jewish story.

All in all, these small forays into originally Indo-European motifs that have been
subjected to the “Pizza Effect” serve to remind us that borders—linguistic,
cultural, or otherwise—are rarely absolute. The dragons may have come from
Indo-European tongues, but the speakers of biblical languages subsequently sent
them back home.

296 For an overview, see West 2007: 356-359.

 11. In Conclusion
With the dragons having returned home—where do we find ourselves? What
have these varying studies on possible Northwest Semitic reception of Indo-
European motifs taught us?

We have learned that borrowed motifs can persist in the receiving linguistic
culture even though the origin may be utterly opaque, certain ideas having still
persisted subtextually, carried through the etymological material. We have
learned that that borrowed motifs may at one point show their origin through
actual lexical borrowings, yet can later seemingly be separated from it by
adapting native terminology to continue the same motifs. One such example was
the “beings of smoke” motif, in which case the actual linguistic borrowing can
be seen in the Ugaritic texts (where Anatolian-derived terminology is used to
express it), whereas native Semitic vocabulary is used when the motif returns in
the context of the Hebrew Bible. A similar situation was found in the matter of
the terminology for the victorious Storm God and his serpentine adversary: at
Ugarit, the terms occur in a way that appears to be calqued on Indo-European
patterns (the “Conqueror” and the “Enveloper/Coverer/Hinderer/Encircler”), but
in the preserved text of the Hebrew Bible, these terms do not occur in the same
clear-cut way (although the name Leviathan is, of course, still there). Again, this
raises the important question of at what point in history this specific piece of
Indo-European influence was transmitted into the Northwest Semitic ambit: was
it in Proto-Northwest-Semitic times, or (more specifically) in the cultural
context of ancient Ugarit? In short, was Baal (or a similar Proto-Northwest
Semitic divine figure) thought of as an ʾalʾiyanu (“Conqueror”) at an earlier
point than the attested Ugaritic text, and, if this was indeed the case, was that
idea transmitted into Israelite culture as well, although this is not directly visible
in the texts of the Hebrew Bible as transmitted to us?
In matters such as these, one would be wise not to limit one’s options. It is
quite thinkable, for example, that the main “serpent slaying” motif was
borrowed into the Northwest Semitic world at a very early period but was later
“bolstered” using the Conqueror/Encircler terminology at the level underlying
the Ugaritic texts.
In our discussion of social terminology for boundary-crossers and
“foreigners,” we noted that such ideas can be borrowed both at the level of
individual words and at a more abstract level of motifs; we looked at both these
possibilities in some detail. Even though I began with a more “typological” form
of comparison in that case, I also suggested actual lexical contacts.
At a number of points in the book, I have tried to highlight some of the
methodological issues that this lexically based type of investigation raises. One
important such question is the matter of the “etymological fallacy,” i.e., the
mistake of assuming that the etymological background of a word or an
expression need in some way imply what the word “actually” means (whatever
“actually” is meant to signify in this connection). What I have tried to point to is

147
148 Unburning Fame

a number of cases in which a more ancient (Indo-European-influenced) meaning

appears to be hiding beneath a perhaps more well-known synchronous meaning.
There is nothing inherently “Indo-European” in the reference to “smoke” in
Hosea 13, but if one adds to that text its probable background in Northwest
Semitic imagery such as that preserved in the Ugaritic Aqhat text, a new layer of
meaning makes itself known, and that Ugaritic text clearly betrays Indo-
European (Anatolian) influence in the form of concrete loanwords. Again, the
point here is that the reception of extra-Semitic motif material can be carried
through specific borrowed words but then be separated from these words during
the chain of transmission.
One may also note again that the type of study carried out here is not
simply a matter of “comparison” in some abstract sense, or even as a purely
historical exercise. Since critical biblical exegesis is perforce a historical
discipline, however, the study of the background of biblical motifs and linguistic
material is by implication also an aid in the exegesis of concrete texts. If one
reckons with the possibility of “etymologically poetic” layers of meaning being
present, one learns more about the historical meaning of the text.

