Caleb Vigilant (Chronicles of the Nephilim) (27 page)

A closer look at comparing just two elements of the Baal cycle with Yahweh’s story will yield a clearer picture of the literary subversion of the Canaanite narrative that God and the human authors were employing. Those two elements are the epithet of “cloud-rider” and God’s conflict with the dragon and the sea.

Cloud-Rider

In the Ugaritic text cited above, we are introduced to Baal as one who rides the heavens in his cloud-chariot dispensing judgment from the heights. “Charioteer (or ‘Rider’) of the Clouds” was a common epithet ascribed to Baal throughout the Ugaritic texts. Here is another side-by-side comparison of Ugaritic and
Biblical texts that illustrate that common motif.

Yahweh is described here with the same exact moniker as Baal, in the same exact context as Baal—revealed in the storm and riding a cloud in judgment on other deities. Baal is subverted by Yahweh.

This correlation of deity with cloud judgment sheds light on the vision of Daniel’s Son of Man that Christians understand as a reference to Jesus Christ.
[22]
The everlasting dominion received by the divine Baal riding the clouds before the throne of the High God El is apologetically ascribed to the divine Son of Man (Jesus Christ) riding the clouds to the throne of “Elyon,” the Ancient of Days
.
[23]

Dan. 7:13-14

“I kept looking in the night visions,

And behold,
with the clouds of heaven

One like a Son of Man was coming,

And He came up to the Ancient of Days

And was presented before Him.

“And to Him was given dominion,

Glory and a kingdom…

His dominion is an everlasting dominion.

Yahweh is God, not the Canaanite El. Jesus is Yahweh’s son, as opposed to Baal being El’s son. And that “Son of Man” is the one who is given a kingdom of everlasting dominion, not Baal.

The Dragon and the Sea

The second narrative element of the Canaanite Baal cycle that I want to address is God’s conflict with the dragon and the sea. In ancient Near Eastern religious mythologies, the sea and the sea dragon were symbols of chaos that had to be overcome to bring order to the universe, or more exactly, the political world order of the myth’s originating culture. Some scholars call this battle
Chaoskampf—
the divine struggle to create order out of chaos.
[24]
Creation accounts were often veiled polemics for the establishment of a king or kingdom’s claim to sovereignty.
[25]
Richard Clifford quotes, “In Mesopotamia, Ugarit, and Israel the
Chaoskampf
appears not only in cosmological contexts but just as frequently—and this was fundamentally true right from the first—in political contexts. The repulsion and the destruction of the enemy, and thereby the maintenance of political order, always constitute one of the major dimensions of the battle against chaos.”
[26]

For example, the Sumerians had three stories where the gods Enki, Ninurta, and Inanna all destroy sea monsters in their pursuit of establishing order. The sea monster in two of those versions, according to Sumerian expert Samuel Noah Kramer, is “conceived as a large serpent which lived in the bottom of the
‘great below’ where the latter came in contact with the primeval waters.”
[27]
In the Babylonian creation myth,
Enuma Elish
, Marduk battles the sea dragon goddess Tiamat, and splits her body into two parts, creating the heavens and the earth, the world order over which Babylon’s deity Marduk ruled.

Another side-by-side
comparison of those same Ugaritic passages that we considered above with
other
Old Testament passages reveals another common narrative: Yahweh, the charioteer of the clouds, metaphorically battles with Sea (Hebrew:
yam
) and River (Hebrew:
nahar
), just as Baal struggled with Yam and Nahar, which is also linked to victory over a sea dragon/serpent.

Baal fights Sea and River to establish his sovereignty. He wins by drinking up Sea and River, draining them dry, and thus establishing his supremacy over the pantheon and the Canaanite world order.
[29]
In the second passage, Baal’s battle with Sea and River is retold in other words as a battle with a “dragon,” the “writhing serpent” with seven heads.
[30]
Another Baal text calls this same dragon, “
Lotan
, the wriggling serpent.”
[31]
The Hebrew equivalents of the Ugaritic words
tannin
(dragon) and
lotan
are
tanniyn
(dragon) and
liwyatan
(Leviathan) respectively.
[32]
Thus, the Canaanite narrative of Leviathan the sea dragon or serpent is undeniably employed in Old Testament Scriptures.
[33]
Notice the last Scripture in the chart that refers to Leviathan as having multiple heads
just like the Canaanite Leviathan
.

