ANCIENT Canaanite ORIGINS For Gods Of The BIBLE Will BLOW Your Mind
In the beginning, the world existed under a shadow of impending doom, held hostage by a terrible, ancient dragon. This beast, possessing seven heads that vomited forth relentless floodwaters, sought to submerge the entirety of existence until nothing remained but the abyss. The Council of the gods found itself in complete disarray, utterly overwhelmed by the sheer, crushing power of this twisting, chaotic monster. Hope seemed lost until, finally, one of the younger, ambitious deities stepped forward to offer a bold proposition to the Divine Council. He promised that he would single-handedly slay the dragon, provided that they would elevate him to the rank of King over the entire pantheon. The council, desperate and seeing no other recourse, agreed to his terms.
The young god prepared himself for the climactic battle. He armed himself with arrows forged from concentrated lightning and mounted his war chariot, driving it outward from the hallowed heights of the mountain of the gods. As he descended, dark and turbulent storm clouds rushed across the surface of the sea, exploding with deafening thunder as he launched his lightning bolts directly at the dragon. The battle was cataclysmic, but in the end, the god emerged as the undisputed victor. With a final, devastating blow, he shattered the dragon’s massive body and crushed its seven heads.
This is the foundational story of the biblical God, Yahweh, triumphing over the primordial dragon Leviathan. Yet, it is also the story of the Canaanite god Baal Hadad, as well as several other deities worshipped by the various cultures that surrounded ancient Israel. Within the region of Ugarit, the biblical narrative claims that when the Creator God—most frequently addressed by the names Yahweh and Elohim—assisted the Hebrew people in their desperate escape from slavery in Egypt, he made a solemn promise. He vowed that he would bestow upon them a land to call their own, provided that they committed themselves to the worship of him alone.
The ancient world was filled with polytheistic traditions, yet the Hebrews were instructed to become strict monotheists. Upon receiving this promise, Yahweh led the Hebrews toward the land of Canaan. There, the biblical account describes a campaign where they nearly exterminated the native population and established their own kingdom. Not long after the founding of the Hebrew kingdom, it faced a bitter, internal civil war, splitting into two distinct entities: the Kingdom of Israel in the north and the Kingdom of Judah in the south.
Over the next several centuries, the Israelite and Judean kingdoms were repeatedly seduced by the practices of their pagan neighbors, turning their backs on their monotheistic vows to worship other deities. Furious at this recurring betrayal of their ancestral covenant, Yahweh punished the two kingdoms. First, he allowed the Israelites to be conquered by an invading enemy nation, and later, he exacted the same judgment upon the judeans. The Jewish survivors eventually resettled their lost kingdom, this time with a fervent, renewed commitment to preserving their promise of strict monotheism.
In the early 20th century, archaeologists made a monumental discovery when they stumbled across the ruins of Ugarit, an ancient city located in modern-day Syria. There, they uncovered hundreds of tablets and texts written between the 14th and 12th centuries BCE. These Ugaritic texts were composed in a language that is remarkably closely related to Biblical Hebrew, yet they predated any written book found within the Bible by hundreds of years.
Scholars soon realized that the Ugaritic pantheon was, in fact, the Canaanite pantheon. Rather than relying solely on the accounts provided by the Hebrew writers—who often painted the Canaanites in a deeply damning light—we were finally able to read the Canaanite stories in their own words. What emerged was a startling revelation: the so-called biblical religion was far less monotheistic than the Bible’s authors would have their readers believe. Contrary to the standard biblical narrative, the overwhelming consensus among modern historians is that no such massive Exodus from Egypt ever took place. Instead, the ancient Israelites and judeans were, in truth, a pair of subcultures that emerged naturally from within the broader Canaanite society. The Hebrews were, historically speaking, Canaanites themselves. They were not original monotheists who fell into the trap of polytheism; rather, they were polytheists from the very beginning of their existence as a people.
