Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [69]
When Aqhat grew up, Dan’el received a bow and arrows from the god Kothar-wa-Ḥasis, after which more feasting ensued, showing Dan’el’s gratitude and hospitality. Dan’el then transferred the prized weapons to his son with a blessing.
The plot thickened when the love and war goddess ’Anat coveted the weapons and attempted to bargain with Aqhat for the bow and arrows:
Hear now, O hero Aqhat,
Ask silver and I will give it thee,
Even gold and I will freely bestow it on thee,
But give me thy bow,
Let the Sister of the Prince take thine arrows.
When this failed, she offered immortality. Evidently, ’Anat had promised something which everyone knew she could not deliver. She was depicted much like Inanna, with whom the savvy hero Gilgamesh refused marriage. Aqhat replied that he was not fooled by the offer:
Fabricate not, O virgin;
To a hero, thy lives are trash
As for mortal man, what does he get as his latter end?
What does mortal man get as his inheritance?
Glaze will be poured out on my head,
Glaze will be poured out on my head,
Even plaster on my pate,
And the death of all men will I die,
Yes, I will surely die.63
The story concentrates on the burial practice of glazing and plastering the head of the corpse, which we, indeed, find in excavated graves of the area, even as far south as Jericho.
’Anat received ’El’s permission to punish Prince Aqhat. But the punishment got out of control. One of the divine thugs, Yatpan, disguised as a hunting falcon, actually killed Aqhat, instead of merely wounding him. As a result, the much envied bow was lost in the sea. As soon as Dan’el found out about the death, the crops failed and drought started. Most of the body was eaten by birds of prey. Dan’el gathered up the few remaining parts of Aqhat, buried them, beginning and completing a seven year period of mourning. Aqhat’s sister Pagat then asked for a blessing from her father to complete the vengeance against Yatpan.
The scene for the vengeance visited upon Yatpan was a drinking feast, a marzeaḥ or marziḥ, which was the major rite of remembrance in this society and, in important ways, the equivalent of the kispu offerings of Mesopotamia. But the goddess ’Anat was also clearly depicted in the wrong for her behavior. So she was frequently depicted as the patroness of these feasts, in seeming compensation for her bad behavior. In some way, this long involved story of give-and-take underlies the script for the Canaanite marziḥ commemorative banquet.64
This entire episode is reminiscent of the death of Enkidu after Gilgamesh insulted Ishtar by refusing marriage and later killing Humbaba as well as the sacred bull of heaven. Here, as in many Canaanite myths, that death had climatic consequences. It also has within it the ancient Near East notion that when we seek immortality we risk offending the gods. We should not even think that we can achieve immortality because it will result in running afoul of the gods in horrendous ways. On the other hand, with the appropriate rituals, the dead could be commemorated and their status in the underworld improved. In these stories and in the rituals that dramatized them, are contained notions of misinvocation, equivocation, insult, and reversal.65 The dead could be given relief from their status but never raised back to life in this world.
David P. Wright, in his study of the Aqhat epic, invokes the work of Mary Douglas with some justification, though perhaps he overplays the parallel with his analogy of dinner parties in Great Britain;66 at least I have not attended any dinner parties that approximate the Canaanite example. The fact is that drinking parties and meals in general often do have a specific ritual character, with the etiquette representing a limited code, just as Mary Douglas pointed out for the cultures of Africa, ancient Israel, Australia, and Great Britain. If the different cultures do not send the same messages with