Dug Up in Syria, Read Alongside the Bible

The Keret Epic survives on tablets recovered from Ras Shamra, the site of ancient Ugarit on the Syrian coast, discovered in 1928 and discussed as part of the broader Canaanite religious corpus elsewhere in this atlas, and its recovery gave biblical scholars, for the first time, access to Canaanite religious and literary tradition composed by Canaanites themselves rather than known only through the Hebrew Bible's consistently hostile external portrayal of Canaanite worship as a temptation to be resisted.

Scholars of comparative Semitic literature have drawn extensively on the Keret Epic's poetic conventions, vocabulary and narrative structure to illuminate similar features found in biblical Hebrew poetry, since Ugaritic and biblical Hebrew are closely related Northwest Semitic languages sharing considerable common poetic and religious vocabulary despite belonging to what the Bible itself presents as rival religious traditions. El's characterization within the Keret Epic as a compassionate, actively helpful high god who personally intervenes with detailed practical guidance offers a notably different portrait from the largely negative and one-dimensional depiction of Canaanite deities found in polemical biblical passages, giving scholars a genuinely more textured, if still incomplete, picture of how Canaanites themselves understood their own chief deity.