In Canaanite myth, the storm god is swallowed by Death and the rains stop
In a myth recovered from clay tablets at Ugarit, the storm god Baal roars a challenge from his new palace window. Mot, the god of death, climbs in and swallows him, and drought grips the world until the war goddess Anat hunts Mot down and Baal returns with the rain.
Canaanite religion was practised across the southern Levant for roughly three millennia BCE. It was polytheistic, shaped by Egyptian and Mesopotamian neighbours, and headed by the creator god El and his consort Asherah, with Baal, Anat, Astarte and Dagon among the other major deities. Worship involved animal sacrifice, shrines and sacred groves, and the dead were honoured: Canaanites believed the soul departed to the land of Mot, and families left food and drink so that dead relatives would not trouble the living, sometimes asking them for help.
For a long time almost everything known came from the Hebrew Bible and a few later Greek writers. Archaeology changed that. Clay tablets from Ebla in Syria, written in the later part of the 3rd millennium BCE, list offerings to El, Baal and Dagon. The richest source, texts from Ugarit near Ras Shamra, dated around 1275 BCE, runs to more than three hundred documents: myths, prayers, hymns, lists of sacrifices and omens. Even so, none of the tablets found since 1928 contains an account of creation, and knowledge remains patchy.
In the Baal Cycle, Baal first defeats the sea god Yam with two magic weapons, called Driver and Chaser, forged by the craftsman god Kothar-wa-Khasis. The death and return of Baal, and the drought that accompanies his absence, tie the storm god's fate directly to the farming year.
The religion branched and travelled. Many scholars count Israelite Yahwism among the Canaanite religions and the Israelites as a Canaanite people, though the Hebrew Bible draws a sharp line between them. Phoenician colonists carried their gods west, and Punic worship in places such as Carthage continued after Roman conquest, in some cases into the 4th century CE. In the Hellenistic era Greek religion blended with local cults rather than replacing them, and Canaanite deities took on the names of their Greek counterparts.
Source: Canaanite religion
