488 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1937 



summer and rose to life with the returning rains ; his consort is Anat, 

 and his perpetual enemy is Mot, god of the death of vegetation, while 

 Shapsh, goddess of the sun, often comes to support him. There are 

 many other deities, some of whom have not appeared in the myths, 

 but are mentioned in lists of sacrifices or of gods; such are Rashp, 

 Athtart, a possible Milkam (Biblical Milkom?), all known from the 

 Bible (where Astarte, i. e., Athtart, is the consort of Baal). There 

 are genii who serve the gods, e. g., the divine constructor Kathar-Hasis 

 (a double name "able-and-understanding"), mentioned in Sanchuni- 

 athon as Chusor. And there is a general divine population, the Bane 

 Ilim (cf., the Biblical Bne Elohim). All live on the heights of Sapun 

 ("North"), the Olympus of this pantheon, which is Mount Casius, 

 north of Ras Shamra; cf. here T}tc's "Holy Mount" in Ezekiel 28: 14, 

 and "Mount Zion in the Recesses of the North (Saphon)" in Psalms 

 48: 3. It is revealing to find here a reference to the mythical Leviathan 

 (Lotan) in almost the exact words used of him in the Bible, and a long 

 legend about Danil, who must bo the Canaanite myth hero referred 

 to in Ezekiel 14: 14 and used as model for the Biblical story of Daniel. 



The mythological poems tell of the struggle between Aliyan and 

 Mot, and the death and resurrection of Aliyan Baal — this is the wide- 

 spread Adonis myth. There is a myth of the building of Aliyan's 

 divine temple (perhaps recited at the completion of his temple in 

 Ugarit), and one of the victory of Aliyan, as Jjord of the Land, over the 

 gods of the Sea. There is a myth of the marriage of the moon gods, 

 Yarih and Nikkal, and one of the birth of the "Gracious Gods." 



Parts of these myths can be read with case, but because of our lack 

 of knowledge of their background, and our frequent inability to fathom 

 their exact meaning, much is uncertain even now. There have been 

 attempts to read these poems as historical traditions, and to prove 

 from them that the Phoenicians came north to the Phoenician-Syrian 

 coast from the south of Palestine where they had originally dwelt. 

 The evidence proposed was the identification of south Palestine names 

 in the poems, but most of these identifications cannot be defended; 

 many are accidental similarities and must, for the sense of the poems, 

 be interpreted otliennse. The renderings of the poems by such men 

 as Professors Albright, Montgomery, and Ginsberg leave no room for 

 their interpretation as historical traditions. Even more erroneous is 

 the attempt to identify ttie origin of the Hebrew people uath this as- 

 sumed south Palestine Phoenician center. There is no archeological 

 evidence for placing the Phoenicians there, and as to the forebears of 

 the Hebrew people, we have good evidence that they were not of the 

 Canaanite group but entered Palestine for the most part during the 

 middle of the second millennium. This divergence of interpretations 

 reveals once more how little one can trust one's reading of a text, how 

 easy it is to read into it unintentionally but effectively any ideas to 



