Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [70]
The marzeaḥ or marziḥ feasts did serve to define who the living kin were and hence who was included in family intimacy, by including the exalted ancestors with the invited guests. The mortals gave the offerings and libations at these feasts while the gods and exalted dead received them. Apparently they were raucous, even orgiastic, as well.68
It may be that the ending of the Aqhat myth provides us with the ultimate significance of the Ba’al myth for Canaanite notions of the afterlife. Aqhat refused ’Anat’s promise of immortality because it was not actually a return to life:
Ask life, O hero Aqhat
Ask life and I will give it thee
Immortality and I will freely grant it thee,
I will make thee number years with Ba’al,
Even with the sons of ’El wilt thou tell months,
As Ba’al, even as he lives and is feted,
Lives and is feted and they give him to drink,
Singing and chanting before him
Even so will I give thee life, O Hero Aqhat.
What ’Anat apparently offers was the chance to be feted at the marziḥ, not actual afterlife. He was like Ba’al, the head of the feast, but he was not a god and so he did not actually come back to life. Instead, he was feted, toasted, praised with chanting and singing, and commemorated. This seems to mean that his “spirit” could be recalled from the afterlife to appear at the feast. Although he rejected this offer at the beginning of the story, this is probably what he got at the end.
The Canaanite Afterlife
WHEN THE CANAANITES died, their vital element, called a npš (like Hebrew: nefesh, usually translated as “soul,” or “spirit”) was thought to leave the body. Alternatively, Ugaritic texts speak of the going out of the “wind” or “breath” (rḥ, like Hebrew: ruaḥ). The word becomes nbš in Phoenician and is sometimes paralleled with the term brlt. Those scholars who maintain that Israel got its notion of a beatific afterlife from Canaan must come to terms with the fact that afterlife in these related groups of cultures was not particularly beatific or optimistic.69 So we should not expect that Israel, in this early period of its existence, would concentrate on the pleasures of living with God after death. It is not hard to see that in envisioning the quality of a person that survives death, the Canaanites, like the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians, were also making judgments about what was important and transcendent in human life; they were finding ways of describing the meaning and final purpose of the earthly “self.” Eventually, that would have to have consequences for the way they thought of their earthly existence. This will be the subject of a future chapter.
After the “soul” or “shade” left the body, life did not totally cease but continued on in another place-the kingdom of Mot (“Death,” Hebrew: mavet), where it lived in the same kind of weak form that we saw in Mesopotamia. This is no surprise since the Canaanites practiced interment as well and it makes sense to think that people who bury the dead would have a tendency to view the dead as residing in the earth. In Canaan traditions, there is no proof of reward or punishment of the dead in any Jewish or Christian sense, though certain transformations of the dead could be effected ritually.
Only the gods were exempt from death and not all of them were, as most cultures have notions of older gods who were killed and supplanted by the present pantheon. Even the present gods were not entirely free of death, as Osiris, Inanna, and Ba’al and the other gods symbolizing some annual rhythm in nature have shown us. They form what is sometimes referred to as the “Dying and Rising gods” of the ancient Near East. This pattern may be more evident to Christians than it was to the ancients.70 For one thing, no real resurrection is promised for their devotees. But there are definitely gods whose lives, deaths, and rebirths informed the ancients about the seasonal agricultural patterns in which they lived, linking them to the cycle of human birth and death.71 Indeed,