BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Nursing a Hangover in the Biblical World

A “hair of the dog” remedy from Ugarit

Dog figurine from New Kingdom Egypt, c. 1390–1353 BCE. Metropolitan Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY 0.

“Hair of the dog” is a saying that originally related to the remedy for a rabid dog bite, which involved putting some of that dog’s fur in the wound. The underlying idea—that you can remedy an issue with more of the thing that caused it—is quite old. For example, Pliny the Elder mentions remedies involving dog hair for dog bites in his Natural History. The idea reflects a broader principle of sympathetic medicine that “like cures like,” found in ancient Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern sources.

Remarkably, a Late Bronze Age (c. 1550–1200 BCE) Ugaritic text (KTU 1.114) mentions dog hair in a medico-mythological context. The writing centers on a night of drinking at an ancient banquet called the mrzḥ. Does this coupling of dog hair and hangovers mean ancient people arrived at the same idea as many modern drinkers—that a hangover is best nursed with more alcohol?

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In a new article, Hebrew Bible student Silas Vermilya argues that, at ancient Ugarit (Ras Shamra in modern day Syria), “hair of the dog” was far more literal. KTU 1.114 describes an episode where the high god Ilu (known also in ancient Canaan as El) hosts a drinking banquet—a mrzḥ—and consumes so much alcohol that he must be escorted home by his two sons, slipping on his own excrement along the way. Two of Ilu’s daughters search for a remedy. The last lines of the tablet, which describe the hangover treatment, are worn and difficult to read, but Vermilya translates them: “This is what one should apply to his forehead: dog hair, from head, then to throat, and until his navel; he should apply along with virgin olive oil.”

Previous scholars have argued that the term involving the dog refers not to actual dog hair but to a medicinal plant whose name happens to involve the word “dog,” such as the plant called, in Akkadian, “dog’s tongue.” Vermilya argues instead that the term references actual dog hair, given the strong association between dogs and healing across the ancient Near East.

Mesopotamian medical texts show dogs and dog organs used as ingredients in remedies for conditions such as fever, childbirth, childhood illness, and curses. Dog hair itself appears in several treatments, for example placed on an ailing person’s neck.

The Mesopotamian healing goddess Gula is closely associated with dogs in textual, iconographic, and archaeological sources, including dog cemeteries excavated at her temples in Nippur and Isin. Pulling back the curtain a bit more, incantation texts describe her dogs as protectors against demons that bring disease. Other healing goddesses—Nintinuga, Ninisina, Ninkarrak—are similarly linked to dogs. Since both Ugaritic and Akkadian sources have been found at Ras Shamra, the association between dogs and healing could plausibly have traveled westward from Mesopotamia to the Levantine coast where KTU 1.114 was produced.

Explore the role of Dogs in the Bible, from scavengers and shepherds to status symbols.

The precise nature of the mrzḥ feast is unclear, though it is attested across a wide range of ancient Semitic texts, from Ugarit in the Late Bronze Age through Phoenician, Nabataean, and Palmyrene inscriptions in later periods, and also the Bible. Some accounts suggest the mrzḥ had funerary or mortuary dimensions, functioning as a ritual banquet to honor the dead, while other references from Ebla, Sidon, and Palmyra suggest it was primarily an elite drinking association, more like the Greek symposium.

The mrzḥ was known in ancient Israel. Amos 6:4–7 describes what appears to be a mrzḥ in progress—wealthy Israelites reclining on ivory beds, eating choice lambs, drinking wine by the bowlful, and anointing themselves with oils, indifferent to the suffering around them. The prophet singles them out as the first that will be exiled. Jeremiah 16:5 uses the Hebrew term directly, connecting the mrzḥ to mourning and the dead.

If the lavish banqueting Amos describes was the kind of event that produced hangovers, it is not difficult to imagine why remedies like the one preserved in KTU 1.114 were preserved. For our part, somewhere along the way, the dog dropped out of the cure and we inherited only the saying. Ilu kept the dog hair.

Lauren K. McCormick is an assistant editor at Biblical Archaeology Review and a specialist in ancient Near Eastern religions, visual culture, and the Bible. She holds degrees in religion from Syracuse University, Duke University, New York University, and Rutgers University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship on religion and the public conversation at Princeton University.

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