Baal, the storm god, has gone down the throat of Death. His sister Anat finds Death, splits him with a sword, winnows him, burns him, grinds him and sows him in the field. Then El dreams that the heavens rain oil.
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The Baal Cycle is the great myth of Ugarit. Across six tablets Baal, the storm god, fights Yam, the Sea, and wins; begs El and Athirat for a palace and builds one of cedar and gold; then challenges Mot, Death, and is swallowed. The land dries up. His sister Anat searches for him, seizes Death and destroys him like a harvest, and El, the old father of the gods, dreams that Baal lives. The press starts with Tablet 6: Anat and Death, and El’s dream.
Ugarit was a rich port on the Syrian coast, burned around 1185 BC. In 1928 a farmer’s plough opened a tomb nearby, and from 1929 French excavators found the city and, in the house of its high priest, clay tablets written in an unknown alphabet of thirty wedge-letters. Hans Bauer, Édouard Dhorme and Charles Virolleaud deciphered it in 1930. The scribe who wrote the Baal tablets signed his name: Ilimilku, pupil of the chief priest, in the reign of King Niqmaddu.
Baal’s title zbl, “the Prince”, comes back in the Bible as Baal-zebub of Ekron and in the Gospels as Beelzebul, prince of demons. The seven-headed serpent he killed is Lotan, the Leviathan of Isaiah 27:1. And Isaiah 25:8 turns Death’s great swallowing around: God “will swallow up death”.
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