The main lesson to be learnt from these studies at a meta-level is perhaps what
appears at the surface to be rather a simplistic one: that no linguistic culture can
be viewed as monadic and that historical linguistics-based mythological
comparison needs to take borrowing and cultural interaction into account. But is
this not self-evident?
Not necessarily. Due to the extreme specialization that is certainly a more
and more prevalent trend in Academia of today, students of ancient textual
cultures run a greater and greater risk of blinding themselves from data from
historically relevant yet “foreign” corpora or sets of material (as seen from the
vantage-point of their own specific field of study). Yet, there is also the opposite
danger: that of disassociating oneself from the historical realities that one is
studying, to move entirely onto a kind of meta-level, at which the matter at hand
is not specific texts or other forms of human cultural production but rather that
which is deemed to be common to “humankind itself,” in a more or less
ahistorical sense. The example of the dragon/serpent mythology discussed in
this volume will make both of these issues clear: on the one hand, one will blind
oneself to possible historical backgrounds and interactions if one looks only at
material from one specific linguistic phylum where two or many may have
interacted, but on the other hand, one does scholarship a great disservice if one
leaves the realm of historically probable cases of interaction and starts
discussing such questions as “dragons all over the world,” adducing evidence
from China, South America or various other cultural areas that could never have
had any impact whatsoever on Israelite or Ugaritic culture.

Given that the subject of the present book is various forms of intercultural
borrowing and interaction, it is rather intriguing that one of the cases that show
parallel expressions is one concerned with the very matter of being “foreign” or
 11. In Conclusion 149

outside of the established society. As I mentioned at the end of the chapter on

these pieces of terminology (chapter 8), it is fascinating to imagine that ancient
Semitic-speaking cultures could actually have used bits of this terminology to
refer to the (Indo-European-speaking) “foreigners” with whom the expressions
and motifs themselves may have originated. In that case, the idea of the
boundary-crossers as metaphorical “wolves” is a highly illuminating connection
that may well have been passed along with the more basic expressions as an
“etymological poetic” motif. When we know from Indo-European studies that
there may have been a social institution in the early periods of that linguistic
phylum of warrior-bands, living on the outskirts of society and being referred to
as “wolves,” then the mention of wolves in connection with the semantically
corresponding Hebrew verbal root gwr becomes noteworthy indeed. The
possibility that a poetic memory of such bands of semi-wild warriors and
“boundary crossers” could lie as a subtext here grants the text an additional
layer of exegetically relevant meaning.
The question of how “foreign” motifs and concepts were viewed by some
authors of the Hebrew Bible came up in the discussion about the concept of
“dividing a god.” If it is the fact, as I have argued, that the story about Jeroboam
creating the sanctuaries in Bethel and Dan was construed by the (proto)-
Deuteronomist author as a kind of “foreign” (specifically, Hittite) ritual idea,
this idea of “boundary-crossing” religious practices is illustrated in yet another
way.

One of the perhaps most startling findings arrived at in the present volume is the
way in which etymologically (and in the sense of “etymological poetics”)
identical material that had been split up and separated by the workings of
historical linguistic development in various branches of the Indo-European
family appears sometimes to have been “reunited” by means of a non-Indo-
European focal point, in this case Northwest Semitic culture, at least as
represented at Ugarit. We saw this in action when we discussed the Ugaritic
reception of the “Conqueror” terminology as applied to the victorious Storm
God, a reception that may well have its origin in material derived from both the
Anatolian and the Indo-Iranian branches of Indo-European. When this is
combined with the perspective of the “Pizza Effect,” it becomes clear that the
history of Indo-European/Northwest Semitic cultural interaction in effect
constitutes a large web of reception history, in which it is not always easy to
separate one culture from the other. And this, again, is an important finding: that
the rigid boundaries sometimes posited between the early Indo-European and
biblical cultural worlds need to be rethought. The cultural spheres in question
did exist, to be sure—their existence is an essential methodological axiom for
studies such as these to be feasible—but they are neither static nor “self-being.”
They should not be unnecessarily hypostasized.
The motifs for which I have argued a connection between Indo-European
and biblical/Northwest Semitic cultural milieu must have passed between these
linguistic settings in very different ways and at different points in time. Some
150 Unburning Fame

