El

El at Ugarit is old. He is the father of years, the bull, the kindly one and the compassionate, the creator of creatures, and he lives at the source of the two rivers, at the confluence of the deeps. He presides over the assembly of the gods, who are called his sons. He does not fight. Baal fights, Anat fights, and El grants, consents, decrees and weeps; the Baal Cycle turns on who can persuade him. He is a patriarch rather than a champion.

The complication is that el is also simply the Semitic common noun for a god, and Hebrew uses it both ways. The names Israel, Ishmael, Michael, Daniel, Bethel and Elijah all contain it. The Hebrew Bible attaches to its god a series of compound titles built on it, El Shaddai, El Elyon, El Olam, El Roi, and Genesis has Jacob build an altar and name it for the god of Israel using the same word. The plural elohim is the ordinary word for God throughout.

So the question arises unavoidably, and it is among the most argued in the field: is the god of Israel a development of the Canaanite El? The evidence adduced for it includes the shared epithets, the fact that the Hebrew Bible never polemicises against El as it does relentlessly against Baal, and Deuteronomy 32:8-9, where a text preserved at Qumran and in the Greek has Elyon divide the nations according to the number of the sons of God and assign Jacob to Yahweh as his portion, which reads as Yahweh receiving a share from a higher god; the Masoretic text reads sons of Israel instead. Against it stand the arguments that Yahweh shows storm-god characteristics closer to Baal's, that a southern origin is indicated by the older poetry placing him at Sinai, Seir and Teman, and that shared vocabulary across a language family proves less than it appears to.

Positions range from full identification through gradual merger to substantial independence, and none commands consensus. What is not in dispute is that the two can no longer be discussed separately.

El's reach extended well beyond Ugarit and Canaan proper: Hittite scribes in Anatolia preserved a mythological text, generally called Elkunirsa and Ashertu after its two main figures, in which a god named Elkunirsa, a name transparently derived from the West Semitic epithet El qoneh 'arts, El creator of the earth, appears as an aged high god married to the goddess Ashertu, a clear borrowing of the Canaanite pairing of El and Athirat carried into Hittite religious literature through the considerable cultural contact between Anatolia and the Semitic-speaking Levant during the second millennium BCE. In the surviving fragments of the tale, Ashertu attempts to seduce the storm-god, here called simply the Storm-god rather than by Baal's own name, and when he rebuffs her and reports the attempt to Elkunirsa, the aged god instructs the Storm-god to humiliate Ashertu in turn, a narrative structure that broadly echoes the dynamic of the Ugaritic Baal Cycle, in which El presides at a careful distance while younger, more active gods such as Baal contend directly with one another and occasionally test or offend the patriarch's own household.

The Hittite adaptation demonstrates that El's specific profile, an aged, authoritative creator-patriarch who presides over disputes rather than fighting them himself, travelled successfully across a real linguistic and cultural boundary from a West Semitic religious milieu into an Indo-European-speaking Anatolian one, evidence that El's particular theological character, and not merely his name, was recognized and considered worth preserving by scribes working in an entirely different language and religious tradition centuries before the Ugaritic tablets that give us our fullest picture of El were inscribed.