The Royal God: Enthronement Festivals in Ancient Israel and Ugarit?

Critically tests Mowinckel's hypothesis about the 'enthronement festival of Yahweh' and asks whether this theory finds any support in the epic literature of Ugarit. Petersen tests Sigmund Mowinckel's classical hypothesis about the enthronement festival of Yahweh and especially whether this theory, as urged by the followers of Mowinckel, finds any support in the epic literature of Ugarit. A careful study of the two corpora of texts, the Old Testament Psalms and the Ugaritic Baal-cycle, together with a discussion of the methodology of the cultic interpretation, shows the weaknesses of the hypothesis. In the history of scholarship, the idea of an enthronement festival of Marduk has been arbitrarily transferred from Babylon to Jerusalem and hence to Ugarit with little basis in the relevant texts. In fact, the method of 'cultic interpretation' is to be rejected, since its circularity of argumentation determines the result of the analysis beforehand.