The Ancient Near Eastern Background of Genesis 49:25
Patterns of Blessing
Jacob’s blessing of Joseph in Genesis 49:24-26 forms one section of a longer poem he delivers to his sons on his deathbed, addressing each in turn with a short oracle about his tribe’s future. The Joseph section is unusually concentrated in divine titles and paired images, even within that larger poem. Each pair, sky and deep, breasts and womb, mountains and hills, is assigned to a divine source. The names invoked include several that lie outside the standard divine name of later Israelite worship, a cluster that runs through “the God of your father,” “the Bull of Jacob,” “the Shepherd,” “the Rock of Israel,” “the Sovereign God,” and “Shaddai.” Together, these features suggest that the poem may preserve an older blessing tradition that the surrounding Torah narrative has drawn on rather than created.
But his bow will remain steady, and his hands will be skillful; because of the hands of the Powerful One of Jacob, because of the Shepherd, the Rock of Israel, because of the God of your father, who will help you, because of the Sovereign God, who will bless you with blessings from the sky above, blessings from the deep that lies below, and blessings of the breasts and womb. The blessings of your father are greater than the blessings of the eternal mountains or the desirable things of the age-old hills. They will be on the head of Joseph and on the brow of the prince of his brothers. (Genesis 49:24-26)1
Texts from Ugarit, a Late Bronze Age coastal city in what is now northern Syria, give the closest surviving parallels to this kind of blessing. The Aqhat tablet preserves a paternal blessing in which the storm god Baal asks El, the chief god of Ugarit, to grant the childless Danil a son. Invoking El as both father and creator, the request follows a formula that recurs elsewhere in Ugaritic literature, where appeals of this kind take a standard shape.2
you must surely bless him, Bull El my father, you must surely give a blessing to him, O Creator-of-creatures, so that he may beget a son in his house, a scion in the midst of his palace. (KTU 1.17.18)3
The two passages share more than language, since both treat a paternal authority as the channel through which fertility is granted, and both layer divine titles to amplify the appeal. The Joseph blessing keeps the same structure of address and request, using divine names that line up with the Ugaritic ones, El as father, El as helper, El as the source of children. The Ugaritic poem does not depend on the Hebrew text, while direct borrowing in the opposite direction is also unlikely. What looks plausible is a shared inheritance, since the literary culture of the eastern Mediterranean coast was already mature in the Late Bronze Age and continued to shape Israelite poetry well after Ugarit itself had been destroyed.4
Let me invoke the gracious gods, both gluttonous from birth, who suck at the nipples of Athirat’s breasts, from the paps of Rahmay, Shapsh counts their tendrils, (KTU 1.23.35)5
The next overlap involves the breast and womb imagery in the Joseph blessing. The Ugaritic ritual text describes newborn divine children nursing at the breasts of two named goddesses, Athirat, El’s wife in Ugaritic literature, and Rahmay, her recurring companion. The Hebrew poem keeps the same imagery of breasts and womb but credits the blessings to a male deity without naming a goddess. A similar pairing of a Hebrew deity with a goddess by name shows up on a ninth-century jar inscription from Kuntillet Ajrud, where the formula is given openly with Asherah,6 which weakens the case for treating the Genesis usage as decoration alone. The poem fits inside a wider regional practice in which fertility was credited to a divine couple, with the Hebrew version keeping the image while leaving out the name.7
she will bear Yasib the heir: he will drink the milk of Athirat; he will drain the breast of Virgin Rahmay; the suckling of goddesses. (Legend of Keret 5.6)8
The Legend of Keret, a Ugaritic narrative poem about a king looking for an heir, offers a third parallel, this time for the social meaning of the imagery. There Yasib, the promised heir of king Keret, is nursed by goddesses as a sign of his royal status, within a longer blessing pronounced over the king and his future son. The same blessing language used in ceremonial and royal Ugaritic poetry is used in the Joseph blessing, with the resemblance strongest in verse 25, the same point where the Hebrew poem leans heavily on these archaic titles.9 The concern over leadership runs through Genesis 49, with verse 26 calling Joseph the prince of his brothers within a chapter that repeatedly weighs which son and which tribe will inherit royal status.10
None of this outright proves that the Joseph blessing borrows directly from any particular Ugaritic poem. Surviving Ugaritic texts come from a single archive, while a great deal of writing from neighboring cultures in the second and early first millennium has likely been lost. What can be said with reasonable confidence is that the Joseph blessing belongs to a tradition of patriarchal blessing common in the ancient Near East, with its common titles, images, and social functions. The Hebrew version has been adjusted in several visible ways, the goddess names are no longer overt, the gifts are credited to one source, and the surrounding prose reshapes the speech into Jacob’s testament to his sons. Those adjustments matter for how the final form should be read, even when the underlying patterns are not native to the Genesis narrative.
The implications of this comparison go beyond the literary and into the shape of how Israel worshiped its God. If the blessing of Joseph preserves something of an earlier blessing tradition shared with neighboring peoples, then the literary and theological world of Genesis was never completely sealed off from its surroundings. The image of Israelite worship that emerges from these parallels looks more like editorial work rather than invention from nothing.
Smith, Mark S. “The Blessing God and Goddess in Early Israel,” in Enigmas and Images: Studies in Honor of Tryggve N. D. Mettinger, eds. Göran Eidevall and Blaženka Scheuer (p. 215) Eisenbrauns, 2011
Cross, Frank Moore Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel Harvard University Press, 1973
Smith, Mark S. The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (p. 78) Eerdmans, 2002
Day, John Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan Sheffield Academic Press, 2000
de Hoop, Raymon. Genesis 49 in Its Literary and Historical Context (p. 354) Brill, 1999
Desmond, Alexander, T. “Royal Expectations in Genesis to Kings: Their Importance for Biblical Theology,” Tyndale Bulletin 49.2 (p. 206) 1998
Excellent article!
I thought Shaddai was feminine? In Genesis, El Shaddai is only mentioned in contexts of fertility, and I remember reading that was due to Shaddai being a fertility goddess of sorts.