Canaanite Religion

In 1928 a farmer on the Syrian coast struck a tomb, and excavation at the mound of Ras Shamra the following year uncovered the city of Ugarit, destroyed around 1200 BCE and undisturbed since. Among its buildings were archives written in a previously unknown alphabetic cuneiform, deciphered within a year of discovery. They include mythological narratives, ritual and offering lists, god-lists, letters and administrative records, and they remain the only substantial body of Canaanite religious literature in a Canaanite language.

This was a transformation, and it is also a trap. Before 1929 the religion was known almost entirely through the writings of its opponents. Since then it has been possible to read a West Semitic tradition in its own words. But Ugarit is one city, at the northern edge of the region, in one period, and its texts were produced by and for a royal establishment. Practice at Hazor, Megiddo, Byblos or Jerusalem, three centuries later, need not have resembled it, and the habit of describing Canaanite religion in general from Ugaritic evidence flattens several centuries and several hundred miles into a single picture.

The ritual texts are in some ways more valuable than the famous narratives, because they record what was done: which god received which animal on which day, what part the king played, how purification worked. They also reveal a pantheon far larger than the handful of names that reach general accounts, and a system of offerings closely comparable in vocabulary and procedure to the sacrificial law preserved in the Hebrew Bible, a similarity that has driven a great deal of the scholarship on both.

The other evidence is thinner: Phoenician and Punic inscriptions, personal names built around divine elements, Egyptian and Mesopotamian references, excavated temples and figurines, and a very late Greek account attributed to Philo of Byblos, which claims to translate a Phoenician source and is of contested value.

The Ugaritic texts present the gods as a household. El is its head: aged, seated at the source of the rivers, called father of the gods, deferred to and consulted but rarely acting. Athirat, the Asherah of the Hebrew Bible, is his consort and mother of the gods. Beneath them are dozens of deities with defined spheres, among them Kothar-wa-Hasis, the craftsman who makes weapons and buildings, and Shapshu, the sun.

The longest narrative concerns Baal, the storm god, also called Hadad. He contends with Yam, Sea, and defeats him with weapons the craftsman god supplies; he is then granted a palace on his mountain, whose completion and the window set into it mark his kingship; and he is finally challenged by Mot, Death, who swallows him, so that drought follows. Anat, a goddess of violence and of the hunt, searches for him, attacks Mot and splits and scatters him, and Baal returns. The tablets are damaged in places and the order of some sections is argued over.

What the sequence means is less settled than summaries imply. It has been read as a seasonal myth of drought and rain, as a charter for kingship, as the script of a particular festival, and as literature that need not map onto any ritual at all. The pattern of a storm god defeating a sea or a dragon and then building a house appears elsewhere in the ancient Near East, and language very close to it survives in Hebrew poetry describing Yahweh subduing the sea and Leviathan, which is one reason these texts are read as closely as they are.

Caution is due on two points often stated too confidently. The gods' relationships vary between texts, and neat family trees are partly modern tidying. And the label "fertility religion", long attached to Canaanite practice and usually implying ritual prostitution, rests on hostile sources and on Greek reports rather than on the Ugaritic material, which does not support it.

Most of what was written about Canaanite religion in antiquity was written against it, and that shapes the subject to this day.

The Hebrew Bible is the largest such body of evidence. It denounces Baal, Asherah and the high places at length, legislates against practices it ascribes to the peoples of the land, and narrates confrontations such as Elijah against the prophets of Baal. These texts establish that the cults existed, were attractive, and were practised by Israelites: a polemic sustained over centuries is aimed at something. They are not reliable on what those cults were for, or on how the people conducting them understood the matter, and the category of the Canaanite is itself partly a construction of these texts, an other against which Israel is defined.

Archaeology has complicated the picture from the other direction. Inscriptions found at Kuntillet Ajrud in the Sinai and at Khirbet el-Qom, dating to about the eighth century BCE, invoke blessing by Yahweh "and his asherah". Whether that phrase names a goddess or a cult object associated with her is debated, but it indicates that Israelite practice was less uniform than the biblical writers wanted, and that the boundary the Bible draws was being drawn precisely because it was not obvious on the ground.

The charge that follows the tradition hardest is child sacrifice. Biblical texts condemn the passing of children through fire to Molech; Greek and Roman authors accuse Carthage of sacrificing children; and excavation at Carthage and other Punic sites has uncovered walled precincts holding thousands of urns of cremated infants and young animals. Specialists disagree sharply about what this shows. Some read it as the practice the ancient sources describe. Others argue the precincts are cemeteries for infants who died naturally, in societies with very high infant mortality, and that the accusations are the standard rhetoric of hostile neighbours. Any account presenting either position as settled is overstating the evidence.