Trent and Rebekah Dutton both hold master's degrees in Biblical Archaeology from Wheaton College, in the Chicago, IL area. They will soon participate in their fourth full season of excavations with The Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon, Israel, and the initial survey season of Tel Shimron in the Jezreel Valley.

ARCHAEOLOGY

"Then the children of Israel again did evil in the sight of the Lord, and served the Baals and the Ashtoreths, … they forsook the Lord and did not serve Him" (Judg. 10:6).

The Biblical narrative never hid the fact that the people of Israel had a roving eye for deities-all despite Yahweh's declaration that He was the One God. Foremost among these gods were the two specifically named: Ba'al and Asherah. Yet, until 1928 AD, even these named deities were shrouded in mystery.

But, in that year, excavations of Ras Shamra in modern-day Syria began, revealing the city-state of Ugarit (pronounced Oo-gar-it), a wealthy coastal power that was utterly destroyed around the year 1200 BC. Excavations revealed a rich culture, featuring, among other things, one of the earliest alphabetic scripts and a short-lived language closely related to Ancient Hebrew. This similarity led to the speedy translation of ritual texts detailing the adventures and misadventures of Ugarit's deities, especially El, Asherah, and Ba'al.

The Ugaritic pantheon, which was also adopted by the Canaanites, was ruled by El. Like the terms El and Elohim in the Hebrew Bible, this term was equivalent to the title "god." This El of Ugarit, however, also answered to other names-Gracious One, Father, and The Bull. El was the chief of the gods, living in the mountains of the north with his sprawling family of offspring and wives, both human and divine. Though he was patriarch of the pantheon, he was also rather lecherous and given to much wine. Representations of El are usually in the form of a male standing atop a mature bull, or often just a bull image.¹

And, naturally, the virile father boasted a fertile consort: The goddess Asherah. She was the mother of 70 divine sons and she nursed kings, gods, and princes. This was a distinctly domestic goddess, plying the loom and dwelling at home. She represented the fertility of humanity and the accompanying sensual passions. She was also one of the most popular deities of the Ancient Near East, and her images and cults are found as far away as Egypt. She was known as the Lady of the Sea, Progenitress of the Gods, and, simply, Holiness. Yet, she is never paired with the other god of fertility, Ba'al. They are only agents of related concerns. Asherah was depicted as goddess alone or with lions, or even just a lion. However, she was also represented by the Tree of Life-drawings of fruitful trees, and possibly living trees or wooden images (the groves and ashtaroth/asherahs of the Hebrew Bible).

While El was the patriarch and chief of the gods, Ba'al was their king, reigning from his palace on Zaphon. Nor was he the son of El, but rather of Dagan the god of wheat. Although Ba'al was a god of fertility, he had less to do with human fertility than he did with the fertility of the land. He was god of the storm and rain-a commodity eagerly sought after in a land of only seasonal rains. Even his wives (or daughters, depending on the translation) were aspects of precipitation and growth: Pidray (Dew), Tallay (Showers), and Artsay (Earth). Ba'al, in the famous Ba'al Cycle, was called the Cloud Rider, who rode the storms and walked over the mountains, whose voice made the earth shake, and who defeated the sea, Yam. He is often depicted as man striding across water, one arm raised to smite with his mace, the other clutching wheat, or just by his pedestal animal, the bull calf.

Israel's fascination with Ba'al and his powers are blatantly mocked in the psalms, where the writer appropriates the imagery of hymns to Ba'al to remind God's people that what they would attribute to a false god is actually the work of the One God. Note especially Psalm 77:16-19-"The waters saw thee, O God, the waters saw thee; they were afraid: the depths also were troubled. The clouds poured out water: the skies sent out a sound: thine arrows also went abroad. The voice of thy thunder was in the heaven. The lightnings lightened the world. The earth trembled and shook. Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters..." Of course, one cannot ignore the deliberate play on words in verse 13 as well: "What god [El] is great like God [Elohim]?"

The discovery of this ancient mythology at Ras Shamra has enriched our reading of the Biblical texts. Now we not only know who El, Ba'al, and Asherah were, we can understand how they were perceived to operate and even how they were imagined to appear. And yet, the prophet reminds us in Habbakuk 2:19-20, that in these images "there is no breath at all. But the LORD is in His holy temple."

¹ A single animal, such as a bull, a calf, a lion, or a composite animal often represented a "pedestal animal," or the base upon which the god, though unseen, was actually standing. These images were understood to both represent the deity and signal his or her presence.