probably migrated from Indo-European to Semitic-speaking peoples at a period

in history predating at least written Northwest Semitic sources by quite some
time—in some cases, we may even be talking about time-depths close to the
proto-language level. In other cases, the points of transmission may have been
closer to (or even within) the bounds of historically attested Northwest Semitic
mythological writings. And the two possibilities need not be regarded as
mutually exclusive: I regard it as rather likely that the serpent-slaying motif, for
example, was adopted from Indo-European sources at quite an early point
(probably during early second millennium BCE or even earlier), but, as we have
seen, this early interaction seems to have been “buttressed” by subsequent and
additional influence at a later point (a possibility suggested by the appearance of
what seems to be specifically translated mythological nomenclature at Ugarit).

Studying how mythological motifs may have spread from Indo-European to

Northwest Semitic sources entails a special kind of illustration of some of the
processes that may have been involved in the spread of the Indo-European
linguistic family itself—and of the ideological features that may perhaps have
been attached to it. An intriguing suggestion put forth by David W. Anthony
(2007, esp. chapter 17, aptly titled “Words and Deeds”) has at its core the idea
that among the most important factors involved in facilitating the rapid spread
of Indo-European as such were (a) its mythic/ritual/poetic tradition (which, one
may venture, would have been exemplified by tales such as the dragon stories
and described as “imperishable fame,” itself an inherited motif or collocation), a
tradition that may have granted the speakers of Indo-European a type of “élite”
status, and (b) certain technological advances, such as the domestication of the
horse. And these two factors (three, if one counts the expression “imperishable”
or “unburning fame” that has given this volume its title) happen to be among
those reflected as results of Indo-European/Semitic interaction in the Ugaritic
texts and in those of the Hebrew Bible. This, I would propose, is no
coincidence. Of course, I do not mean that the fact of these Indo-European
words and motifs being represented in the world of the Hebrew Bible carries
with it some sort of statistical significance—the studies in this book have not in
any way been statistically based, making any such argument nonsensical.
However, it appears to be a fact that a word for “horse” and heroic tales about
serpent-slaying were among the material imported from Indo-European sources,
which fits very well with the image of (Proto-)Indo-European culture built up by
Anthony, Watkins, West, etc. If borrowed Indo-European words or motifs are to
be found in Northwest Semitic, these are ones one might expect to find—and
such turns out to be the case. Not only specific words were transmitted, but also
the mythological structure that was perhaps the most typical of early Indo-
European culture as a whole. If, as Anthony suggests, bardic tales of heroic
exploits were important means of transmission of Indo-European linguistic
culture itself, then this becomes even more salient when we see this process
occurring even in the case of borrowings, without an accompanying language
shift.
 11. In Conclusion 151

It is my contention that the élite transmission by means of poetic capital, so

to speak, that David W. Anthony suggested can be found represented in the
pages of the Hebrew Bible and in the Ugaritic epics—or at least that its results
can be. When we read today of YHWH’s heroic exploits as a slayer of serpents,
of the god Dagon as the enemy of the “Little Sun” Samson, of the boundary-
crossing, wolf-like foreigners that threatened the borders of ancient realms and
perhaps influenced the self-identification of the Hebrews, and of the vital force
of humanity being thought of in terms of “smoke” that passes away—then we
may in fact be viewing the remnants of Indo-European storytelling having
spread and been adapted by another cultural and linguistic sphere. And when we
see Greek language texts that helped shape the entire cultural and religious
history of Europe (and the world) import not only “natively Semitic” concepts
(to use a simplistic phrase) from the world of the Hebrew Bible but also some of
the concepts that had an earlier home among speakers of Indo-European, we see
that there is no one-sided or simply “giving” and “receiving” equation at work
here, but a continuous process of borrowing and reborrowing. Indeed, early
Indo-European sources have borrowed from Semitic sources, as well. One such
possible mythological borrowing from Semitic into Indo-European may be
present in the Thunder-Sea-Underworld division of the three main Greek male
gods (Zeus, Hades, Poseidon), which has an exact parallel in Ugaritic
mythology (Baal, Mot, Yamm) but is not that common in other Indo-European
sources.297
Again, it bears repeating that investigating interactions of the sort that we
have done in this volume may serve as a corrective to tendencies to view ancient
cultures as isolated from each other in their respective mythologies. Even
though we have consistently talked of “Indo-European” motifs (in the sense of
“motifs originally carried through Indo-European etymological material”), one
should not forget that this has been a matter of methodology. The motifs studied
probably did cross the boundaries of linguistic cultures; even though we look at
them as constructs being at home in a certain language family, what we have
been studying is in fact the active defiance of that principle: motifs that “jump
the fence,” so to speak. The great and ongoing interaction between Indo-
European and Northwest Semitic ideological and mythological material is, after
all, what gave rise to the entire Christian tradition. The interaction still goes on
today. By following motifs from one language family into another, one can see
how intertwined ancient cultures actually were. By separating them and
reconstructing them, one can paradoxically see how the divides were bridged.

