The following comes from William M. Schniedewind, The Finger of the Scribe: How Scribes Learned to Write the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 95-98
The Prominence of Letter Writing
throughout the Ancient Near East
Ugaritic, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian corpuses include many
literary texts with narrated scenes of letters being sent and received.
Interestingly enough, one Mesopotamian account even explains the invention of
writing as resulting from the need to write letters accurately. In Enmerkar and
the Lord of Aratta, 1 Enmerkar ruled in Uruk as “priest-king” and forced the
ancient city of Aratta to submit to his rule. The lord of Aratta challenged
Enmerkar by sending him messengers who each posed a series of seemingly
insurmountable problems. Enmerkar in response dispatched messengers with the
solutions. Finally, in one particular instance, Enmerkar’s message became too
long for his messenger’s memory. To solve the problem, the priest-king invented
writing so that his messenger could take a written response—a letter—with him
to Aratta. This story nicely illustrates that the need to transmit ideas
between polities was foundational to the invention of writing itself, which
explains why learning to write letters was fundamental to scribal education.
The importance of letter writing was also part of the
literary canon in Egypt. For example, the well-known story “The Report of
Wenamun” (dated to ca. 1100 BCE) recounts the story of an unfortunate Egyptian
emissary traveling up the eastern Mediterranean coast in order to acquire
Lebanese timber for the bark of Amun-Re.2 Wenamun arrived in the Nile delta at
Tanis bringing “dispatches of Amun-Re, King of the Gods. They had them read out
before them and they said: ‘I will do, I will do as Amun-Re, King of
the Gods, our lord has said.’ ” With this literary dispatch couched in the
traditional messenger Sitz im Leben, he begins his perilous mission. After
making port in Dor, where he was robbed, Wenamun traveled to Byblos, where he
is unwelcome. According to the story, he sent and the prince of Byblos daily
messages back and forth for twenty-nine days: “Then the prince of Byblos
sent to me: ‘Leave my harbor!’ I sent to him, saying: ‘Where
shall I go? If you have a ship to carry me, let me be taken back to
Egypt!’ ” Letters were simultaneously being sent back and forth to
Egypt: “(The prince of Byblos) placed my letter[s] in the hand of his
messenger . . . and sent them to Egypt.” The entire
narrative thread of the story is carried by these types of messenger scenes and
the traditional formulations of letters.
Ugaritic literature also utilizes letters as a means of
carrying its literary narratives. For example, messenger scenes carry the
narrative in the Ugaritic epic poem known as The Baal Cycle (see KTU 1.1–6).3
The use of letter formulae are illustrated nicely in the account where Yamm’s
messengers arrive at the Great Assembly and frame the message as follows:
“Speak to the Bull, his Father, El: the message of Yamm” (line 33). This
is a standard formula of Ugaritic letters. And messengers, messages, and
messenger formulae are critical to the narrative. Although the beginning of
this particular epic is missing, when it picks up, El is sending messengers to
the goddess Anat. The narrative then recounts their journey to deliver El’s
message. El later sends messengers to the craftsman god, Koṯar-wa-Ḫasis. Then
the god Yamm returns messengers to El. The latter scene is clearly depicted and
can illustrate the way the story uses messengers to move the narrative thread
(KTU 1.2:i:11–17):
Yamm sends messengers, Ruler Naharu sends an embassy. They
rejoice . . .
Go, young servants, don’t delay, head for the Great Assembly,
to Mount Lalu. Do not bow down at El’s feet, Do not prostrate yourself before
the Great Assembly. Standing, make your speech, repeat your information. Speak
(rgm) to the Bull, my father, El, repeat to the Great Assembly. Message (tḥm)
of Yammu, your master, of your lord River [Naharu].
