Bible Review

KTU 1.5 I 1. See Smith, “The Baal Cycle,” in Ugaritic Narrative Poetry, p. 141.

CAT 1.3 III 38-4. Mark S. Smith, Ugaritic Narrative Poetry, ed. Simon Parker, Society of Biblical Literature Writings from the Ancient World Series 9 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997), p. 111.

In truth, Leonard King’s Seven Tablets of Creation, or the Babylonian and Assyrian Legends Concerning the Creation of the World and of Mankind (vols. 1 and 2 [London: Luzac and Co., 1902]; see www.cwru.edu/univlib/preserve/Etana/KING.SEVENv1/KING.SEVENv1.html), published the same year as Delitzsch’s lecture, presented in even more detail what was known at the time, and integrated it into an all inclusive picture of the Bible’s dependence on Babylonian culture.

Friedrich Delitzsch, Babel and Bible: A Lecture on the Significance of Assyriological Research for Religion Delivered Before the German Emperor, trans. Thomas J. McCormack (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1902); and Babel and Bible: Two Lectures Delivered before Members of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft in the Presence of the Great Emperor, ed. C.H.W. Johns (Oxford, UK: Williams and Norgate; New York: G.P. Putnams’s Sons, 1903).

Tablet vii, lines 159-162.

See Victor A. Hurowitz, “Babylon in Bethel: A New Look at Jacob’s Dream,” in Teshurot LaAvishur: Studies in the Bible and Ancient Near East, in Hebrew and Semitic Languages; Festschrift Presented to Prof. Yitzhak Avishur on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. Michael Heltzer and Meir Malul (Tel Aviv-Jaffa: Archaeological Center Publications, 2004), pp. 103-109 [Hebrew]; English version soon to appear in Orientalism, Assyriology, and the Bible, ed. Steven W. Holloway (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, in preparation).

I associate the term ṣābitarkāti, “pinching the rear” with the Akkadian term ṣibit appi, “a pinch of the nose,” which means “sneeze” and Rabbinic Hebrew “sneeze from below” designating flatus.