Mot is death itself in Canaanite religion, and his name is simply the ordinary Semitic word for death, the same root that lies behind the Hebrew word. He rules the pit below the earth, the realm of the dead, and the Ugaritic tablets describe his appetite in vivid physical terms: he is imagined with one lip to the earth and one to the sky and a tongue reaching to the stars, a mouth that swallows all living things, so that everything that dies passes down his throat. He is the great adversary of Baal, the storm-god who brings the rains and the fertility of the land, and the conflict between them enacts the turning of the Canaanite agricultural year.
In the myth Baal is summoned down into Mot's realm and dies, and with the death of the rain-god the earth withers and the crops fail. It is Baal's sister Anat who avenges and restores him: she seizes Mot and destroys him with the imagery of the harvest, splitting and burning and grinding him, after which Baal revives and the rains return. But Mot too comes back, and the two clash again, in a cycle that has no final victor, an apt figure for a world in which the fertile season and the dead season of drought succeed one another endlessly. Mot is the personification, unusually direct, of the power that consumes all life, honoured not with worship so much as with dread.