The narrative is framed by performative speech acts derived
from the reading of letters, even in other places where messengers and letters
are not specifically mentioned. The scene type of the messenger carrying a
letter to be read out loud before the recipient is deeply embedded into the
narrative poetry. Most revealing is the usage of technical terminology known
from the letter genre— namely, “message (tḥm) of Sender” and “speak (rgm) to
Recipient.” These are the exact terms from the many letters in the Ugaritic
corpus, and their repeated usage directly points to the role of the letter
genre in carrying the narrative thread. In sum, the social context of letters,
letter writing, and messengers has shaped Ugaritic narrative poetry
Likewise, the formula from the letter genre can be seen in
biblical narratives.4 For example, in the story of Jacob’s confrontation with
Esau on his return to the land, we read as follows in Gen 32:4–14:
Jacob sent messengers ahead to his brother Esau in the land
of Seir, the country of Edom, and instructed them as follows, “Thus shall you
say, ‘To my lord Esau, thus says your servant Jacob: I stayed with Laban
and remained until now; I have acquired cattle, asses, sheep, and male and
female slaves; and I send this message to my lord in the hope of gaining
your favor.’ ” The messengers returned to Jacob, saying, “We came to your brother
Esau; he himself is coming to meet you, and there are four hundred men with
him.” . . . Then after spending the night there, Jacob
took from what was at hand and sent presents for his brother Esau
In this narrative, we witness the oral Sitz im Leben from
which the written genre of letters arises. Messengers are sent and received.
Originally, these were oral performances (without the aid of letters), as
suggested by the Mesopotamian etiology of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta. The
oral conventions of messengers and messenger performances actually become
encoded in the letter genre itself. For example, “thus says your servant Jacob”
is an oral convention that was textualized in the letter genre. It is often
difficult to know whether physical letters were actually sent, as in the above
narrative. The oral conventions, however, become fixed in the letter genre The
story of David and Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11 also illustrates the role of
messengers and letters. It begins with David sending “messengers” to fetch
Bathsheba (verse 4). When she becomes pregnant, she “sends word” to David
(verse 5). We may assume (though it is not explicit) that this part of the
story utilized oral messengers although the private nature of the interaction
might suggest written letters. But the story quickly moves explicitly to
messengers carrying letters. David sends messengers to Joab to recall Uriah
from the battle. When Uriah refuses to sleep with his wife, David conceives of
his plot using a letter: “David wrote a letter to Joab, which he sent with
Uriah” (verse 14). Joab receives the letter, and he fulfills David’s plot,
resulting in the death of Uriah. Joab then sends messengers back to David with
the news. The story ends with David sending the messengers back to Joab, implicitly
signaling his approval of Joab’s role in the plot (verse 25). An actual written
letter in this story is mentioned only in verse 14, that is, when the message
needs to be concealed from Uriah (who is also the messenger). Many other
biblical stories utilize messengers and letters,5 and it is clear that the
setting and literary genre were widely known in ancient Israelite culture.
Notes
for the Above
1. See COS 1.170. This text also has interesting parallels to
Genesis 11 and the idea of “one language”; see Thorkild Jacobsen, The Harps
That Once (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 275–319.
2. For a convenient translation, see Miriam Lichtheim, “The
Report of Wenamun,” in COS, 1.41.
3. For an exhaustive treatment, see Smith, The Ugaritic Baal
Cycle: Volume I and Mark Smith and Wayne Pitard, The Ugaritic Baal Cycle,
Volume II, Introduction with Text, Translation and Commentary of KTU/CAT
1.3–1.4 (VTSup 114; Leiden: Brill, 2009).
4. See John Greene and Samuel Meier, The Role of the
Messenger and Message in the Ancient Near East (BJS 169; Atlanta,
GA: Scholars Press, 1989), 77–136; Dirk Schwiderski, Handbuch des
nordwestsemitischen Briefformulars: Ein Betrag zur Echtheitsfrage des
aramäischen Briefe des Esrabuches (BZAW 295; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000),
323–27.
5. See Greene and Meier, The Role of the Messenger and
Message in the Ancient Near East, 77–133. Also see examples in 2Kgs 5:5–7,
10:1–7, 19:14, 20:12; Jer 29:1–30; Esth 9:26–29; Ezra 4–7; Neh 2:8, 6:5; 2Chr
21:12.
Further
Reading