The precise historical origins of Yahweh remain a subject of intense academic debate. However, based on the evidence gathered from Ugarit, other troves of rediscovered ancient documents, and the fragmented, often contradictory stories still present within the Bible, the prevailing theory is that the worship of Yahweh originated somewhere in the regions of Midian or Edom. From there, it gradually migrated northward into the lands of Israel and Judah. Initially, Yahweh was fully integrated into the Canaanite pantheon as a storm and warrior god, bearing a striking resemblance to the existing Canaanite god Baal Hadad.
As the followers of Yahweh gained sociopolitical power and influence over the following centuries, they began to assign to him attributes, legends, and stories that had originally belonged to other gods within the Canaanite pantheon. Ultimately, the worship of any deities other than Yahweh was suppressed by powerful cultural and religious leaders. This movement included deliberate, systematic attempts to edit the books of the Bible, either by altering or entirely removing any passage that contained a positive reference to other gods. However, this effort was only partially successful. Digging beneath the surface of the biblical text reveals the underlying polytheistic worldview of ancient Israel.
The Father of the Gods, as depicted in the Ugaritic literature, sat at the very top of the Canaanite pantheon. He was a deity whose name, El, essentially means “God.” El was addressed by a variety of titles; one of the most prominent was El Elyon, which translates to “Most High.” Another was Shaddai, which has traditionally been translated as “Almighty.” The consort of El was a powerful goddess named Asherah. Together, El and Asherah were identified as the divine parents of the 70 gods who comprised the core of the pantheon. According to this theological tradition, the human world consisted of 70 distinct nations, and each god was assigned one of these nations to rule as their own personal domain. We see a reflection of this concept in the tenth chapter of the Book of Genesis, which claims that humanity separated into 70 nations following the flood of Noah.
In the historical narrative of the Hebrew Bible, which spans from the Book of Genesis through the Book of Kings, we find various poems and songs that are rooted in archaic linguistic features. Some of these are considered by many scholars to be the oldest components of the entire Bible. One such example is found in Deuteronomy 32, where we read a fascinating statement: “When El Elyon distributed the nations, when he divided the sons of man, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of the gods. The share of Yahweh was his people, Jacob, the portion of his inheritance.”
In the blank spaces of this text, different manuscripts and translations fill in different words. The standard Hebrew text commonly says “sons of Israel,” but different ancient Greek copies translate these lines as “angels of God” or “sons of God.” Disagreeing with the Hebrew version, other ancient copies of the verse specifically refer to “gods,” “sons of God,” or “sons of the gods.” One must ask: what did the text originally say? There was clearly some form of the Hebrew word for God—whether it was El, Elohim, Elim, or Israel. When these alternate versions are analyzed and the reasoning behind their discrepancies is considered, the evidence strongly points to an original version that stated the nations were sorted out “according to the sons of El.”
Amid this divine assignment of nations to the gods of El’s pantheon, Yahweh received the Hebrew nation, referred to here as Jacob. The natural, logical implication is that when this poem was first composed, Yahweh was identified as one of the sons of El. He was merely one god among many. However, the author of the poem in Deuteronomy 32 believed that Yahweh was rapidly ascending in power and therefore deserved special recognition. This is further evidenced by the command: “Praise, oh heavens, his people, worship him, all you gods.”
The short Psalm 82 also refers to the role of Israel’s God within the context of the wider pantheon. The psalm begins: “Elohim has taken his place in the assembly of El; among the gods, he holds judgment. How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? Selah.” The psalm continues with a plea to “judge for the weak and the orphan, give justice for the lowly and the destitute, rescue the weak and the needy, deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”
The text then highlights the incompetence of the other gods: “They do not know nor understand; they walk around in darkness; all the foundations of the Earth are shaken. I say, ‘You are gods, sons of El Elyon, all of you; nevertheless, you shall die like men and fall like one of the princes.’ Rise up, Elohim, judge the Earth, for all the nations belong to you.”
