The Baal Cycle
In the Canaanite religion, or Levantine religion as a whole, Ēl or Il was the supreme God, the Father of humankind and all creatures and the husband of the Goddess Asherah as recorded in the clay tablets of Ugarit (modern Ra′s Shamrā, Syria).
The noun ʾEl was found at the top of a list of Gods as the “Ancient of Gods” or the “Father of all Gods”, in the ruins of the royal archive of the Ebla civilization, in the archaeological site of Tell Mardikh in Syria dated to 2300 BC.
The bull was symbolic to Ēl and his son Baʻal Hadad, and they both wore bull horns on their headdress. He may have been a desert god at some point, as the myths say that he had two wives and built a sanctuary with them and his new children in the desert. Ēl had fathered many gods, but most important were Hadad, a Northwest Semitic storm and rain god, cognate in name and origin with the earlier attested East Semitic Akkadian (Assyrian-Babylonian) god Adad, Yam, the god of the sea, and Mot, personified as a god of death, each share similar attributes to the Greco-Roman Gods: Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades respectively.
The Baal Cycle is a Ugaritic cycle of stories about the Canaanite god Baal, also known as Hadad the god of rain, storm and fertility. They are written in Ugaritic, a language written in a cuneiform alphabet, on a series of clay tablets found in the 1920s in the Tell of Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra), situated on the Mediterranean coast of northern Syria, a few kilometers north of the modern city of Latakia, far ahead of the now known coast.
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