A storm-god rising, a sea-god demanding tribute, and a seven-headed serpent twisting beneath the deep. But does this ancient Ugaritic myth reveal a forgotten shared memory behind the Bible?

What we talk about in this episode:

📜 The Characters & the Tablets
• Baal, El, Asherah, Anat, Mot, Yamm, Shapash, Kothar-wa-Hasis
• Why the Baal Cycle survives in fragments — and what we can still reconstruct
• Ugaritic as a linguistic cousin to Hebrew (think American vs. Australian English centuries apart)

⚔️ Baal’s Rise & Fall
• Baal vs. Yamm: the storm-god defeating the sea-god
• Baal’s cedar palace and why kingship required a temple
• Baal vs. Mot: death, drought, resurrection, and the cosmic cycle of life

🐍 The Seven-Headed Serpent & Shared Motifs
• Lotan/Leviathan parallels: Isaiah 27, Revelation, Ninurta, and chaos-dragon traditions
• Influence vs. shared memory — the real methodological question scholars avoid

🏺 Biblical & Linguistic Parallels
• El in a tent vs. Yahweh in a tabernacle
• Messenger motifs, storm-god imagery, and the “Cloud Rider” theme
• THMT in the Baal Cycle debunking the Tiamat = tehom claim

🔥 A Surprising Twist: YW in the Baal Cycle?
• A deity named “Yw” appears as El’s son — strikingly close to the root of Yahweh
• Not proof, but a possibility that critical scholarship rarely acknowledges

🎙️ Plus: Methodology, logical consistency, and why parallels alone don’t prove borrowing.

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Sources:

Mark S. Smith
Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts
God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World

Michael David Coogan
Stories from Ancient Canaan

Simon B. Parker (ed.)
Ugaritic Narrative Poetry
—with contributions by: Mark Smith, Dennis Pardee, et al.

John Hayes
A Manual of Sumerian Grammar and Texts