In studying the early and far-reaching interactions between Indo-European and

Northwest Semitic culture, the results of which helped shape the religious and
literary history of the entire world, we can be reminded that even though we as

297 The parallel structure of the triple powers Zeus-Poseidon-Hades and Baal-Yamm-

Mot was also noted in López-Ruiz 2014: 179. I myself made the same point in Wikander
2008: 189.
152 Unburning Fame

humans may be little more than “beings of smoke,” the tales and ideas that we
share with each other, across borders and into unexpected reaches of history,
can still grant us a glimpse of that immortal and indestructible fame that will
never, ever burn.
 12. Abbreviations
AAE Militarev, Alexander and Stolbova, Olga V.,
Afro-Asiatic Etymology (online database, available as part of the
website of Sergei Starostin, starling.rinet.ru ;
accessed latest Dec 28, 2016).
AB Anchor Bible.
AV Atharva-Veda.
AOAT Alter Orient und altes Testament.
BHKApp Biblia Hebraica Kittel critical apparatus.
BHSApp Biblia Hebraica Stutgartensia critical apparatus.
BSOAS Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies.
BZAW Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft.
ConBOT Coniectanea Biblica Old Testament Series.
CTH Catalogue des textes Hittites.
DDD Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, 2nd ed., ed. Karel
van der Toorn, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. van der Horst. Leiden:
Brill 1999.
DUL Olmo Lete, Gregorio del, Sanmartín, Joaquín, A Dictionary of the
Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition, 3rd rev. ed., tr. and
ed. Wilfred G.E. Watson. HdO 1/122. Leiden 2015.
EIEC Enclyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, ed. James P. Mallory and
Douglas Q. Adams. London: Fitzroy Dearborn 1997.
EIET (Telepinu) Slocum, Jonathan and Kimball, Sara E., Early Indo-European
Texts, Hittite: The Telepnus “Vanishing God” Myth (Anatolian
Mythology), https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol/hitol/20
(accessed latest Dec 11, 2016).
EE Enūma eliš.
EOR Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., ed. Lindsay Jones. Detroit,
MI/Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA/Gale 2005.
ETCSL Black, J.A., Cunningham, G., Ebeling, J., Flückiger-Hawker, E.,
Robson, E., Taylor, J., and Zólyomi, G., The Electronic Text
Corpus of Sumerian Literature (http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/),
Oxford 1998–2006.
FAT Forschungen zum Alten Testament.
GRBS Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies.
HALOT Koehler, Ludwig and Baumgartner, Walter, The Hebrew and
Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, rev. by Walter Baumgartner

