Friends with a nose
Fun with Ugaritic
Posted
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
by
Charlie Trimm
Categories:
Old Testament
All langauges have a vareity of idioms that sound really funny to speakers of other languages. Semetic languages have their share. One example is the use of "nose" to refer to anger. When Exodus 34:6 says that God is "slow to anger," the Hebrew phrase is that he "has a long nose." When people get angry, their nose gets hot. But then last night I was reading the Ugartic tale "Baal and Yam" and discovered another unusual idiom. Baal gets angry with Yam, but the literal Ugartic is that he "became friends with his nose." So be careful about getting cozy with a nose!
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