Ugarit

There's some kind of a famine.

And it can be backed up with what we talked about in the last episode, where this one king is messaging to the king of Ugarit, and he's like, give me some grain or we're all going to die.

And then the king of Ugarit sends a...

So environment seems to play a part.

To what extent, nobody is entirely sure.

In the few rooms thus far at Kurion, excavators have come upon the skeletons of two women, a young girl, and a horse.

The bones are cracked and crushed.

How Mycenae, Tyrens, Medea, Knossos, Troy, and Ugarit could have experienced quakes sufficient to completely, but without loss of human or animal life is difficult to imagine.

Yeah.

They are deployed to Ugrit again, which is where they were having the battle with the Egyptians the first time.

But strangely, there is no one in the towns.

So our crew is deeply confused by this.

They had their own kings and so on.

So in Syria, at a place called Raskshamra, they started excavating and they found a whole country called Ugarit U-G-A-R-I-T and they found some 10,000 tablets, writings, a whole library, a royal library was discovered there, all from about the year 1600 to 1200 B.C.

In other words, contemporary with Moshe Rabbeinu, perhaps contemporary with some of his predecessors, like someone like Yaakov Avinu.

So you can imagine how crucial these documents are.

They shed light on that part of the world just at the time that's crucial for the founding, if you like, of the Israelite people.

And one of the texts that was discovered in Ugarit, we call the language Ugaritic, and at universities throughout the United States and Europe as well, there are now professors of Ugarit.

If anybody here is looking for a field you would like to consider, if you like to read

other

What Joseph Smith is presenting there is far beyond his time.

These are things that maybe people could have accessed more or less through the Bible, but the texts in Akkadian, in Ugaritic, in ancient Egyptian, that would... really support this kind of notion from an ancient Near Eastern standpoint had not even been discovered yet.

They hadn't been translated.

Those languages were still being worked out.

So this would be, yeah, parallel to the head one.

Right.

And there's a similar kind of construction in Psalm 134, where you have a sentence in the first... parallel colon and then in the second colon it reads the father of the creator of heaven and earth right expanding on this subject of the first colon so it would make it sound much like Psalm 134 and it would then imply that that first part of Genesis we would read as poetry narrative poetry much like Ugaritic narrative poetry So we can see that, and granted this is making a new philological claim on the reading of Et being father, but if we take that step then we can see it fitting very well within biblical literature and within an ancient Near Eastern understanding of the creation.

Yeah, and so in Egypt it would be et, and in Amorite it's atum, or etum, or I think it is.