Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [71]
But, in most contexts, immortality was a key feature of a Mesopotamian and Canaanite god, even those who visited the underworld. They all survived their ordeals. But we do not; humans have to die. This is one of the lessons of yet another story, the Kirta legend, named for a legendary king of Khubar whose children thought him to be immortal because he was king.
That assumption prompted the king’s children to ask their father: “Ah father! Should you die like mortal men? / Is not Kirta the son of ’El, the child of the Benevolent and Saint?” In spite of whatever may have been claimed in the enthronement rituals of Canaanite kings, it was still a naive question, even offensive to the gods. The irony is that we all die and only a child would think we are gods. But the story also parodies the pretensions of royalty and perhaps even specifically the Egyptian funerary cult.
It was the job of the children to care for the family’s deceased and make sure that the proper rituals were maintained. It was the lineage that must survive, so a person’s death was socialized into the memory of the lineage. As the Kirta legend tells us, among the duties a son owed to his father was that of supporting him in his drunkenness when returning from the commemorations of the dead. It turns out that this was a ritual concern because the dead were buried with a “wake” and later commemorated with a great drinking party called a marziḥ or a marzeaḥ, as the word would be pronounced in Hebrew.
Marzih or marzeaḥ: The Canaanite Cult of the Dead
AS EVERYWHERE in the Middle East and many other places, the dead were buried with grave goods. The heads of the dead were often painted with glaze. Sometimes corpses were deliberately disfigured or dismembered; for instance, at Jericho not only do we find bright, colored head-painting, we also occasionally find that one or more arms or legs of the corpses were removed-ostensibly to render them harmless in any future hauntings. Many archeological remains show evidence of repeated offerings. Sometimes a large storage jar for this purpose stood at the entry to the tomb. In other places a jar was buried in such a way as to provide an underground depository and occasionally even a pipe was used for offerings to be accessed from the tomb below.
In Ugarit (Ras Shamra), family tombs were found connected to the house by a stone shaft, with evidence that they were used over long periods of time and reused with the prior remains pushed aside. Children were sometimes buried at the entrance to the tomb. There are even cultic halls above some great tombs, where offering jars could be filled and other rites to various gods could be performed. It was also the location of the grave-marker or stele, and evidently a herb garden for marjoram (za’aar) used in rituals for remembrance of the clan.72
Besides the funerary cult, there is considerable literary evidence in Canaan of the veneration, feeding, appeasing, and honoring of the transformed dead at regular intervals and whenever their help might be sought.73 The basic goal of the cult of the dead seems to be to establish and continue a positive relationship between the dead and the living, in some sense to keep the dead part of the family.74 At Ugarit, the dead evidently participated in the fall New Year festival, celebrating the return of Ba’al with the fall rains. This act of Ba’al is described in KTU 1.21:11.5-6. Although the text is damaged, it can be restored by supplying the conventional parallels: “Then he will heal you/the Shepherd will give life to you.” The words were addressed to what seem to be a group of privileged, immortalized or specially commemorated dead, called rp’um (cognate with Hebrew refa’im), possibly vocalized as rapi’uma. Many scholars find the Hebrew pronunciation the most convenient since pronunciation of Ugaritic words is speculative.
In any event, the connection between