153
154 Unburning Fame

and Johann Jakob Stamm, translated and edited under the

supervision of M.E.J Richardson. Leiden: Brill 2001.
HdO Handbuch der Orientalistik.
HED Puhvel, Jaan, Hittite Etymological Dictionary. Trends in
Linguistics: Documentation. Berlin/New York, NY: Mouton de
Gruyter 1984-.
JANER Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions.
JANES Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society.
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society.
JCS Journal of Cuneiform Studies.
JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies.
JSOTSup Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series.
JSS Journal of Semitic Studies
KAI Donner, H. and Röllig W., Kanaanäische und aramäische In-
schriften: mit einem Beitrag von O. Rössler. 3 vols. Wiesbaden:
Harrasowitz 1962-1964.
KBo Keilschrift-texte aus Boghazköi.
KTU Dietrich, Manfried, Loretz, Oswald and Sanmartín, Joaquín, Die
keilalphabetischen Texte aus Ugarit, Ras Ibn Hani und anderen
Orten/The Cuneiform Alphabetic Texts from Ugarit, Ras Ibn Hani
and Other Places: Third, Enlarged Edition, KTU3. AOAT 360/1.
Münster: Ugarit-Verlag 2013.
KUB Keischrifturkunden aus Boghazköi.
LIV Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben.
LXX Septuagint.
NIL Wodtko, Dagmar S. Britta Irslinger and Carolin Schneider, Nomina
im Indogermanischen Lexikon. Heidelberg: Winter 2008.
OT Old Testament.
OTL Old Testament Library.
RCU Pardee, Dennis, ed. Lewis, Theodore J., Ritual and Cult at Ugarit.
SBL Writings from the Ancient World 10. Atlanta, GA: Society of
Biblical Literature 2002.
RS Ras Shamra.
ṚV Ṛg-Veda
SEÅ Svensk exegetisk årsbok.
StBT Studien zu den Boğazköy-Texten.
 12. Abbreviations 155

TDOT Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, ed. G. Johannes

Botterweck and Helmer Ringgren. Various translators.
UF Ugarit-Forschungen.
VT Vetus Testamentum.
VTSup Supplements to Vetus Testamentum.
ZAW Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft.
156 Unburning Fame
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 14. Index of Personal Names
A. HISTORICAL AND
MYTHOLOGICAL CHARACTERS 3. Phoenician
Eshmunazar II 109
1. Hebrew
Aaron 93 4. Akkadian
Abel 146 Adad-Nirari I 104
Abraham 116 Yazraḫ-Dagan, Yaṭṭa-Dagan 99
Adam 121, 145,
146 5. Sumerian
Amnon (Rabbi) 86n Aga 94, 95
Arauna 57 Enmebaragesi 94, 95
Barak 6 Gilgamesh 94, 95
Cain 146 Gudea 49
David 33, 91,
125n, 6. Hurrian
129, 130 Kikkuli 21, 27
Deborah 6, 82, 83
Elijah 106 7. Anatolian
Geradamas 121, 145 Azatiwada 27
Hilkiah 6n Ḫūpašiya 47, 48,
Jael 82 54, 120,
Jephthah 125n, 121
129, 130 Šaptamanika 99
Jeroboam 91-93,
149 8. Greek
Joseph 63 Eurydice 130
Josiah 6n, 8n, 91 Orpheus 130
Lappidoth 6 Plato 140-142,
Levi 62 144
Melchizedek 16
Moses 83 9. Latin
Rehoboam 91, 93, Octavia 99
94, 96 Remus 146
Samson 106, 107,
114, 151
Saul 129 B. GODS AND MONSTERS
Shamgar ben Anat 82
Solomon 94 1. Hebrew
Asherah 17
2. Ugaritic ʿAštōret/ʿAštārôt 111
Aqhat 68, 70-72, Bashan (?) 64
76, 80 Behemoth 43n
Danel 68, 70, 71 Dagon (see also 2., Dagan) 54, 97-99,
Kirta 99 101, 102,
Thitmanit(u) 99 104-114,
Yatpan 72 132, 135,
151

