At the head of the Ugaritic pantheon stands El, an aged and remote father of the gods who lives at the source of the rivers, with his consort Athirat. The active figure is Baal, the storm god, and the long poem about him turns on his struggle to obtain a palace and thereby a recognised kingship. He defeats Prince Sea, wins permission for a house, at first refuses windows in it for fear of what may come in, and is then swallowed by Mot, Death, so that the land dries; his sister Anat kills Mot, splitting and winnowing him like grain, and Baal returns.
The effect on the study of the Hebrew Bible was immediate and permanent. The poetry of the Psalms and of Job turned out to share not only imagery but whole phrases with this literature: the rider of the clouds, the twisting serpent Leviathan, the council of the gods, the dividing of the sea. El is a name for God in the Bible; Asherah, the object of prophetic denunciation, is Athirat under another spelling. A biblical writer describing his God enthroned above the flood is using the vocabulary of the surrounding culture, sometimes borrowing it and sometimes arguing with it, and before 1929 that context had to be reconstructed from the polemics of the people rejecting it.
Ugarit was not Israel, and the two are separated by centuries and by geography. What the tablets supply is the religious language of the region, in its own words rather than in its opponents'.