Canaanites

Almost everything known about Canaanite religion from the inside comes from one place. The tablets found at Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit, from 1929 onward gave the tradition its own literature for the first time, and Simon Parker's edition presents the principal narrative poems: the Baal Cycle, the tale of Aqhat and the tale of Kirta.

The pantheon those texts show is headed by El, an aged creator who presides over the divine assembly, with his consort Athirat, the Asherah of the Hebrew Bible. The active figure is Baal, the storm god, whose cycle turns on his acquisition of a palace, his combat with Yamm the sea, and his descent into the power of Mot, death, from which his sister Anat retrieves him. The pattern of a storm god defeating the sea and then being swallowed by death has obvious agricultural sense, though scholars differ on how directly the texts should be read as seasonal ritual.

Mark Smith's work on early Israelite religion argues that Israel emerged from within this world rather than against it, and that Yahweh acquired El's titles and imagery before the two were understood as one. The Hebrew Bible's polemic against Baal and Asherah is therefore evidence of proximity as much as of difference, and it is the polemic of an insider quarrel rather than a report on foreigners.

Canaanite is a term the atlas uses with the caution its own sources apply. It appears in Egyptian and Mesopotamian records and in the Hebrew Bible as a designation for the peoples of the Levantine coast and interior in the second millennium BCE, but no inhabitant is known to have called their religion Canaanite, and the cities involved, Ugarit, Byblos, Tyre, Sidon, Hazor and others, were politically separate and frequently at odds.

The material record shows an urban society of walled city states under Egyptian oversight through much of the Late Bronze Age, trading across the eastern Mediterranean, with temples inside the towns and open air cult sites beyond them. Alphabetic writing developed in this milieu, first in the cuneiform alphabet used at Ugarit and then in the linear script that became the Phoenician alphabet and, through it, the Greek and Latin ones.

Michael Coogan and Mark Smith's collection presents the surviving narratives to general readers and is frank about the distance between them and the Hebrew Bible's account. The biblical picture of Canaanite religion, with its child sacrifice and its fertility rites, is hostile polemic composed centuries later, and the archaeological and textual evidence for its specific charges is contested rather than settled. The atlas reports the charge, names its source, and does not adopt it.