Before the Church · c. 1400 BC
The Tale of Aqhat
Ilimilku the scribe
What it is
Danel, a righteous man who judges the case of the widow and the orphan at the gate, is granted a son. The goddess Anat covets the boy's bow, offers him immortality for it, is refused with the answer that death is the lot of all men, and has him killed. The land dries up for seven years.
Why it lasted
Its hero Danel is almost certainly the ancient righteous figure Ezekiel names beside Noah and Job — which means Ezekiel's readers knew a Canaanite legend better than they knew the book of Daniel, still centuries away.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
Public domain and free to read in full, though not held here. The archives below have it.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
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