Chapter 5. Canaan, Ugarit and the Levant

The narrow strip of land between the Mediterranean and the Syrian desert produced the gods with whom the Hebrew Bible argues most bitterly: Baal, Asherah, Molech and the “host of heaven”. For most of the modern era these gods were known almost only through that polemic. The discovery of the clay tablets of Ugarit in the twentieth century changed this. Canaanite religion could now be read in its own words, and the Bible’s relationship to it turned out to involve inheritance as much as rejection. This chapter sets out what the library’s sources say about the Canaanite pantheon and its myths, about worship at the high places and the practice of sacrifice, about Phoenician and Punic religion (including the long dispute over child sacrifice), and about the Canaanite roots of Israelite religion, which Part 4 takes up again.

Sources: from biblical polemic to the Ugaritic tablets

The reference shelf stresses how fragmentary the evidence is. Before Levantine archaeology began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, knowledge of Canaanite religion “came mostly from the accounts of the Hebrew Bible,” supplemented by late Greek writers such as Philo of Byblos. “By far the most substantial source” is the Ugaritic corpus from Ras Shamra in Syria, dated around 1275 BCE, whose more than three hundred texts include myths, prayers, deity lists, lists of sacrifices and ritual prescriptions. The tablets have been found “since 1928” in a city destroyed c. 1200 BCE [Wikipedia: Canaanite religion].

John Day describes what the tablets changed in biblical scholarship. Nineteenth-century scholars such as W. Robertson Smith took the biblical plural “the Baals” to mean many separate local gods. “The Ugaritic texts revealed, however, that Baal, ‘the Lord’, was the epithet (though becoming a personal name) of one great cosmic deity, Hadad.” The local Baals were therefore “simply local manifestations of this particular deity”. [Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan, #86469, ch. 3 “Yahweh versus Baal”].

The pantheon: El, Asherah, Baal, Anat and Mot

Mark S. Smith reads the Ugaritic pantheon as a divine household of four tiers. “In the top two tiers of the pantheon are the divine parents and their children; the bottom two tiers of the pantheon consist of deities working in the divine household.” In his words, “El and Athirat are the divine royal parents of the pantheon, and the dominant deities are generally regarded as their royal children” [Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism, #64008]. Athirat is the Ugaritic form of the biblical Asherah. The reference survey uses the same scheme, listing Anat as “virgin goddess of war and strife” and Mot as god of death, “not worshiped or given offerings” [Wikipedia: Canaanite religion].

Day describes El as “wholly benevolent in nature” in the Ugaritic texts, a “supreme deity, creator god and one possessed of wisdom”. Baal, by contrast, “was not only subordinate to the chief god El, but was also considered to be dead in the underworld for half the year” [Day, #86469, ch. 1 “Yahweh and El”]. The sources disagree about Anat. The Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible reports that “the predominant view among scholars is that the Ugaritic texts present Anat as a ‘fertility goddess’ who is the consort of the god Baal” [van der Toorn, Becking and van der Horst (eds.), Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, #66939]. A contributor to Carl Olson’s anthology argues against that view. Anath is “a principal wife of Baal” and apparently bears him a bull, “despite this she is called virgin Anath”, and the fertility reading is one “the texts we have do not lend much credence to” [Olson (ed.), The Book of the Goddess, #39988]. Merlin Stone, writing from the goddess-religion perspective, treats Asherah as part of a religion of the Goddess “from the most ancient times” and suggests that El at Ugarit had ties to “the Indo-European storm god” [Stone, When God Was a Woman, #87745]. That second claim is hers and is not found in the specialist works cited here.

The Baal Cycle: sea, palace and death

The central myth is summarised on the reference shelf. Baal defeats Yam with two magic weapons, “Driver” and “Chaser”, made by the craftsman Kothar-wa-Khasis. With the help of Athirat and Anat he persuades El to allow him a palace. From it he challenges Mot, who swallows him and takes him down to the underworld. Drought follows. Anat then “attacks Mot with a knife, grinds him up into pieces, and scatters him far and wide”, and Baal returns to bring rain again [Wikipedia: Canaanite religion].

Smith traces the long life of this imagery in Israelite texts. Mot, “Death”, appears in the Ugaritic texts and in Isaiah 25:8, Hosea 13:14 and as late as Revelation 21:4. “Biblical Mot is personified as a demon, in the manner of Ugaritic Mot.” Anat’s battle, with its heaps of corpses and its “gleaning”, has parallels in biblical scenes of divine war (Joel 3:13; Revelation 14:14-20) [Smith, The Early History of God, #67245, ch. 2]. The Dictionary adds that the later Byblian cult of Adonis “probably” continued “the worship of a Phoenician Baal, conceived as a dying and rising god” [DDD, #66939].

High places, sacrifice and cult personnel

The reference shelf describes the bamah, the “high place”, as a “simple hilltop installation” with platforms, altars, standing stones (matzevah) and an Asherah pole. Such sites appear “in the early Bronze Age at the latest”. In Israel, ordinary offerings were made at the town’s bamah until Hezekiah and Josiah proscribed them [Wikipedia: High place].

Smith shows the depth of the shared sacrificial vocabulary. Biblical zebaḥ, “slaughtered offering”, appears in the cults of both Yahweh and Baal and has Ugaritic and Phoenician cognates. The same holds for šĕlāmîm, neder (vow), minḥāh and kālîl (holocaust). The priest, kōhēn, and the “chief priest” have Ugaritic counterparts (rb khnm, KTU 1.6 VI 55-56), and the “tent of meeting” “derived from Canaanite prototypes”. Smith concludes that “this incidence of highly specialized sacrificial terms suggests a common West Semitic heritage” [Smith, The Early History of God, #67245, ch. 1 “Israel’s ‘Canaanite’ Heritage”].

