Mettinger, The Riddle of Resurrection: 'Dying and Rising Gods' in the Ancient Near East
The major post-Smith re-examination of the dying-and-rising category, by a Lund Hebrew Bible scholar. Mettinger works case-by-case through Baal, Melqart, Adonis, Eshmun, Osiris, and Dumuzi/Tammuz with the primary texts and epigraphy, and concludes — against the post-Smith consensus — that a restricted set of genuinely dying-and-rising deities did exist in the pre-Christian Northwest Semitic world (Baal securely; Melqart and Adonis plausibly; Dumuzi in his alternation form), while agreeing that Frazer's grand unified vegetation-god theory is dead.
On Baal: the Ugaritic texts attest death, burial, mourning, and return to life and throne — Smith's category-dissolution does not survive this case (Mettinger 2001, ch. 3).
On Melqart: the egersis ("awakening") festival of Melqart at Tyre, the title "raiser/awakener of Melqart" (mqm 'lm) in Phoenician epigraphy, and Josephus's citation of Menander on Hiram I are read as a cultic celebration of the god's revival; evidence is real but later and thinner than for Baal (ch. 4).
Crucially for the contact question: Mettinger explicitly declines to derive Christian resurrection belief from these cults — "the riddle" is left as an open historical question, with the dying-rising pattern judged a distinct, older, West-Semitic phenomenon.
Reviews split along predictable lines: Smith's defenders find Mettinger's Melqart/Adonis cases overextended from late or ambiguous evidence; Ugaritologists broadly accept his Baal reading. The book's restraint on the Christianity question is widely noted as a strength. Use as the steelman for a restricted category.
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