El at Ugarit is old. He is the father of years, the bull, the kindly one and the compassionate, the creator of creatures, and he lives at the source of the two rivers, at the confluence of the deeps. He presides over the assembly of the gods, who are called his sons. He does not fight. Baal fights, Anat fights, and El grants, consents, decrees and weeps; the Baal Cycle turns on who can persuade him. He is a patriarch rather than a champion.
The complication is that el is also simply the Semitic common noun for a god, and Hebrew uses it both ways. The names Israel, Ishmael, Michael, Daniel, Bethel and Elijah all contain it. The Hebrew Bible attaches to its god a series of compound titles built on it, El Shaddai, El Elyon, El Olam, El Roi, and Genesis has Jacob build an altar and name it for the god of Israel using the same word. The plural elohim is the ordinary word for God throughout.
So the question arises unavoidably, and it is among the most argued in the field: is the god of Israel a development of the Canaanite El? The evidence adduced for it includes the shared epithets, the fact that the Hebrew Bible never polemicises against El as it does relentlessly against Baal, and Deuteronomy 32:8-9, where a text preserved at Qumran and in the Greek has Elyon divide the nations according to the number of the sons of God and assign Jacob to Yahweh as his portion, which reads as Yahweh receiving a share from a higher god; the Masoretic text reads sons of Israel instead. Against it stand the arguments that Yahweh shows storm-god characteristics closer to Baal's, that a southern origin is indicated by the older poetry placing him at Sinai, Seir and Teman, and that shared vocabulary across a language family proves less than it appears to.
Positions range from full identification through gradual merger to substantial independence, and none commands consensus. What is not in dispute is that the two can no longer be discussed separately.