CANAAN
The Canaanite material in this app draws first from the Ugaritic texts discovered at Ras Shamra on the Syrian coast in 1928. These tablets, dated to the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE, contain the Baal cycle, the story of Aqhat, the legend of Kirta, and the ritual and god-list literature that together give us the deepest reservoir of Northwest Semitic religion we possess. Frank Moore Cross's Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic remains the standard synthesis.
The Canaanite divine council (the assembly of the gods presided over by El, attended by Baal Hadad as active king, Shapash as messenger, and the other named deities) provides the dramatic frame for the interpretive voice this app uses for the Canaanite pantheon. Ten planetary identifications are seated here: seven reconstructed from Ugaritic theogonic order, iconographic correspondence, and the systematic Greek and Roman syncretisms of the Hellenistic and Imperial periods, and three received bodies given seats at the same council by the modern method this app names plainly wherever it is used.
Bring a gift to the tent flap and wait to be asked in.
Your love and your harvest lend each other a hand, and the elders mark the day.
This council did not vanish. A god from the southern deserts, Yahweh, was drawn into it and then identified with El himself. He took El's titles, his tent, and his seat at the head of the assembly. In the oldest reading of Deuteronomy, he still stands among the sons of El, receiving Israel as his portion. Later, the rest of the council was demoted to angels, and the assembly became a heaven with one throne. The scale, the vow, and the court you read here are the older furniture of that house.