Pidray, Tallay and Arsay

Summary

Pidray, Tallay and Arsay are the three daughters of Baal on the tablets of Ugarit. The tablets tell no story of their own about them, but they appear whenever Baal's house and rain are spoken of: their father looks at them at his feast, complains that they have no house because he has none, fears that they will escape through the window, and takes two of them with him when he goes down to death.

In the Baal Cycle the gods hold a feast for Baal on Mount Saphon; a minstrel of beautiful voice rises and sings of Baal in the uttermost parts of Saphon, and Baal looks at his daughters: at Pidray, "daughter of Light", and at Tallay, "daughter of Shower". Then he sends his messengers to his sister Anat, telling them to begin with "the desire of Pidray daughter of Light, the affection of Tallay daughter of Shower, the love of Arsay daughter of Yaʿbdr". When he asks for a house worthy of his kingship, his complaint is repeated by his messengers, by Anat and by Athirat until El consents: El has a home, his sons have shelters, Athirat has a home, Pidray, Tallay and Arsay have homes, and Baal has none. When Kothar-wa-Khasis has built the palace and proposes a window, Baal refuses: lest Pidray daughter of Light escape and Tallay daughter of Shower flee, and Yamm, El's beloved, rise and insult him. Later he accepts the window. At the end of the cycle Mot orders him to come down: take your clouds, your winds, your lightnings, your rains, your seven lads and your eight boars, take with you Pidray daughter of Light and Tallay daughter of Shower, and go down into the house of the earth; and Baal obeys. Arsay is not among those he takes.

The idea their appearances turn on is that the three daughters are what the house of rain holds: the mist that comes down in clear weather, dew and showers, and the earth they fall on. If Baal has no house, they have none; if the window is opened, he fears they will go out through it; when he goes down to death, mist and dew go down with him and the land dries. Arsay is not taken because she is already where he is going: Wyatt says her name is from the earth in the sense of the underworld, and the Ugaritic pantheon list equates her with Allatum, that is, Ereshkigal, queen of the underworld. The project's Canaanite rereading essay reads Baal as the winter rain and his palace on Saphon as the mountain where snow and rain collect; the essay does not mention the daughters, but its reading puts them in place as the forms of water that house keeps. The story belongs to the dying and rising god and to the descent to the underworld. Wyatt, KTU 1.3 III 8, note 39, p. 77.

We read the names in the Arabic tongue like this. All three end in the same adjectival -y; remove it and ṭl remains in Tallay, arṣ in Arsay and pdr in Pidray. Tallay is from Arabic ṭall, which Lane gives as the lightest and weakest of rain, or the dew that descends from the sky in cloudless weather. Arsay is from arḍ, earth, Ugaritic ṣ answering Arabic ḍ in this very word. Their epithets agree: Tallay is the daughter of rb, Arabic rabāb, which Lane gives as white clouds or clouds hanging beneath other clouds, and Hebrew rəbîbîm, the copious showers that make the land fertile; Pidray is the daughter of ar, Arabic ary, which the Muḥkam explains as the dew that falls on trees and grass and sticks to them, while ary is also honey. Pidray herself is harder: her p is Arabic f, so her name is fidr, and Lane gives fidra as a compact piece of flesh, while Hebrew peder is the suet of the burnt offering, the sense by which Wyatt renders her name "Fatty". On this reading, proposed on the method, she is the richness and fatness of the land beside her sisters dew and earth, as Isaac's blessing joins "the dew of heaven and the fatness of the earth". The limits of the reading are set out under the linguistic root.

Linguistic Root

Tallay and Arsay

The final -y of all three names is adjectival, as Wyatt says of Arsay, "epithetal from ars", earth. So Tallay is "she of the dew" and Arsay "she of the earth". Ugaritic ṭ is Arabic ṭ, and Ugaritic ṣ answers Arabic ḍ in arḍ, as it does in Hebrew ʾereṣ. Brown, Driver and Briggs give Hebrew ṭal as night-mist or dew, note that Arabic has it for light rain and dew, and cite Isaac's "dew of heaven". Wyatt says the earth in Arsay's name is the underworld, and that the pantheon list equates her with Allatum, the Babylonian goddess of the underworld.

Daughter of Shower and daughter of Light

Wyatt renders rb "Shower". Hebrew has rəbîbîm, which Brown, Driver and Briggs give as copious showers causing fertility, and Deuteronomy 32:2 sets it beside dew in one verse: "My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distil as the dew, as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as the showers upon the grass." In Arabic rabāb is cloud. Ar Wyatt renders "Light", noting that Astour took it as "dawn", Pardee as "dew" and de Moor as "honey dew". Arabic joins the last two in one word: ary is honey, ary al-nadā is the dew that falls on trees and grass and sticks to them and abounds, and ary al-samāʾ is what the wind drives and pours down little by little. The daughter of ar is the daughter of the dew that clings to plants in the morning.

Pidray

For pdr Wyatt gives two views: "Fatty", by Hebrew peder, and "Cloudy", after Milik and Astour; he rejects "Thunder" and "Lightning". Brown, Driver and Briggs give peder as the suet of the burnt offering, occurring only three times. Semitic p is Arabic f, so the root is f-d-r, and Lane gives fidra as a compact piece of flesh-meat, a piece of anything, a lump of dates. Pidray would be "she of the fat", a reading proposed on the method. Its limit is that Arabic f-d-r is not used of land or rain, and Hebrew peder is the fat of the victim, not the richness of the field, so joining her to "the fatness of the earth" in Isaac's blessing is a joining of sense, since the blessing uses another word. Wyatt also notes that the pantheon list equates her with the Hurrian goddess Hebat, and that Akkadian Pidriya is an epithet of Ishtar, so the name may come from outside Ugaritic.

Yaʿbdr

Arsay's epithet is yʿbdr. Wyatt takes it as an epithet of Mot, "Snatcher-for-ever", following Astour, who divides it yʿb plus dr and cites Arabic waʿaba, to take everything. De Moor renders it "the ample flowing", from Arabic waʿb, wide, and darra, to flow copiously. Both senses are in Lane: waʿabahu, he took the whole of it, and waʿb, a wide road. The first suits Arsay better, since the list equates her with the queen of the underworld: daughter of the one who takes everything and gives nothing back.

Key Mythic Narratives

Pidray at the moon's wedding

In KTU 1.24 Yarikh the moon asks Harhab for Nikkal, and Harhab answers: "O most gracious of the gods, become son-in-law to Baal, wed Pidray his daughter"; Yarikh refuses: "With Nikkal will be my wedding." Pidray is offered as a substitute bride, and the Baal Cycle calls her and her sisters "the perfect brides". Wyatt says Baal "evidently eyes his daughter-wives" at the feast.

In the offering lists

The Ugaritic pantheon list, in three copies, names the gods in fixed order, and an Akkadian version gives each one its counterpart: Pidray there is Hebat, Arsay is Allatum. In the list of sacrifices of Saphon a ram is offered to Pidray and a ram to Arsay, beside a ram for the Kotharat, a ram for Yarikh and a ram for Kothar.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Wyatt, following Astour, compares the three with the three daughters of the Athenian Cecrops: Pandrosos, "All-Bedewing", Herse, whose name he sets beside Arsay, and Aglauros; and he compares Tallay's name with Thalia, the muse of comedy, and holds that these Greek goddesses are "evidently of West Semitic origin". It is a comparison of names and of the dew that joins them, not a shared story.

The Ugaritic list equates Arsay with the Babylonian queen of the underworld, as told under Ereshkigal: when Baal goes down to death Arsay stays where he goes, as Ereshkigal stays in her house when Inanna comes down to her.