179
180 Unburning Fame

Leviathan 1, 35, 41- 61, 66,

44, 46n, 133
50, 52-56, Mot 41, 48,
60, 65, 50, 54-56,
66, 144, 60, 107,
145, 147 133, 134,
Rahab 35, 42, 151
45, 50, Shapshu 55, 107,
145 111
YHWH 38-40, Yamm 41, 47-49,
42-45, 47, 50n, 54-
54n, 60- 56, 151
62, 64,
78, 81, 3. Akkadian
84, 91-93, Anu 103, 113,
96, 105, 114
107, Apsû 142
121n, Dagan: See 1. Dagon and 2. Dagan
122, 151 Daguna 101
Ea 142
2. Ugaritic (and other non-Hebrew Enlil 100
Northwest Semitic) Ištar 17, 111
Anat 17, 68, Marduk 35, 45
70, 72, 76 Shamash 111
Athirat 17 Tiāmat 36, 37, 45
ʿAṯtar (Athtar) 111
ʿAṯtart (Athtart) 17, 111 4. Egyptian
Baal 17, 35, Horus 43n
39-42, 44, Set 43n
47, 48,
51, 53-56, 5. Sumerian
103, 104, An 95
106, 109- Inana 95
111, 113, Ningirsu 49
114, 133,
147, 151 6. Hurrian
Dagan (see also 1., Dagon) 15, 54, Ḫedammu 56n
97-104, Kumarbi/Kumarve 99, 103,
108, 110- 112-114
114, 132, Teššob/Teššub 49, 103,
135 113, 114n
El 41, 60,
99n, 103, 7. Hittite
112n, Ašertu 17
113, 114, Elkunirša 16, 17
134 Illuyanka 35, 47,
Haddu/Hadad 17, 37 48, 49n,
Kothar-wa-Hasis 40, 44 50, 53,
Lotan/Litan 41, 50n, 54, 56,
52-56, 60, 59, 120
 14. Index of Personal Names 181

Inara 47, 48, 10. Nordic

54, 120, Thor 108
121 Ymir 146
Tarḫunna- (Luwian Tarḫunt-
/Tarḫunza-),
Anatolian Storm God 17, 35,
40n, 47,
48, 49n,
51, 52n,
53-56, 80,
110, 113,
114n,
120, 147,
149

8. Greek
Hades 151
Kronos 99, 103n,
112, 113
Ophion 35
Ouranos 103n,
113, 114
Poseidon 151
Typhon 33, 35
Zeus 33, 113,
151
Zeus Arotrios 99
Zeus Demarous 113

9. Vedic
Agni 46, 51
Ahi Budhnya 50
Bala 47
Indra 6n, 35-42,
46, 47,
51, 52,
57, 58n
Mitra 51
Rauhiṇa 46
Tvaṣtṛ 40
Vṛtra 35-37, 41,
46, 47,
50, 52,
55, 57
Yama 146

9. Iranian
Apaoša 50
Yima 146
 15. Index Locorum
1. Hebrew Sources 12:6-11 94
12:24 91
Genesis 12:26-29 91, 93
1 73 18 106
1:2 36 18:28 109
3:15 62n
4:1-16 146 Isaiah
12:1 116 6:10 82
14 16 11:6 128n
14:19, 22 16 14:1 119n
49:9 128 27:1 60-62

Exodus Deutero-Isaiah 106

15:6-7 63 40 86
32:4, 8 92, 93 51:6 81
51:9 42, 44
Levicitus 51:9c-d 45
16 4
25:23 121n Ezekiel
1:4 119n
Deuteronomy 32:3 43n
6:4 92n
32 57, 83 Hosea
32:15 32, 78, 13-14 108n
79, 81, 83 13:3-6 77, 79-81,
33 64 84, 148
33:11 62-64 14:8 107, 108
33:13 63
33:22 128 Habakkuk
3:8-9 64
Judges 3:13 62, 64
5:6-7 82
5:8 83 Psalms
5:26 62 18:8-16 39, 40
11:2-4 129 18:39 62, 63
16:23 106 18:45b-46a 134
22:17 128
1 Samuel 29:3-9b 38, 39
5:1-5 105 31:13 134
5:6 106n 36:4 82
28 73 37:20 81, 83, 84
29:3 129 39:13 121, 122,
145
2 Samuel 59:7 128
22:39 62, 63 68:22-23 62, 63
68:24 63n
1 Kings 74:13 45, 46

182
 15. Index Locorum 183

89:11a 45 1.3 54
102 84 1.3 III 22-29 112
102:4 83, 84, 1.3 III 38-46 50n
137 1.3 V 17-18 55n
102:5 134 1.4 54
102:5b 137 1.4 VII 31-41 37, 39
110:5, 6 62 1.4 VIII 21-24 55n
110:6b-7a 64 1.5 41, 54
119 122 1.5 I 1-8 41, 55,
119:19 121, 145 60, 133,
137:5 134, 136 134
141:2 84, 86 1.6 II 24-25 55n

