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nuts, which were said to need rain to ripen, as well as olives, fruits, and gourds.78 There is also evidence that the marzeaḥ could have been held at other times of the year. But besides the fall festival, there was a clear connection with the Kotharot, the fertility goddesses emanating from the underworld, who here sat on twigs like birds. Indeed, it is quite probable that the rp’um were also pictured as birds (KTU 1.20: 11.2), like the aviary transformation that Enkidu underwent and perhaps somewhat influenced by Egyptian conventions of iconography as well.

The transformed dead could also arrive in great chariots, as befitted gods, with their banners flying. The same mode of conveyance was available to YHWH. Psalm 68:18 speaks of God’s myriads of chariots.79 When God left Jerusalem to follow his people into exile, he arrived in Babylon in a luxurious, two-axle chariot-cart, witnessed by the prophet Ezekiel who was watching in prophetic trance (Ezek 1). Indeed, the name of the vehicle, a mrkbt, in Ugaritic, derived from the word for chariot, anticipates the Rabbinic name for the branch of Jewish mysticism arising from speculation of Ezekiel’s vision, Merkabah mysticism.

Summary

EGYPT, MESOPOTAMIA, and Canaan all produced very sophisticated mythologies, which both acknowledged death and hoped for regeneration, and were known throughout the ancient world. It was mostly through Canaanite culture that Biblical religion received its knowledge of these wider traditions, at least in preexilic times. The Bible did not accept these mythological renditions of immortality uncritically, though the Biblical Israelites were certainly tempted by some of the promises it held. The prophets offer a long polemic against the horror of Canaanite religion, especially in its accusations of Canaanite child sacrifice and its ritual prostitution.

Nevertheless, a great many Canaanite images are to be found inside Israelite literature. It is in Canaanite religion that many of the literary images we normally understand as Israelite find their source. During the whole First Temple period (ca. 960-587 BCE) the battle raged, as we shall see, and the received Bible fought strongly against any articulate notion of an afterlife, beatific or not. The Bible, however, reaches its present form in the Second Temple period (515 BCE-70 CE). Just how much of the portrait of the First Temple period that we read in the Bible is actually historical is a moot point, as it is being filtered through the eyes of a much later and more sophisticated editor. It is quite possible to posit that the First Temple period was much closer to the culture of Canaan than the Bible paints it.80 On the other hand, when it comes to issues of the afterlife, we cannot fail to miss that there is not much archeological evidence that the Israelites regularly offered food or drink to their dead, as was characteristic of the Canaanite cults.81

In the end, however, after notions of the afterlife entered Israel, it was not the notion of contact with the living that persisted as a beatific reward after death. On the contrary, the vision of the afterlife of the Mesopotamian and Canaanite cities became more the model of hell, not heaven, in the Bible.

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The First Temple Period in Israel

THE YEARS of our life are threescore and ten,

or even by reason of strength fourscore;

yet their span is but toil and trouble;

they are soon gone, and we fly away.

Who considers the power of thy anger,

and thy wrath according to the fear of thee?

So teach us to number our days

that we may get a heart of wisdom. (Ps 90:10-12)

THIS PSALM OFFERS us sobering thoughts to ponder. The advice of the Bible is to value our fleeting time alive. Its advice is similar to Sidduri’s advice to Gilgamesh, though it straightforwardly implores God for the wisdom to fear Him. In these few verses we can see the deep relationship between Biblical literature and Mesopotamian notions of the afterlife. Save for the monotheistic invocations, these verses might have served nicely as the moral to The Gilgamesh Epic.