Guest post- Ugaritic and the LDS temple

This is a guest post from The Monk, of Mormon Monastery, a repository of sorts for temple-related bibliography and a LDS Temple FAQ/essays.

I have a favorite passage from Ugaritic literature. (Nitsav has written briefly on Ugaritic before. See that post if you need a primer.) I’m just geeky enough that I’d like a nice alphabetic cuneiform scroll* of it framed on my wall. Though everyone has heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls, few know the Ugaritic texts which are ironically far more important for understanding the Old Testament.

Below is my translation and brief commentary regarding this passage, which comes from the Ba’lu** epic, one of the lengthier texts from Ugarit. It consists of a message from Ba’lu, in highly repetitive poetic parallelism. I tried to arrange it to bring this out, but the formatting keeps disappearing.