The text of Ps. 110:3 is
undoubtedly corrupt and requires emendation. Here we shall discuss the
reference to dew. The passage in question can be read: mēreḥem šaḥar lēḵ keṭal yeliḏtîḵā, “go forth
from the womb of the dawn, I have given birth to you like the dew.” This
statement is addressed to the king of Judah, probably at his enthronement and
speaks of his birth—understood from the perspective of cultic ideology—in
mythological language. The question is how the king, the dew, and the dawn are
related. Widengren makes a radical proposal: the royal ceremony reflected in
Ps. 110 dates from the Canaanite period of Jerusalem. Citing the Ugaritic text
SS, he interprets v. 3 as follows: in KTU,
1.23, El begets the two deities Šaḥar and Šalem; the former (fem. according to
Widengren) can be identified with the dawn, the latter with sunset and also
with El Elyon of Jerusalem. Thus the Jerusalem king was thought of as the child
of these two divine figures and himself identified with the dew (Widengren
translates: “From the womb of the dawn, as
dew I have begotten you”). Bentzen has a different interpretation of the
prepositional phrase: “On holy mountains I have begotten him, from the womb, before the morning star and the dew.” It
is probably best to take keṭal
as nothing more than a simile, so that in its original (“Canaanite”) form the
passage means that the Jerusalem king is the child of El and Šaḥar, just as the
dew is the daughter of Baʿal (and the dawn Šaḥar?). In the royal cult of Israel
and in Ps. 110, these mythological notions are quite veiled (although Isa.
14:12 can be very direct in saying much the same thing about the Babylonian
king).
The names of two Judahite queens,
Abital and Hamutal (cf. the masc. name yhwṭl),
may contain the element ṭal, “dew.”
Usually, however, they are taken as aramaizing forms (ṭl = ṣl, “shadow”). (Benedikt Otzen, “טַל,” in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament,
ed. G. Johannes Botterweck and Helmer Ringgren, 17 vols. [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans,
1986], 5: 329-30)
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