A Buried City Changed What Was Known

Before the 1928 discovery and subsequent excavation of Ugarit, an ancient city on the Syrian coast, almost everything known about Canaanite religion came through the Hebrew Bible, a source written by a rival religious tradition that consistently portrayed Canaanite worship in polemical, negative terms as a temptation to be resisted rather than described neutrally on its own terms, meaning scholars previously had essentially no access to Canaanite religion in anything like its own voice.

The Ugaritic tablets recovered from that site, written in a Semitic language closely related to biblical Hebrew and including major mythological texts such as the Keret Epic and the Baal Cycle alongside more strictly ritual material, transformed the field by finally providing a body of Canaanite religious text composed by Canaanites themselves for their own religious purposes, allowing scholars for the first time to compare the Hebrew Bible's hostile portrayal of Canaanite religion against the tradition's own surviving self-description. This comparison has proven immensely valuable for biblical scholarship specifically, since Ugaritic material illuminates poetic conventions, religious vocabulary and mythological themes that also appear, often transformed or polemically inverted, within the Hebrew Bible itself.