Stories from Ancient Canaan

Michael D. Coogan and Mark S. Smith are scholars of ancient Near Eastern religion, and this Westminster John Knox Press volume, now in its second edition, is their annotated English translation of the Ugaritic Baal Cycle and related texts recovered from the site of Ras Shamra. Its strength is that it renders a genuinely fragmentary and difficult cuneiform corpus into readable English with scholarly annotation explaining where the tablets are damaged or the reading uncertain, rather than smoothing over the gaps. Its limit is precisely that underlying fragmentation, the Baal Cycle survives incomplete, so any specific plot detail this translation supplies where the tablets are broken represents scholarly reconstruction rather than certain original text, a distinction the annotations themselves are the place to check.