Phoenicia and Carthage: Melqart, Tanit and the molk debate

In the first millennium the Phoenician cities carried this religion across the Mediterranean. Melqart, whose name Edward Lipiński derives from mlk qrt, “King of the City”, was the tutelary god of Tyre. He was identified with Heracles “from at least the sixth century BCE”. Josephus, following Menander, records that King Hiram I was “the first to celebrate the awakening (egersis) of Heracles”, which the article reads as possible evidence of a dying-and-rising god [Wikipedia: Melqart]. The sources disagree about which god Jezebel promoted in Samaria. The reference article proposes Melqart, while Day argues that the Phoenician Baal opposed by Elijah was Baal-Shamem, “Baal of the heavens”, “rather than Melqart, contrary to what is often asserted” [Day, #86469, ch. 3]. At Carthage the leading divine pair were Baal Hammon and Tanit. From the fifth century BCE Tanit was titled “Face of Baal”, and the reference shelf notes that her origin (Libyan, or linked to Anat, Astarte or Asherah) is debated [Wikipedia: Punic religion].

The hardest question concerns the tophet precincts. At Carthage, over 20,000 urns of cremated infants and animals were buried beneath stelae to Baal Hammon and Tanit [Wikipedia: Carthage tophet]. The scholarly positions divide as follows.

Day concludes that “there is overwhelming evidence that the Old Testament itself implies that children were offered up in fiery human sacrifice to Molech”. He reads he’ebir ba’esh as “he offered up in the fire” rather than “passed through”. He identifies Molech with a Canaanite underworld god mlk, attested in Ugaritic serpent charms and equated with Nergal in Mesopotamian god lists, whose name the biblical writers distorted with the vowels of bōšet, “shame” [Day, #86469, ch. 7 “Molech”]. Smith disagrees on this link. He finds that Ugaritic mlk “appears to be unrelated to either child sacrifice or the Phoenician sacrificial term mlk“, and he calls Heider’s connection of the two “conjectural” [Smith, #67245, ch. 5 “The mlk Sacrifice”]. Smith reports Stager’s figures from Carthage, where human-only burials rose from 62.5 percent of urns in the seventh and sixth centuries to 88 percent in the fourth, and the objections to them. He concludes that “despite several issues raised and scholarly demurrals, some level of child sacrifice evidently took place at Carthage”. For Israel he is more cautious: child sacrifice “may not have been a common religious practice”, and he finds “no historical evidence outside biblical polemic” for it at the high places [Smith, #67245, ch. 5 “The mlk Sacrifice”].

Canaanite roots of Israelite religion

Both main sources hold that Israel grew out of Canaan rather than arriving from outside it. Smith writes that “early Israelite culture cannot be separated easily from the culture of ‘Canaan'”. Script, pottery and burial show continuity, and “Canaanite and Hebrew so closely overlap that the ability to distinguish them is premised more on historical information than linguistic criteria”. Some scholars therefore define Israelite culture “as a subset of Canaanite culture”. Smith names only two features that appear non-Canaanite: Yahweh’s southern sanctuary (Sinai, Paran, Teiman) and the Exodus tradition [Smith, The Early History of God, #67245, ch. 1].

Day takes a different view of the gods themselves. Against Cross and de Moor, he holds that “El and Yahweh were originally distinct deities that became amalgamated”. On his reading Yahweh came from the south, in Midian or Edom, and the Bible “has no qualms in equating Yahweh with El”, while it opposes Baal vehemently [Day, #86469, ch. 1]. In his conclusion he argues that “Yahweh was very much the chief god in ancient Israel, and the other gods and goddesses would have been worshipped as part of his pantheon”. The inscriptions reading “Yahweh and his Asherah” at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom “imply a close relationship (doubtless that of god and consort)” with the goddess. Absolute monotheism “was first given explicit expression by the prophet Deutero-Isaiah”. Day also follows a Canaanite “afterglow” into later texts: El’s seventy sons became the guardian angels of the nations, zbl b’l (“Baal the Prince”) became Beelzebul, and El and Baal stand behind the Ancient of Days and the “one like a son of man” in Daniel 7 [Day, #86469, ch. 8]. Part 4 (ch. 28–37) follows this transformation in detail.

Key points

• Canaanite religion was known mainly from biblical polemic until the Ugaritic tablets (found from 1928; texts c. 1275 BCE) supplied its own myths, lists and rituals [Wikipedia: Canaanite religion; Day, #86469].
• Smith describes the Ugaritic pantheon as a four-tier divine household headed by El and Athirat/Asherah. Day stresses El’s benevolence and Baal’s subordinate, half-yearly dying status [#64008; #86469].
• The Baal Cycle (Baal against Yam, Baal swallowed by Mot, Anat’s revenge, the return of rain) supplied imagery that Smith traces through biblical texts down to Revelation [#67245].
• Sacrificial terms, priestly titles and the high-place cult were shared West Semitic inheritance, which Smith takes as evidence of a common heritage [#67245; Wikipedia: High place].
• Phoenician religion centred on city gods such as Melqart of Tyre and, at Carthage, Baal Hammon and Tanit. The sources disagree on whether Jezebel’s Baal was Melqart or Baal-Shamem.
• The molk/child sacrifice question remains contested: Eissfeldt’s “sacrifice-term” view, Day’s “god Molech” view, Smith’s “in Yahweh’s name” reading, and the propaganda and cemetery hypotheses all appear in the sources.
• Smith and Day agree that Israelite religion emerged from a Canaanite matrix. Day holds that Yahweh absorbed El, rejected Baal, was paired with Asherah in popular cult, and reached explicit monotheism only with Deutero-Isaiah.