The main entry's brief mention that the Ugaritic Baal material "transformed the study of the biblical material when it was excavated from 1928" understates how dramatic that was, and the discovery itself is worth telling.
In 1928, a farmer plowing a field near the Mediterranean coast of Syria struck a buried tomb, leading to the identification of the site as Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit, a Bronze Age city destroyed and abandoned around 1200 BCE and undisturbed for three thousand years until French archaeologist Claude Schaeffer began systematic excavation that year. Among the finds were clay tablets in a previously unknown cuneiform script, deciphered within a few years by scholars including Hans Bauer and Charles Virolleaud, revealing a Northwest Semitic language, Ugaritic, closely related to Hebrew, and a substantial mythological literature including the Baal Cycle, describing the storm god Baal's combat with Yam, the sea, and his later combat with Mot, death, texts composed centuries before the Hebrew Bible's own final compilation, from a culture adjacent to ancient Israel.
The discovery mattered because it supplied, for the first time, a body of West Semitic mythological material closely related to Hebrew rather than the more distant Akkadian and Sumerian material scholars had relied on, showing that the combat imagery scattered through the Hebrew Bible's poetry, Leviathan, Rahab, the sea as adversary, was not a distant echo of Mesopotamian myth but part of a shared West Semitic vocabulary Israel's poets and prophets could draw on directly, a discovery that reshaped, within a single generation, how confidently scholars could reconstruct the mythological world biblical writers were responding to.