Ugaritic Data Bank: The Texts

The Ugaritic Data Bank presents the texts excavated since 1928 at Ugarit (present day Ras-Shamra on the Syrian coast), a cosmopolitan port city in the Late Bronze age. Written in alphabetic cuneiform, the texts are undeniably important for illuminating the language and culture of the entire Bible. Ugaritic represent an older member of the Northwest Semitic family of languages and is thus linguistically related to Hebrew. In addition, the Ugaritic texts are primary witnesses to Canaanite religion, containing literary and mythological texts concerning Baal and other figures familiar to us primarily and in abbreviated form only from the Hebrew scriptures.

The texts are presented in Latin transliteration with contextual data, bibliography, and copious comments. The editors have documented variant readings by different publications so that one can easily compare different scholarly readings and reconstructions of these difficult texts. As extrabiblical witnesses go, Ugaritic is, by dint of geographic and temporal proximity, rivalled in importance only by the Hebrew inscriptions of the Iron Age and the Hebrew and Aramaic of the later Dead Sea Scrolls.

Ugaritic Data Bank: The Texts
• Editors: Jesus-Luis Cunchillos, Juan-Pablo Vita, Jose-Ángel Zamora (Madrid, 2003)
• Translators: Alfonso Lacadena, Alberto Castro
• Publisher: Laboratorio De Hermeneumática (2003)