The author sets the scene with Yahweh—often interchangeable with Elohim—sitting as a member of the Assembly of El. This assembly is closely related to the Ugaritic term for the pantheon’s council. Yahweh addresses the other members of this assembly, whom the psalm explicitly identifies as “gods” and “sons of El Elyon.” Yahweh accuses these other gods, his peers, of a severe sin: they have utterly failed to enforce true justice in the world. Their punishment is essentially a death sentence. Despite being gods, they will die like men, and their nations will be stripped from them and given to Yahweh to rule with justice.
Similarly, in Exodus 12:12, Yahweh vows to punish the gods of Egypt for allowing the Hebrews to have been enslaved by the Pharaoh, declaring: “For I will pass through the land of Egypt on this night and I will slay the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from man to animals, and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments; I am Yahweh.” The author’s message here assumes the essential truth of the Canaanite worldview. He does not challenge the underlying idea that nations are ruled by various gods, nor does he deny that Yahweh was once just one member of that same pantheon. Instead, the central point of the passage seems to be the author’s recognition that the sociopolitical strength of Yahweh’s following had grown so significantly that the other deities were now deemed unworthy of worship. The psalm unwittingly provides a window into the historical development of Yahweh worship as an emergent subculture within the broader Canaanite religion.
This exaltation of Yahweh over the pantheon is reflected in other parts of the Bible, although often in a less overt fashion. The people living in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah possessed a wide variety of stories concerning the distant past. These included myths detailing the creation of the world, legends regarding ancient heroes, and folktales about noble or clever ancestors who were granted divine favor. When these diverse oral traditions were eventually collected and edited into a single, cohesive historical narrative, the result was a work filled with contradictions between competing versions, often appearing within the very same books.
According to one particular tradition, the Creator God was exclusively known to humanity by names such as El, El Shaddai, or Elohim. Sources such as Genesis 1:1, 17:1, 28:3, 31:13, and 35:11 suggest that he revealed his true name, Yahweh, only after he summoned Moses to act as his prophet during the Exodus. In Exodus 6:2–3, we read: “Elohim also spoke to Moses and said to him, ‘I am Yahweh. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make myself known to them by my name, Yahweh.'” This statement directly contradicts another, competing tradition which maintained that humanity had known the Creator God by the name Yahweh from the very beginning. In that second tradition, the patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—repeatedly call him Yahweh, and when this God summons Moses to be his prophet, he simply identifies himself as the same Yahweh known to those patriarchs.
The first tradition corresponds to another significant historical development in Israelite theology—a logical progression following the ideas presented in Psalm 82. The followers of Yahweh clung to ancient stories in which their ancestors worshipped the Canaanite god El. Yet, over time, as the importance of Yahweh within the pantheon increased, this group eventually concluded that Yahweh was, in reality, simply another name for El. This led to the invention of the claim in Exodus 6 as an attempt to resolve the apparent incongruity. It was not a linear or universally accepted process; some worshippers of Yahweh believed he was El, while others did not hold such a belief. The contradiction between the two versions of the ancestral stories only became a glaring problem when they were combined during the editing of what we now call the books of Genesis and Exodus.
The merging of Yahweh and El meant that Yahweh was now viewed as the head of the pantheon, the “God of gods.” This could also imply that El’s consort, Asherah, was now the consort of Yahweh, though her presence in this specific role is notably absent from the Bible. What few references to her exist are almost exclusively negative, focusing on the condemnation of Asherah worship and the destruction of the Asherim—the ritual objects associated with her. However, some archaeological discoveries challenge this narrative, such as a 10th-century BCE cult stand found at Taanach that depicts Asherah alongside Yahweh. Furthermore, 9th-century BCE inscriptions found at Kuntillet Ajrud mention an “Asherah ritual object which belongs to Yahweh.”
