Mot

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.

The clearest and most striking use of Mot's own defining image within the Hebrew Bible is also its most pointed reversal. Where the Ugaritic myths describe Mot as the great swallower, the god whose gaping throat consumes Baal and all living things, the book of Isaiah, in a passage often dated to a later stratum of the text, declares that God will swallow up death forever, using the same vivid image of a great mouth consuming its object, but inverting who does the swallowing.

Scholars of comparative Ugaritic and biblical literature, including Mitchell Dahood and Frank Moore Cross among others who worked extensively on the parallels between Ugaritic poetry and biblical Hebrew, have argued that this is very unlikely to be coincidental: the prophetic text appears to be deliberately borrowing the region's own mythological vocabulary for death as an all-consuming mouth and turning it back against death itself, asserting that the god of Israel will do to death exactly what death, personified as Mot, was traditionally said to do to everything else. This kind of polemical inversion, taking a rival religious tradition's own central image and using it to declare that tradition's god defeated by one's own, is a documented technique elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible's engagement with Canaanite religion, and if the reading holds, it means Mot's own signature trait, the insatiable, swallowing mouth of death, survived into Israelite scripture not as a description of a rival god to be worshipped or feared but as the very image later turned decisively against death by the prophetic tradition.