The gods of Canaan and Ugarit, recovered chiefly from the tablets found at Ras Shamra. This pantheon is the immediate background to the Hebrew Bible, which polemicises against several of these deities by name, and the shared vocabulary between the two bodies of text is among the more consequential findings in the study of ancient Near Eastern religion.
Facts
Overview
What Defines This GroupingThe gods of the Northwest Semitic city-states of the Late Bronze and Iron Age Levant. Canaanite is a modern cover term for a religious world known very unevenly across many polities, and almost all the narrative material comes from a single site, Ugarit. Its weight in scholarship lies partly in its close relation to the religious background of the Hebrew Bible. 2 Peoples and Traditions CoveredThe Phoenician, Punic and wider Levantine city-states, known chiefly from inscriptions and from the reports of their neighbours 2 Peoples and Traditions CoveredUgarit, the Late Bronze Age city of the Syrian coast, from which nearly all the narrative texts come 3 Attestation
Era of AttestationThe Ugaritic tablets of about 1400 to 1200 BCE carry the narrative texts, and the same deities are named in Phoenician and Punic inscriptions into the Roman period. 3 Veneration TodayNo continuous cult survives; the tradition is known from its texts, inscriptions and archaeology. 2 Learn More
The gods of Canaan
This group gathers the deities of the Canaanite and wider Northwest Semitic world of the ancient Levant, known especially from the cuneiform tablets found at Ugarit. This pantheon is of particular historical interest for its close relationship to the religious background of the Hebrew Bible.
The browser will find the high god El and his consort Asherah, the storm and kingship god Baal, the warrior-goddess Anat, the death-god Mot, and the sea Yam. Several of these names appear in the Bible as rival gods; the atlas notes the scholarly discussion of how Canaanite religion relates to the emergence of Israelite worship.
All Canaanite Deities
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Sources
1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category Tree
2. The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel
Mark S. Smith, William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2002ch. 1
3. Ugaritic Narrative Poetry
Simon B. Parker (ed.); Mark S. Smith and others (trans.), Society of Biblical Literature, 1997IntroductionView the Source Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
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