Dying and Rising Gods

The present book is a contribution to the study of the origins and development of the dying and rising god mythologem in the second millennium BCE. As outlined in the Introduction, since the publication of James G. Frazer's research towards the end of the nineteenth century, the scholarship has dealt extensively and continuously with the influential mythologem of the dying and rising god. The study follows this mythologem in its narrow definition (as adapted twenty years ago,...
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The present book is a contribution to the study of the origins and development of the dying and rising god mythologem in the second millennium BCE. As outlined in the Introduction, since the publication of James G. Frazer's research towards the end of the nineteenth century, the scholarship has dealt extensively and continuously with the influential mythologem of the dying and rising god. The study follows this mythologem in its narrow definition (as adapted twenty years ago, particularly by Tryggve N.D. Mettinger), aiming to fill a lacuna in previous studies on this topic. Its objective is to trace the mythologem's origins and its dissemination route amongst the ancient Near Eastern cultures. To this end, the study examines the earliest texts attesting to the mythologem in question, all from West Asia of the second millennium BCE, including Mesopotamia, Mari, Ugarit and another Northwest Semitic culture reflected in a Hittite text. As it turns out, along with the few early texts that describe the return from the netherworld of a god who had been killed, many others attest to a different sort of a mythologem; namely, the death of a god without his revival. The scholarship of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led many scholars through the present day to consider this variant as a part of the complex mythologem of a god dying and being resurrected. However, the extant evidence presented in this study demonstrates that the distribution of the revival concept in its early years was in fact limited. Moreover, influenced by early scholarship, many scholars regard the Mesopotamian god Dumuzi as the most dominant among the gods who had died and risen from the dead. As such, it is commonly argued that Dumuzi's qualities influenced the depiction of other gods, like Baal and later Adonis. However, the extant evidence discussed in this study disproves this assumption. While the concept of a rising god is hardly present in the numerous unearthed Mesopotamian texts, the sparse evidence originating in Levantine cultures seems to indicate an ongoing familiarity with the mythologem of the dying and rising god, whose protagonist in the second millennium BCE appears to be Baal the Storm God.