Place · Syria, Mesopotamia and Persia
Ugarit
Ancient names: Ugarit
A Syrian coastal city whose texts preserve languages, myths and deities close to ancient Canaan's cultural setting.
35.6028°N 35.7853°E · representative coordinate · Pleiades 668455 ↗
Statements linked to this place
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Hundreds of texts from the ancient Syrian city-state of Ugarit, prosperous in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE, are among the best sources on Canaanite culture before Israel. The Ugaritians did not live in Canaan, but their culture, religion and mythology were related to those of the Canaanites: El, the supreme creator deity; Asherah, his consort; and Baal, a warrior god tied to fertility.
Ugaritic literature describes its gods in ways parallel to the Bible's God, who receives titles of El or Baal (in Genesis 14:19 he is 'El Elyon', El the Most High). There are also parallels in ritual and literary form, such as poetic parallelism, in which the two halves of a line correspond.
Psalm 89 and other psalms have parallels in Ugarit: the 'holy ones' convene in assemblies, like the one in which Baal meets the gods before confronting Yam, the Sea; Yahweh's subjugation of the sea parallels Baal's victory; the dragon Lotan, whom Baal fights, corresponds to the monster Rahab of the psalm and to Leviathan, a variant of Lotan (Psalm 74). Mount Zaphon in northern Syria, Baal's home, resembles the Bible's holy mountains and above all Zion, and the Bible transfers the name 'Zaphon' to Zion in Psalm 48.