POETRY
Their
overseas exploits and the gradual recovery of the material traces of their
voyages has been the focus of much research on the Phoenicians. From that
evidence, however, we will never be able to reconstruct more than a part of
their culture, for the Phoenicians were more than just good sailors and clever
traders. It is an irony, that almost none of the literature of the people who
gave us the alphabet, has been preserved. Fragments of their poetry have
survived in, for example, the biblical Song of Songs and in the Psalms. The
mountains are described as “a fountain that makes the gardens fertile, a well
of living water” (Song of Song 4:15). Even more evocative is the Phoenician
poem embedded in Psalm 104 which speaks of the birds making their nests in the
cedars which God planted and the streams breaking out of the ravines. In that
Psalm, the creator lives in a palace above the mountains – the thunder is his
voice, the clouds his chariot, and the winds his messengers. Those are the
Phoenician images that still survive in the religious consciousness of the
West.
There can
no longer be any doubt that the Bible has preserved some of the best in
Phoenician literature, especially lyric and gnomic poetry. Without the powerful
influence of the Canaanite literacy tradition, we should lack much of the
perennial appeal exerted by Hebrew poetic style and prosody, poetic imagery and
vivid description of natural phenomena. Through the Bible the entire civilized
world has fallen heir to Phoenician literary art.
See:
W.F.Albright, From Stone Age to Christianity, Baltimore , 1940.
And:
S.J.Mitchell Dahood gives a lot of examples of Phoenician poetry in the Bible
texts in his publication “The Phoenician contribution to Biblical Wisdom
Literature.” In the paper “The role of the Phoenicians in the interaction of
Mediterranean Civilizations” by W.A.Ward.
And: Edmond Jacob goes even further back in history, when he
points out the Ugaritic wisdom and the comparisons with the Bible in: “Ras
Sjamra – Ugarit
en het Oude Testament, Callenbach, Nijkerk, 1962.
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