Given the blending of Yahweh and El, one might wonder if there are other references to the pantheon within the Hebrew Bible. Genesis 6 opens with the “sons of God” taking human women as their wives, and the Book of Job begins with the “sons of Elohim” assembling in front of Yahweh, their ruler. Another notable example is found in Deuteronomy 4:19–20: “And when you look up to the heavens and see the sun, the moon, and the stars, all the hosts of heaven, do not be led astray and bow down to them and serve them, things that Yahweh your God has allotted to all the peoples everywhere under heaven. But Yahweh has taken you and brought you out of the iron smelter, out of Egypt, to become a people of his very own possession, as you are now.”
For this author, the existence of other gods is taken as an absolute, unquestioned reality. Even the worship of these other gods by all the peoples everywhere under heaven is merely frowned upon or forbidden for the Israelites. Instead, the author’s primary point is that the Hebrews were uniquely restricted to worshiping a single God, Yahweh. It is the same theological concept found in Deuteronomy 32, except the theology has developed to a point where Yahweh is no longer one of many members within the pantheon, but its supreme ruler. Yahweh was the one who assigned the nations to the other gods, while he reserved the Hebrews for himself.
With the existence of the Canaanite pantheon assumed by various biblical authors, readers might expect to find direct references to those gods, at least occasionally, in the Bible. This is exactly what we find. There are several passages that disparage the gods of the enemies of Israel and Judah, but there are others that demonstrate that Yahweh was not nearly as omnipotent as his followers might have hoped. In Judges 1:19–18, Yahweh’s promise to assist the Hebrews in battle is thwarted by the superior military technology of Israel’s enemies. Later, in 2 Kings 3, Yahweh likewise promises to help the Israelites and judeans win a battle against the Moabites—a promise he ultimately fails to keep. The reason? The Moabites offered the correct sacrifice to their own god. It appears that Yahweh was simply outmaneuvered on the divine battlefield by the Moabite god, Chemosh.
Various Canaanite gods are known to us today through the Ugaritic texts. Knowing their names from these older, external sources, we can identify several of them hidden within the Hebrew text of the Bible, though they have mostly been obscured by common English translations. In one myth, the storm god Baal Hadad is devoured by Mot, the god of death. Though Baal is eventually rescued, the story was intended to explain seasonal droughts: the rains provided by Baal were withheld because of his temporary departure to the underworld, a narrative parallel to the Greek myth of Hades and the abduction of Persephone.
In Isaiah 25, a prophecy written in the 8th or 7th centuries BCE, the author flips this myth on its head. In promising a triumphant future for the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the prophet declares: “On this mountain, Yahweh Sabaoth will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up Mot forever. Then the Lord Yahweh will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the Earth, for Yahweh has spoken.”
Instead of Mot devouring the storm god Baal Hadad—leading to agricultural failure—the storm god Yahweh will himself devour Mot, providing an immense feast for all peoples. Possible allusions to the death god Mot may also be found in Job 18:13: “The firstborn of Mot consumes their limbs,” or in Psalm 49:14: “Like sheep they are appointed for Sheol; Mot shall be their shepherd. Straight to the grave they descend, and their form shall waste away; Sheol shall be their home.”
A few chapters later in Isaiah, the author again borrows from the mythology of Baal Hadad. Rather than Baal slaying the dragon Lotan, it is Yahweh who kills Leviathan. Isaiah’s description of Leviathan is lifted almost word-for-word from the myth about Baal that survived at Ugarit: “Leviathan, the fleeing serpent, the twisting serpent; Lotan, the fleeing serpent, the twisting serpent.” The dragon Leviathan is mentioned multiple times in the Hebrew Bible, sometimes given the name Rahab. In some passages, Leviathan (or Rahab) is the primordial chaos monster that only Yahweh is capable of subduing. On other occasions, the dragon is minimized as a mere creation of Yahweh.