Job 1.10 II 24-25 63

3 44n
3:8 44, 46n Epic of Kirta (1.14-1.16) 99
26:12 62
26:13b 45 Epic of Aqhat (1.17-1.19) 68, 70-72,
40:24 43n 80, 81,
40:25-26 43, 44 83, 148
1.17 I 26-28 68, 69,
1 Chronicles 74-75
29:15 122 1.18 IV 24-26 72
1.19 IV 24 70
Sepher Yetzirah 145 1.19 IV 31 70

Ûnĕtanneh Tôqep 87 1.42 112n,

113n
Rashi 98n 1.78 line 1 21n
1.83 50n
Maimonides, 1.118 lines 1-3 112n
Mishneh Torah 128n 1.147 lines 2-4 112n
1.148 lines 1-2 112n
Todros Abulafia: 6.13 line 2 103
ʾāmĕrâ hăkî nôd rāṣĕtâ 129n 6.14 line 2 103

RS
2. Ugaritic Sources 1004 (Hurrian) 112n
20.024 lines 1-3 (Akkadian) 112n
KTU/CAT

Baal Cycle (1.1-1.6) 33, 35, 3. Phoenician Sources

37, 39-42,
54-57, KAI 14:19 109
107, 112,
134 4. Aramaic Sources

1.1 IV 41n Targum Yonathan 108

1.2 I 36-41 41n
1.2 IV 12, 19 47 Hymn of the Pearl
184 Unburning Fame

(Acts of Thomas) 140, 141, §§9-12 47, 48

144 §21 53
§25 50
5. Coptic Sources Indictment of Madduwatta
(CTH 147) 79
Codex Brucianus 143, 144 KARATEPE (Azatiwada)
1:§VIII 27
KBo X 1 verso 23 71n
6. Akkadian Sources KBo X 2 iii 40 71n
KBo XXXII 13 recto II 9-10 114n
Adad-Nirari I inscription 104 KBo XXXII 14 recto 1 89
Kingship in Heaven
Enūma Eliš 11, 35-37, (Song of Going Forth,
48n CTH 344) 113
I 61-65 142 KUB XXXVI 55 ii 28 50
IV 101 45 Song of the Sea 49
IV 130 45 Telepinu Myth (CTH 324) 80
TOPADA §21 24n
Mari letter (A.1258+ :9) 100n

7. Sumerian Sources 10. Greek Sources

Hesiod, Theogony 103n, 113
Gilgamesh and Aga, Philo of Byblos
lines 1-41 93-95 (in Eusebius’
Gudea. Cylinder A 8.15 49 Praep. Evang.) 97-99
1.10.18-19 113, 114

8. Hurrian Sources Poimandres

(Corp. Herm. I) 31 85
Epic of Liberation 32, 78-81, Wisdom of Solomon
83, 89, 2:2-3 76, 77,
114n 80, 86,
KBo XXXII 13 recto I 9-10 114n 87, 137n
1 Corinthians
1:13 96n
9. Anatolian Sources Apocalypse of John
12, 13, 16 142
ÇINEKÖY (Warika) §4 27n
CTH 785 56
Elkunirša Myth (CTH 342) 16, 17 11. Latin Sources
Epic of Liberation
See also under “Hurrian sources” Celsus 144
Ḫedammu myth (CTH 348) 56n Origen, Contra Celsum 144
Hittite laws 117 Jerome 98n
Hymn of the Great Sun God,
line 7 88
Illuyanka Myth (CTH 321) 12. Vedic, Sanskrit, and Pāli Sources
§3 53, 54
§§7-8 120, 121 Ṛg-Veda
§11 50 I 32:1 36, 37, 50
 15. Index Locorum 185

I 32:8 50n
I 52 36n Bhagavad-Gītā 132
1.80 36n
II 11 36n Bhāgavata-Purāṇa
II 12 36n 6:12:32 47
II 12:3 36, 50
II 12:13 38, 39 Buddhist pāli scriptures 132
III 32 36n
IV 18 36n
V 32 36n Iranian sources
VI 17 36n
VI 29 36n Avesta 50, 52
VII 94:12 46
VIII 96 36n
X 113 36n Celtic sources

Atharva-Veda Vercelli inscription 107

XX 128:13 46 Saga of Fergus mac Léti 50
London, Additional MS
Taittirīya-Upaniṣad 132 4783, folio 7a 145n