The Older Gods, and the Living Minorities

Beneath and around the Abrahamic faiths, the Levant preserves older and smaller religious worlds. Long before Israel, the region was the land of Canaanite religion, whose gods, the high god El, the storm god Baal, the goddesses Asherah and Anat, are known from the cuneiform tablets of Ugarit and form the polytheistic background against which, and in reaction to which, the monotheism of the Hebrew Bible defined itself; the biblical prophets' polemics against Baal are a direct record of that struggle.

The Levant also remains home to living religious minorities of great antiquity and distinctiveness: the Samaritans, an ancient offshoot of Israelite religion who still keep the Passover sacrifice on Mount Gerizim and now number only a few hundred; and the Druze, whose secretive, esoteric faith emerged from Ismaili Islam in the eleventh century and whose communities endure in the mountains of Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. The region thus holds not only the shared holy places of half the world's believers but also the archaeological memory of the Canaanite gods and the enduring presence of some of the smallest and oldest surviving religious communities on earth.