ABSTRACT
The present state of the scholarly assessment of Psalm 19, as with so many passages in the Bible and other ancient literatures, is inconclusive. The following discussion aims at addressing this problem, taking discussion further (though not pretending to exhaust it), and recovering as far as is possible a putative original context in which it played a liturgical role in the Jerusalem cult, whatever reassessments and reapplications may have occurred later in its history. This exercise is necessarily conjectural, intended to indicate the value of the controlled use of imagination and analogy in the reconstruction of a lost context. It makes use primarily of the Ugaritic material, which has long been recognized as a fruitful quarry in which to search for nuggets of the theological and ideological Grundlage which may be supposed to underlie the final, much reworked, text of the Hebrew Bible. Many biblical scholars show an excessive caution when faced with this material: this is no better than the excessive lack of caution which is sometimes claimed for the work of some ugaritologists who have ventured into the biblical field.1 Since most of the writers in the latter field were trained, or are experienced in, the former, a more considered judgment is deserved than is sometimes given for interdisciplinary work of the kind engaged in here. It is too easily forgotten that Hebrew thought did not simply spring fully armed from the brow of Yahweh, or from any other part of his body; rather does it have, unless it can be shown that it is a later development within Israelite or Judahite history, an ancient pedigree which is often greatly illumined by comparison with the broader Canaanite matrix from which it must have emerged, of which the Ugaritic texts provide the most considerable repertoire. In no sense is this to deny that caution must be used at every juncture, and that possibilities, and even probabilities, must never be taken for certainties. Since, however, there are few enough of the latter in biblical studies, there is no need to take this as a counsel of despair.