Two of the more obscure Canaanite deities were the siblings, Shalim and Shahar. Shalim was the god of dusk, while Shahar was the god of dawn. The name “Jerusalem” has been understood by the religiously devout as a Hebrew phrase meaning “city of peace.” Because of the city’s significant political importance for the Judean monarchy, different scribes devised competing origin stories for Jerusalem—such as the claim that it only received its name after David conquered the Canaanite tribe living there, or that it evolved from an older name during the time of a legendary priest-king named Melchizedek. In reality, Jerusalem had been known by its common name for several centuries before the rise of the Judean monarchy, as attested by Egyptian sources in the 14th century BCE and possibly even the 19th century. Its name is now widely agreed to mean “Foundation of Shalim,” named for the god of dusk. While Shalim is found across the entire Bible in an indirect way via the name Jerusalem, his sibling Shahar is mentioned just once, but in a passage that is clearly borrowing from an older, more elaborate mythology.
Isaiah 14:3–23 contains a prophecy directed against the king of an enemy nation. The king’s cruel arrogance earns him a sharp rebuke, and the prophet declares that the king will die a loathsome death and will not even receive a proper burial. To illustrate just how profoundly terrible the king’s fate is, the prophet draws a comparison with a rebellious heavenly being. Many English translations have watered down the mythological allusions made here, and centuries of Christian interpretation have made them even harder to notice: “How you are fallen from heaven, Helel, son of Shahar! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low! You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of El; I will sit on the mount of assembly on the heights of Zaphon; I will ascend to the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like El Elyon.’ But you are brought down to Sheol, to the depths of the pit.”
The father of the Canaanite pantheon, El Elyon, is mentioned twice. We have three references to the pantheon itself. First, we see the “stars of El”; remember from Deuteronomy 4 that stars were thought to be gods. Then, we have the “mount of assembly,” which parallels Ugaritic phrases used for the pantheon’s council. Third, the author mentions Zaphon, the name of the mountain where the gods would gather—a Canaanite equivalent to Mount Olympus from Greek mythology. The king himself is equated with a figure named Helel, son of Shahar. Shahar was himself a son of El, which would make Helel a grandson of El. The exact myth Isaiah is borrowing from remains lost to us today. Scholars have variously suggested connections to the gods Attar, Phathon, or Halalu, but it was clearly inspired by astrology. Venus, the star born from the dawn, attempts to exalt himself above other stars in the sky by remaining visible even in the light of day. Like Icarus, the minor god’s hubris led to his downfall by flying too close to the sun. Isaiah 14 assumes the reader will be familiar with the polytheistic myth underlying his rebuke of the king. Because of the obvious allusion to Venus, Greek copies of Isaiah 14 translated Helel’s name as Eosphoros, while Latin versions called him Lucifer, and Christians began interpreting the human king at the center of Isaiah’s prophecy as a fallen angel called the devil or Satan. This misunderstanding of Isaiah 14 bled over into Ezekiel 28, where we find a similar condemnation of a human king through the use of mythological references.
Elsewhere, Isaiah briefly mentions yet another god. Within the Ugaritic literature, we find references to Habby, an obscure god or demon from the underworld who frightens even El. Isaiah 26:20 mentions this Habby as instilling fear. The presence of other gods in Israelite and Judean culture is often difficult to notice in English translations of the Bible without access to explanatory footnotes. One notable example is Samson, whose story in the Book of Judges is a favorite for Sunday school. The titular judges were heroes in Hebrew society, rising up to protect their community from foreign enemies before the establishment of an Israelite or Judean monarchy. Among these heroes, Samson’s story is by far the most obviously mythological. His personality, his incredible strength, and his fantastic deeds have frequently earned comparisons to figures like Gilgamesh or Heracles. Like those demigods, Samson’s legend even begins with the story of his birth being announced by a mysterious visitor from heaven. Scholars have argued that the account shows signs of having been edited, possibly to sanitize an earlier version of the story where the heavenly visitor was, in fact, Samson’s father.
