Summary
Yarikh is the moon on the tablets of Ugarit, called in the poem "the luminary of the heavens". The fullest record of him left is a short poem, KTU 1.24, which tells of his wedding to Nikkal, the one marriage between two gods that the Ugarit tablets state outright.
The poem begins: "Let me sing of Nikkal-and-Ib, daughter of Harhab, king of weddings". At sunset Yarikh burns with desire and embraces her who was born of the Kotharat, goddesses of conception and birth, and the poem says the bride bears a son. Then "Yarikh the luminary of the heavens" sends word to Harhab: "Give Nikkal! Yarikh will pay the bride-price for Ib; let her enter his house. I will give her father a thousand shekels of silver and ten thousand of gold, I will send him lapis lazuli, I will turn her steppes into vineyards, the steppe of her love into orchards". Harhab answers: "Most gracious of the gods, become son-in-law to Baal, marry Pidray his daughter; I will introduce you to her father Baal, and Athtar will plead for you". Yarikh says: "With Nikkal will be my wedding!" Then he pays the bride-price: her father sets up the beam of the scales, her mother its pans, her brothers arrange the silver ingots and her sisters the weighing stones. The story ends with a blessing, "Nikkal-and-Ib of whom I sing; bright is Yarikh, may Yarikh shine on you", and then a hymn to the Kotharat. Wyatt thinks the poem was sung at weddings.
In another, comic text, KTU 1.114, El holds a feast in his house, and Yarikh arches his back like a dog and gathers crumbs under the tables. A god who knows him throws him a piece of meat, one who does not beats him with a stick under the table; Athtart throws him a haunch and Anat a shoulder, and the porter of El's house shouts: why do you throw a haunch to the dog? Wyatt, KTU 1.114, pp. 407–409.
The idea Yarikh's stories turn on is that the moon reckons time and seals contracts. He rises on time, wanes and grows full, so the months are counted by him, and the months of pregnancy with them, which is why the poem sings the goddesses of birth alongside his wedding. The wedding itself is a counted contract: a bride-price in shekels, scales set up by the bride's family, brothers counting ingots and sisters laying out weights. At the end the singer prays that Yarikh will shine on the couple, so the moon's light is a blessing on the new house. At El's feast, by contrast, the moon is small under the tables, and at Ugarit the sun, Shapsh, ranks above him, an exception to the rule in the early lunar traditions of the Levant.
We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Ugarit wrote yrḫ, and the same word there also means "month". Its first y is an old w, as Canaanite begins with y most verbs that begin with w in Arabic. Restore the w and the letters are w-r-kh, which in Arabic is warrakha al-kitāb, he wrote its date on the document; it is said more often arrakha, with the glottal stop, and Lane notes that w and the glottal stop alternate in it. So Yarikh is the moon by which time is dated, which is the essay's second reading: "Yarikh is the dater, the moon that fixes the months and the dates".
Linguistic Root
Yarikh and taʾrīkh
| Language | Form | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Ugaritic | yrḫ | moon, the moon god, month |
| Akkadian | warḫu, arḫu | month, its first day |
| Hebrew | יָרֵחַ yārēaḥ, יֶרַח yeraḥ | moon, month |
| Ethiopic | wrḫ | moon, month |
| Sabaean | wrḫ | month |
| Arabic | warrakha, arrakha, taʾrīkh | to write the date on a document; reckoning of time from a fixed point |
The letter that decides this comparison is kh. Ugaritic writes kh at the end of the name, as do Akkadian, Ethiopic, Sabaean and Arabic; Hebrew writes ḥ, because it merged ḥ and kh into the one letter ח. Lane reports that some held taʾrīkh to be an arabicized word that the Muslims took from the People of the Book, that is from Hebrew yeraḥ, and that others held it pure Arabic. The kh settles the question: a word taken from Hebrew would come with ḥ, and the Arabic word has kh like Ugaritic, Akkadian and Ethiopic, so it belongs to the same old family. The w is original at the head of the root: Arabic keeps it in warrakha, as do Ethiopic, Sabaean and Akkadian warḫu; it becomes y in Ugaritic and Hebrew, and a glottal stop in arrakha.
