The cycle follows Baal through two successive struggles that together establish him as the effective ruling god of the Canaanite pantheon beneath the more distant authority of the aged high god El. In the first, Yam, the god of the sea and its chaotic waters, demands that the assembled gods hand Baal over to him as a servant; Baal instead defeats Yam in single combat using two magical weapons the craftsman god Kothar-wa-Khasis fashions for him, and wins from that victory the standing to demand a palace of his own, a mark of established divine kingship the other gods had denied him. The palace episode that follows is not a mere reward: building it, on Mount Sapan, is itself the act that makes Baal's rule visible and permanent, and Baal at first hesitates to let a window be cut into it, fearing Yam might somehow return through the opening.
The cycle's second and darker movement pits Baal against Mot, the god of death and the underworld, who summons Baal down into his own domain to be consumed. Baal dies, the fertility his rain and storms had sustained fails, and his sister Anat searches for him, eventually confronting and destroying Mot in a scene of extended violence, threshing, burning and scattering his remains, described with the same imagery used elsewhere for processing grain. Baal returns to life and to his throne, and the cycle closes with the two gods still locked in an unresolved rivalry that suggests the struggle between fertility and death was understood as ongoing and cyclical, not permanently settled by any single victory.