Danel

For six nights an old man sleeps on the floor of a shrine in nothing but a loincloth. Each day he has set out food for the gods to eat and poured drink for them, and each night he has taken off his robe, lain down and waited. He has no son. On the seventh day, the storm god Baal takes pity and carries the matter to El, the father of the gods.

The man is Danel, and almost everything known of him comes from three clay tablets dug out of the ruins of Ugarit, at Ras Shamra on the coast of Syria, in the first seasons of the French excavation around 1930. They were written in the fourteenth century BC by a scribe who signed his work, Ilimilku, and first published by Charles Virolleaud in 1936. The poem is usually named for the son, Aqhat. The father is on stage for more of it.

His name means that El is judge. The poem gives him two fixed titles, man of Rapiu and man of the Harnamite, and nobody is certain what either means. Rapiu may be a god of healing or of the honoured dead. Harnam may be a town. The tablets never plainly call Danel a king, though he has a house with a court, a wife named Danatiya, servants, and a seat among the leading men.

What he lacks is an heir, and when Baal pleads for him the poem spells out what an heir is for. A good son sets up a stone for his father’s ancestors in the sanctuary. He silences the people who speak against his father and drives off those who trouble him. He takes his father by the hand when the old man has had too much wine, and carries him home when he is full of it. He eats his father’s share at the temple feasts. He plasters the roof when the rains have turned it to mud, and washes the clothes when they are dirty. El hears the list, takes his cup in his hand and gives the blessing. Danel’s face lights up. He puts his feet on the footstool and laughs out loud. Then he goes home and feasts the Kotharat, the goddesses of conception and birth, for seven days, and sits down to count the months.

The boy is born in a gap in the clay. When the text picks up again he is nearly grown, and Danel is at work. This is the ordinary day the poem keeps returning to: the old man seated at the entrance of the gate, beside the heaps of grain on the threshing floor, with dust and chaff in the air, hearing the widow’s complaint and deciding the orphan’s case. He lifts his eyes and sees someone coming a long way off. It is Kothar-wa-Hasis, the craftsman of the gods, carrying a bow. Danel calls to his wife to dress a lamb. She feeds the god and gives him drink, he leaves the bow behind as a gift, and Danel hands it to Aqhat.

It is a very good bow. The goddess Anat sees it at a feast and wants it. She offers silver and gold. Then she offers to make Aqhat immortal. He answers that she is lying, that every man goes grey and dies and so will he, and adds that bows are for warriors and asks what a woman would want with one. This is not a wise thing to say to the most violent goddess in the pantheon. Anat goes to El and threatens him until he lets her have her way. She sends a hired fighter, Yatpan, in among a flock of vultures circling over the young man as he sits down to eat. Yatpan strikes him on the head, and his breath goes out of him like wind.

Danel does not know. He knows only what he can see. He is at the gate again, judging, when his daughter Pughat looks up. She is the girl who carries the water, who brushes the dew from the barley, who knows the paths of the stars. She sees the grain drying on the stalk and vultures wheeling over her father’s house, and she begins to cry. Danel tears his robe. He calls on the clouds for rain and gets none, and says what is coming: seven years without Baal, eight without the Rider on the Clouds, no dew, no showers. He has Pughat saddle a donkey and rides out through the fields. He finds one green shoot in the cracked ground and takes it in his arms and kisses it, and says he hopes the hand of Aqhat will bring it in to the barn.

Then the messengers arrive.

What follows is the strangest scene in the poem. Danel looks at the vultures overhead and asks Baal to break their wings. They drop at his feet. He cuts them open and looks for fat and bone, finds none, and asks Baal to mend them, and they fly off. He does the same with Hargab, the father of the vultures. Nothing. He does it a third time with Samal, their mother, and inside her he finds what is left of his son. He weeps, and buries it. He curses any bird that disturbs the grave, and then goes to the three places nearest the killing and curses each of them in turn.

He goes home, and the wailing women come into his court. They stay seven years. In the seventh year he sends them away, makes a sacrifice and burns incense that rises to the sky. Pughat asks for his blessing to go and kill the man who killed her brother. He gives it. She washes, reddens her skin with dye from the sea, puts on a fighter’s clothes and a blade, and a woman’s dress over the top. At sunset she walks into the camp of Yatpan, who takes her for a serving girl, drinks what she pours, and boasts about the hand that struck down Aqhat. The tablet breaks off there. Nobody knows how it ended.

Danel has no strength of his own beyond a clear head and a reputation for fairness. His power is that the gods listen to him. His prayer gets him a child, his word brings birds out of the air and puts them back, and his curse can hold off the rain or blight a town. The limits are harsh. He cannot protect his son from a goddess. He cannot see the killing, or bring the boy back, and it is his daughter who must go and do what an old man at the gate cannot. Baal answers him at once about vultures and not at all about death.

His name outlasted the city, which burned around 1200 BC. Six centuries later the prophet Ezekiel, speaking of men so righteous they could save themselves from a doomed land, names Noah, Job and a third figure whose name is spelled in the old Hebrew text without its usual letter, as Danel. Later he mocks the prince of Tyre for thinking himself wiser than the same man. Many scholars, John Day among them, hold that Ezekiel meant the old judge of Canaanite story and not the young exile of the Book of Daniel. Others, such as Harold Dressler, argue that a worshipper of Baal is an odd hero for a Hebrew prophet. The Book of Jubilees gives a Danel as the father-in-law of Enoch. Today a crater on Ganymede carries the name.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Danel in Canaanite mythology?

Danel is a just elder and judge in the Ugaritic poem of Aqhat, written on clay tablets at Ugarit in Syria in the fourteenth century BC. He is the father of Aqhat and Pughat, and his name means “El is judge.”

What happens to Danel in the story of Aqhat?

Danel has no son, so he spends seven days making offerings and sleeping in the shrine until Baal and El grant him one. The son, Aqhat, is given a bow made by the god Kothar-wa-Hasis, refuses to give it to the goddess Anat, and is killed on her orders. Danel finds the remains inside a vulture, buries them and mourns for seven years.

Is Danel the same person as the biblical Daniel?

Danel is not the Daniel of the lions’ den, who belongs to the Babylonian exile. Many scholars think Danel is the figure the prophet Ezekiel names beside Noah and Job, because the Hebrew text of Ezekiel spells the name as Danel. John Day argues for that link and Harold Dressler argues against it.

What do the titles of Danel mean?

The poem calls Danel the man of Rapiu and the man of the Harnamite. Neither title is fully understood. Rapiu may be a god of healing or of the honoured dead, and Harnam may be the name of a town.

How does the story of Danel end?

The ending is lost because the last tablet is broken. After seven years of mourning, Danel blesses his daughter Pughat, who disguises herself and enters the camp of Yatpan, the man who killed Aqhat. The text stops while she is pouring his wine.

Related Entries

El, Baal, Anat, Hadad, Asherah, Astarte, Mot, Yam (Yamm), Lotan, Dagon, Noah, Abraham