Kirtu's Allusive Dream

The author examines El's words to Kirtu in his dream (CAT 1.14 ii 24-iii 49) and argues that the Ugaritic bards, like the erudite literati of the wider Near East, employed polysemy and other allusive devices when describing the contents of divine dreams. They then resolved the dream's ambiguities in the narrator's description of the dream's fulfillment. Thus, the narrative strategy constitutes a form of innertextual exegesis and a mise en abyme that make the narrator, and by extension, Ilimilku and the divinatory establishment, the omen's authoritative interpreter. As such, the narrative legitimates divinatory hermeneutics, authority, and ideology. Since any recitation of the text would have required an authorative reading tradition, it is opined further that the ambiguities provided master tradents with educational paradigms for demonstrating to their pupils the relationship between polysemous dream omens and their interpretations.