Samson’s story is set in the vicinity of the town Beth Shemesh, a name which means “House of Shamash,” the Canaanite sun god. Samson’s name in Hebrew, Shimshon, even comes from this god and means something like “little sun.” Samson’s enormous strength comes from growing his hair long, and ancient illustrations of the sun in this region of the world sometimes depicted the sun’s radiance as flowing hair. The chief antagonist of Samson’s story is the woman Delilah, whose name comes from the word “Laila,” which means “night.” Samson’s tragic downfall occurs when Delilah cuts his hair—the “little sun” is defeated when the “night” extinguishes his radiance.
Other gods sometimes overlooked in the Bible are the deities that protect important people or stand guard over holy places. The prophet Isaiah, living in the 8th century BCE, tells of six-winged snakes that serve Yahweh’s throne in his temple. Royal seals from the Judean king Hezekiah, who was Isaiah’s contemporary, likewise show four-winged snakes. These divine snake guardians in Judean iconography may have been remnants of Egyptian influence on Canaanite culture. Most books in the Hebrew Bible were written or edited after the Judean kingdom was conquered by the Babylonians. These books frequently mention divine beings called cherubs, which overshadow Isaiah’s snakes as the protectors of Yahweh’s throne and temple. Readers discover these minor gods had faces like humans but bodies like lions or bulls and wings like eagles. The cherubs were based on Mesopotamian deities called “lamassu,” which were engraved on temples and city walls. Some parts of the Bible also say that cherubs functioned as Yahweh’s throne, just as we find engravings of kings sitting on thrones carried by lamassu. Alongside this, the Hebrew and Greek words for “angel” both directly translate into English as “messenger.” An angel was merely a lesser god running errands for Yahweh, carrying out his orders.
In many ancient mythologies, the universe is not the creation of something from out of nothing. Instead, the universe sort of already exists and must be brought into order. The initial state of the world is, quite literally, an ocean of pure, chaotic emptiness from which the first primordial gods emerged. They create the world by bringing order to the chaos, forming the sky and the land, then fashioning plants and animals to inhabit those domains. The land is given firm boundaries, which the waters are not allowed to cross: “Bless Yahweh, oh my soul. Yahweh, my God, you are very great; you are clothed with honor and majesty, wrapped in light as with a garment. You stretch out the heavens like a tent; you set the beams of your chambers on the waters; you set the Earth on its foundations so that it shall never be shaken. You cover it with the deep as with a garment; the water stood above the mountains. At your rebuke, they flee; at the sound of your thunder, they take to flight. They rose up to the mountains, ran down to the valleys, to the place that you appointed for them. You set a boundary that they may not pass, so that they might not again cover the Earth.”
Often, the waters of chaos are personified as a god or a monster. For the Canaanites, Lotan fulfilled this role in his fight against Baal Hadad, but Lotan was actually a servant of the ocean god called Yam and Nahar—names which literally mean “sea” and “river.” One of the surviving Canaanite epics tells how, in the early ages of the world, El permitted Baal to become king of the gods after Baal and Yam fought for the position: “I tell you, oh Prince Baal, I declare, oh Rider of the Clouds. Now your enemy, oh Baal, now you will smite your enemy. Strike the head of Prince Yam between the eyes of Judge Nahar. Yam shall collapse and fall to the ground.”
One of Baal Hadad’s earliest appearances is in the Epic of Gilgamesh: “With the first glow of dawn, a black cloud rose up from the horizon. Inside it, Adad thunders, while Shullat and Hanish go in front, moving as heralds over hill and plain.” Seen here with the gods Shullat and Hanish, Baal was sometimes accompanied by other deities when he took action. These lesser gods, such as Resheph and Deber, sometimes show up in the Bible. Yet, “Man is born to trouble as the sons of Resheph fly upward” (Job 5:7). “You shall not be afraid of terror at night, nor of the arrow that flies in the day, nor of Deber who walks in darkness, nor of Keteb who lays waste at noon” (Psalm 91:5–6). As a storm god, Baal’s arsenal for war included his earth-shaking thunder, his arrows or spears made of lightning, and sometimes fire or hail. Coincidentally, the Bible shows Yahweh wielding the same weapons, such as in Psalm 18: “Yahweh also thundered in the heavens, and El Elyon uttered his voice, and he sent out his arrows and scattered them; he flashed forth lightnings and routed them.” The comparison between Baal and Yahweh is impossible to avoid.
