The Myth of Môt and ʼAlʼeyan Baʻal

The myth of Môt and ʼAlʼeyan Baʻal, who is Hadad, recounted in the texts unearthed at Ugarit, is a work of the schematizing imagination, and expressive of the ordered relations of natural phenomena conceived as embodied in gods. The systematic organization of the events in which the gods are caught, or which they dominate, shows that the myth arose from “observation of the great annual fluctuations of the seasons and a desire to explain them,” and that the authors or revisers, “brooding over the mystery of external nature,” sought “to lift the veil and explore the hidden springs that set the vast machine in motion.” We are well aware that “the civilized nations of western Asia and Egypt pictured to themselves the changes of the seasons, and particularly the annual growth and decay of vegetation, as episodes in the life of gods, whose mournful death and happy resurrection they celebrated with dramatic rites.” But in our texts we are introduced to subtle variations. Here the lapse, absorption and return of the rain are interfused with the regeneration and decline of plants in a rhythmic process to which no parallel is to be found among extant documents of similar purport and provenance. And the investigation of “nature's plan,” however cumbered with besotted notions, is so diligent as to bring the resulting depiction close to the twilight zone between mythology and the speculations of the early physical philosophers.