Canaanite and Phoenician Religion

For centuries the gods of Canaan were known almost only through their enemies. The Hebrew Bible names Baal, Asherah and Astarte mainly to condemn them, and Greek and Roman writers added scattered, often hostile notes on the Phoenicians. That changed in 1928, when a farmer ploughing near Ras Shamra on the Syrian coast struck the stone of an ancient tomb. Excavations led by the French archaeologist Claude Schaeffer began the following year and uncovered Ugarit, a rich Bronze Age port city, along with its archives.

The tablets were written in an unknown script: cuneiform wedges on clay, but only thirty signs, an alphabet. Within a year, Hans Bauer, Édouard Dhorme and Charles Virolleaud had deciphered it, and the language proved to be a Semitic tongue close to Hebrew and Phoenician. Most of the texts date from the thirteenth and early twelfth centuries BCE, shortly before the city was destroyed around 1185 BCE, an event that baked and buried its clay archives.

“Canaanite” is a broad term. Scholars use it for the peoples of the Bronze Age Levant and their culture, while the coastal cities of the Iron Age, such as Byblos, Sidon and Tyre, are usually called Phoenician. Ugarit stood at the northern edge of this world and had its own local traditions, but its gods and myths overlap closely with what is known of Canaanite and Phoenician religion further south.

At the head of the Ugaritic gods sat El, the aged father, wise and kindly, who lived in a tent where the rivers rise and presided over the assembly of the gods. His consort Athirat, known in the Bible as Asherah, was the mother of the gods. Below them were younger deities, of whom the most active was Baal, the storm god, also called Hadad, the “Rider of the Clouds” whose voice was thunder and whose rain made the land fertile.

The great myth of Ugarit, the Baal Cycle, recorded by the scribe Ilimilku, tells how Baal won his place. First he fought Yam, the Sea, who demanded to be king, and defeated him with magic clubs forged by the craftsman god Kothar-wa-Khasis. Then he gained a palace of his own on Mount Zaphon. Finally he faced Mot, Death, and went down into his throat; the earth dried up until his sister Anat sought him out, defeated Mot and Baal returned to life. Many scholars read the cycle as a reflection of the seasons and of the struggle between rain and drought, though it is also a story about divine kingship and order.

Other texts, the Epic of Kirta and the Story of Aqhat, tell of kings and heroes who seek heirs, receive the blessing of El and suffer at the hands of jealous gods. Together they show a religion concerned with fertility, family, royal legitimacy and the boundary between life and death.

The Phoenician cities inherited these gods and added their own. Byblos honoured its Lady, Baalat Gebal; Sidon the healing god Eshmun; Tyre its city king Melqart. In Carthage, founded by settlers from Tyre, the leading pair were Baal Hammon and the goddess Tanit.

Ugaritic ritual texts read almost like calendars. They specify which sheep, oxen, birds, wine or oil should be offered to which god on which day, often by the king, who also purified himself and the city. Two temples, to Baal and to a god called Dagan, stood on the acropolis of Ugarit. Elsewhere in the Levant people also worshipped at open-air sanctuaries with altars and standing stones.

Religious feasting was important. The marzeah was an association whose members met to eat and drink in honour of a god, a custom known from Ugarit to Phoenicia and criticised by the prophet Amos. Ugaritic texts also invoke the Rephaim, the royal dead, who received offerings and in return blessed the reigning king.

The most debated Phoenician rite concerns the tophet. At Carthage and other western sites, open-air precincts held thousands of urns containing the burned bones of infants and young animals, under stones dedicated to Baal Hammon and Tanit; many historians, following ancient writers, interpret them as evidence of child sacrifice in times of crisis, while others argue that the precincts were burial grounds for children who died naturally.

The relation of all this to ancient Israel has been studied closely. Many scholars now think that Israel emerged from within Canaanite society, sharing its language and much of its culture. The Bible uses El as a name for God and draws on poetic images known from Ugarit, such as the defeat of the sea monster Leviathan, while its prophets and laws reject the worship of Baal and Asherah and call for loyalty to Yahweh alone. Jewish and Christian traditions understand that call as the heart of biblical monotheism; historians trace how it developed over the centuries.

Ugarit itself vanished around 1185 BCE, but Canaanite religion lived on in the Phoenician cities and their colonies. Phoenician sailors and traders carried their gods to Cyprus, Sicily, Sardinia, Spain and North Africa, often merging them with local cults. Over time Greek and Roman culture absorbed them too: Melqart became Herakles, Astarte was linked with Aphrodite, and Eshmun with Asclepius.

After Rome destroyed Carthage in 146 BCE, Punic religion did not disappear. In Roman North Africa Baal Hammon was worshipped as Saturn, often with Punic features, into the third century CE. In the Levant, temples such as those at Baalbek and Byblos continued to honour old gods under Greek and Roman names until Christianity became dominant in the fourth and fifth centuries.

Much remains uncertain. The Ugaritic texts come from one city over a short period, and they say little about the beliefs of ordinary people or how the myths were used in worship. Phoenician religion is known mostly from brief dedications on stone and from Greek and Roman writers, who often explained foreign gods in terms of their own. Even Philo of Byblos, who claimed to translate an ancient Phoenician sage, wrote in Greek more than a thousand years after Ugarit fell, and scholars weigh his account with care. The picture of Canaanite religion is therefore built from fragments, and new finds continue to change it.

Canaanite traces survive in words and names. The Phoenician alphabet, passed to the Greeks, lies behind most alphabets used today. Biblical names that contain El, such as Israel and Daniel, share a common word for god with Canaanite texts. Carthaginian names like Hannibal, “Baal is gracious”, preserve the god’s title. And the tablets of Ugarit, read again after three thousand years, have changed the way scholars understand the world of the Hebrew Bible.