Lane adds that the Muslim era of the Hijra begins the year from the first appearance of the new moon of Muḥarram and begins the day at sunset. Arabic dating was, at its start, reckoning by the moon, which is what the essay says when it sets the name beside the verse "They ask you about the new moons; say, they are times appointed for people and for the pilgrimage". In the Ugaritic poem the story itself begins "at the setting of the sun", when the moon rises.
Other readings in the essay
The Canaanite essay opens with y-r-kh itself and says that yarikh is the moon in Arabic. What the Arabic dictionaries have is w-r-kh and ʾ-r-kh for dating; the moon itself is qamar and hilāl. So the essay's two readings are one: the first keeps the Canaanite shape of the name, the second returns it to its Arabic shape. The Babylonian essay reads Yarikh with Nanna and Sîn as "the lunar month". In KTU 1.24 the Kotharat are called "daughters of hll", which some scholars read as Arabic hilāl, the new moon, and others as a name of Enlil; the new moon has its page at h-l-l. Wyatt, p. 337.
Key Mythic Narratives
The town of Prince Yarikh in the Tale of Aqhat
In the Tale of Aqhat Anat invites the youth to hunt at "Abilim, the town of Prince Yarikh", then tells his killer Yatipan to wait there "until the moon is new". When Aqhat is dead, his father Danel goes round the places near the killing to curse them, comes to "Abilim, the town of Prince Yarikh", and says: woe to you, for near you Aqhat was struck; may Baal make your wells dry for ever.
Yarikh in worship
The Ugaritic god lists name Yarikh, and the Akkadian version of the list puts Sîn in his place; the offering lists name him among those who receive sacrifices. A shekel of gold goes to Shapsh and Yarikh together when the two Gathru gods enter the royal chapel. In the snakebite spell KTU 1.100 the mare sends her voice to "Yarikh in Larugat" among the gods she asks, and he does not answer. Personal names include "servant of Yarikh", and earlier at Mari "servant of Erakh" and "Erakh has given".
The rest of the feast
El drinks at the feast until he is drunk and stumbles home, held up by Thukamun and Shanim; a creeping thing with horns and a tail comes at him, and he falls in his own filth "as though dead", "like those who go down into the underworld". Anat and Athtart go out to hunt and come back with meat, El is treated and wakes, and the tablet ends with a recipe: dog's hair, the knot of a vine and its juice, with virgin olive oil, to be put on his forehead. Wyatt thinks the dog's hair in the remedy takes the hearer back to Yarikh crouching like a dog at the start.
Symbolic Reading
The Canaanite essay reads Yarikh as a god of the moon, the night and time, who rules the cycles of time and the months and is tied to measuring time and to calendars; it makes the moon "the cosmic dater" who orders months and festivals. The Ugaritic poem bears this out from the human side: the months the moon counts are those by which pregnancy is counted, which is why the goddesses of birth are sung at his wedding, and in KTU 1.23, on Wyatt's reading, the father counts after the wedding "five for growth, ten for completion", ten lunar months to the birth, though other translations read the line differently.
The poem gives an exact picture of a wedding in a society that reckons things by weight. The groom offers silver, gold and lapis lazuli and promises to turn steppe into vineyards and orchards; the bride's father proposes another wife from a higher house, Baal's; the groom insists on his bride, and then the whole family takes part in the weighing. Marriage here is an agreement between two houses whose rights are kept by the scales, and the moon that counts the months is the one who pays the bride-price.
Cross-Cultural Parallels
Nikkal is Sumerian Ningal, "the Great Lady", wife of Nanna, the moon of Ur, and Sîn is the moon's Akkadian name, which the Akkadian version of the Ugaritic god list puts in Yarikh's place. So the wedding of Yarikh and Nikkal is the wedding of the Levantine moon to the wife of the Mesopotamian moon, and Wyatt sees a Hurrian tradition behind the poem. In India the wedding hymn of the Rigveda, 10.85, answers it: Soma comes forward as suitor of Sūryā, the hymn says that the moon is the one who shapes the years, and then the hymn becomes a human wedding: a moon marries, and his wedding is sung at every couple's wedding. Rigveda 10.85.5 and 19. This is the clearest marriage between two gods that the Ugarit tablets state, so it belongs to the sacred marriage. Japan has its moon in Tsukuyomi, with no wedding in his story.