And notice as well the reference to the Red Sea event also associated with Leviathan in the
Biblical text. In Psalm 74 above, God’s parting of the waters is connected to the motif of the Mosaic covenant as the creation of a new world order in the same way that Baal’s victory over the waters and the dragon are emblematic of his establishment of authority in the Canaanite pantheon. This covenant motif is described as a
Chaoskampf
battle with the Sea and Leviathan (also called
Rahab
) in several other significant Biblical references as well.
[34]

Mount
Zaphon/Sapan

Another element of Baal’s reign that was touched upon is his mountain abode of Mount Sapan or Saphon (
Zaphon
in Hebrew). As illustrated in the passages above, a plethora of Ugaritic texts link Baal with his “divine mountain, Saphon/Sapan” (KTU 1.101:1-9; 1.100:9; 1.3:3:29), that he is buried there (KTU 1.6:1:15-18), in his sanctuary (KTU 1.3:3:30), and mountain of victory (KTU 1.101:1-4). Earlier Hurrian and Hittite traditions of Baal link Mount Zaphon with another mountain, Namni, both in the northern Syrian ranges
.
[35]

This linking of the two mountains is of particular importance because as the
Dictionary of Deities and Demons
in the Bible
explains, the Psalmist asserts Yahweh’s authority as creator and therefore owner of all the heavens and the earth by referring to the mountains of pagan mythology as under the lordship of Yahweh
.

Psalm 89:12

The north (
zaphon) and the south (yamin), you have created them; Tabor and Hermon joyously praise your name.

Tabor and Hermon are well-known holy mountains in ANE mythology.
[36]
But the deliberate linking of
Zaphon
and
Yamin
are most likely Hebrew references to the Saphon and Namni of Ugarit in a symbolic reflection of Tabor and Hermon.

In Isaiah 14:13, Isaiah mocks the arrogance of the king of Babylon by likening him to another mythological figure,
Athtar, who sought to take Baal’s throne and failed “on the mountain of assembly on the summit of Zaphon [Sapan].”
[37]

In the Bible, this Mount
Zaphon is subverted by Israel’s holy Mount Zion.

Psalm 48:1–2

Great is the
Lord
and greatly to be praised in the city of our God! His holy mountain, beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all the earth, Mount Zion, in the far north [Zaphon], the city of the great King
.

Note in this Scripture that the holy Mount Zion is described as being in “the far north,” the very location of Mount Sapan, but not in fact the actual location of Israel’s Mount Zion. So “the far north” is a theological not a geographical designation of Zion replacing Sapan as the divine mountain par excellence.
[38]

Subverting Paganism

The story of deity battling the river, the sea, and the sea dragon
Leviathan is clearly a common covenant motif in the Old Testament and its surrounding ancient Near Eastern cultures. The fact that Hebrew Scripture shares common words, concepts, and stories with Ugaritic scripture need not mean that Israel is affirming the same mythology or pantheon of deities. The orthodox Christian need not fear literary similarity between Israel and Canaanite imagination. Common imagination springs from what Old Testament and ancient Near Eastern scholar John Walton
calls a “common cognitive environment” of people in a shared space, time, or culture.

Walton suggests “borrowing is not the issue…Likewise this need not concern whose ideas are derivative. There is simply common ground across the cognitive environment of the cultures of the ancient world.”
[39]

The story of a cloud-rider controlling the elements and battling the Sea and Leviathan to establish his sovereignty over other gods with a new world order is not a false “myth
.” It is a narrative shared between Israel and its pagan neighbors that Jewish authors appropriate, under divine authority of Yahweh, as a metaphor within their own discourse. God uses that cultural connection to subvert those words, concepts, and stories with His own poetic meaning and purpose.

Great fathers of the Faith utilized this same subversive storytelling. Curtis Chang, in his book,
Engaging Unbelief
, explains how Augustine wrote his
City of God
to defend the Christian faith in the Roman Empire in terms of urban historical narrative saturated with references, motifs, and themes from classical Roman authors. He subverted that “City of Man” by revealing the destructive pride lurking behind all human social construction. Aquinas, in his
Summa contra Gentiles
, appealed to the Aristotelian story of knowledge because he was addressing a Muslim culture steeped in Aristotle. But he subverted that cultural narrative by teasing out the ultimate insufficiency of human reason.