Baal’s mythology predates anything in the Bible by hundreds of years, so the simplest explanation for these similarities between the two gods is that the followers of Yahweh copied from the mythology of Baal, sometimes word for word, as we saw in Isaiah 27. The historical situation appears to be that when the worship of Yahweh migrated from Midian or Edom northward into Canaan, the followers of Yahweh purposefully adapted the attributes and stories of Baal for their own god. This theory may also explain the deep rivalry between the followers of the two gods, as portrayed in the Bible. With our context firmly established, we find the poem in Chapter 3 of the Book of Habakkuk. This passage suffers from several scribal errors in the surviving Hebrew and Greek copies. Critical scholarship works hard to make sense of the chapter by seeking to explain where these errors came from, such as letters or words that sound the same or look the same having been mistaken for each other. Other words in Habakkuk 3 are extremely rare, making them difficult to translate because their meaning is so obscure.
But when these scholarly studies come together, the picture comes into focus, and the chapter makes a lot more sense. In this poem, the storm god Yahweh—also named Eloah—emerges from his home on his holy mountain in Edom. The worshippers of Yahweh are under threat, and he must save them. His thunder shakes the mountains. Yahweh is on the march, accompanied by Canaanite gods of disease and the underworld. “There was Hebron, the strong one; before him went Deber, and Resheph followed close behind.” The people of Cushan and Midian tremble in fear as Yahweh’s war party passes by. What is his enemy who has threatened his followers? It is Yam, the sea god. “Was your wrath against Nahar, oh Yahweh, or your anger against Nahar, or your rage against Yam, when you drove your horses, your chariots to victory?” Yahweh readies his bow to launch poison-tipped arrows. He prepares his bolts of lightning to throw like spears. His storm clouds blot out the sky as the gods of the sun and moon watch Yahweh’s battle against his enemies. “Shamash raised high by his hands, Yari stood still in his exalted place.”
Habakkuk 3 was written by an Israelite or Judean author for whom Yam, Hebron, Deber, Resheph, Shamash, and Yari were as real as Yahweh. The appearance of this diverse spread of Canaanite gods in such a dense cluster makes it essentially certain that the author accepted the existence of the many Canaanite gods unmentioned in the poem; he had no real reason to doubt that they existed.
After the Bible, as is the case with all spiritual belief systems, the religion of Yahweh evolved. The perpetual elevation of Yahweh eventually reached a point where he was believed to exist in a category all his own—as the god over all gods, the supreme creator of all things. He had no origin and so had no equal. For the people who believed this, it meant all those other gods were not really gods, not in the sense that Yahweh is. They were one of his many creations, a species we now commonly call angels, or perhaps some of those things we thought were gods were really just demons, the disembodied spirits of dead Nephilim maliciously pranking humans, or better yet, those gods never existed at all, except as figments of the human imagination.
Ironically, as some Jewish philosophers stressed the total and absolute supremacy of Yahweh, they started to think that maybe he was too separate from the angels and humans he made. As the distance between Creator and creation continued to widen, these theologians began speculating that some divine hierarchy existed in the gap. Angels were at the bottom of the ladder; somewhere a little ways above them were those cherubs and many-winged snakes; and somewhere above them were a superior version of angelic princes called archangels. In Greek, Yahweh delegated these princes, these archangels, to different parts of the world to rule. When kingdoms on the Earth went to war, it corresponded to these angelic princes battling each other in the heavens. “But the prince of the kingdom of Persia opposed me for 21 days, so Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, and I left him there with the prince of the kingdom of Persia, and have come to help you understand what is to happen to your people at the end of days. Now I must return to fight against the Prince of Persia, and when I am through with him, the prince of…”
