American Journal of Philology 136 (2015) 1–35 © 2015 by Johns Hopkins University Press AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGY 1 I will use the term “rock” here to refer to the unworked material, but in this analysis ultimately the function of the object is largely irrelevant. Likewise, I use “tree” instead of “oak” to denote the general versus the specific. The phrase also appears in scholarship as “oak and rock” or “tree and stone.” The use of the word “oak” is an accurate translation of the Greek, but in this case I believe that the generic “tree” is more appropriate due to the importance of the arboreal visual characteristics. 2 See Nagy 1990, 181–201; Watkins 1995, 161–64; O’Bryhim 1996. An important book chapter linking the Hesiodic occurrence of the phrase with Near Eastern parallels, with SPEECH FROM TREE AND ROCK: RECOVERY OF A BRONZE AGE METAPHOR ALEXANDER S. W. FORTE  Abstract. Interpreters of archaic Greek epic poetry have long labored to explain the meaning of the semantically ambiguous phrase involving “tree (δρῦς) and/or rock (πέτρη).” The idiom appears three times in archaic epic: in the proem of Hesiod’s Theogony, during Hector’s deliberation about negotiating a truce in Iliad 22, and in Penelope’s speech to a disguised Odysseus in Odyssey 19. A tantalizingly similar, and equally unsolved idiom, rgm ‘s ≥ w lh°št ’abn, appears in the thirteenth-century Ugaritic Ba’al Cycle found at Ras Shamra. Current scholarship agrees that this phrase connotes ideas of prophecy. This article argues that the phrase’s history can be traced further back to a metaphor describing the audio-visual phenomenon of lightning and thunder as the storm-god’s oracular speech. Crucial evidence for this account is found in Bronze Age material culture. OF ALL SEMANTIC AMBIGUITIES IN HOMER, perhaps the most perplex- ing, and commanding the most attention of modern scholarship has been the enigmatic phrase involving “tree and/or rock.” 1 In attempting to ana- lyze this notoriously elusive phrase, scholars have generally adopted one of two methodologies: that of Indo-European comparison, or that of cultural contact between the Levant and the Mediterranean. 2 Despite attempts