Canaanite Literary Culture Before the Bible, a View from the Canaanite Amarna Letters

The present study highlights how the Canaanite Amarna Letters offer unique insight into Canaanite literary culture in the Late Bronze Age. The letters represent the diplomatic acumen of scribes writing letters for local elites that were sent to the Egyptian court in the mid-fourteenth century BCE. Yet they also preserve the earliest evidence of Canaanite literary forms and compositional practices. The letters include memorized formulae and expressions, word pairs, poetic devices, and the use of repetition to frame poetic units, which are common in the practices of later first-millennium scribes working in this same region, including those who wrote the Hebrew Bible. The letters also offer insight into the ways that the scribes combined memorized units into new narrative contexts. Such features added literary texture to the letters, but also contributed to their rhetorical aims. While some poetic passages in the letters may be novel compositions, there is also evidence that literary forms and expressions were integral to Canaanite scribal education by the Amarna period. The Canaanite Letters therefore set an important precedent for literary creation, and for the scribes’ bricolage practices in the process of creating new diplomatic letters.