Mount Zaphon- Canaanite LocationLocation · Landmark"Mountain of the North"

The Mountain

Mount Zaphon rises from the northeastern Mediterranean coast, its peak at 1,717 meters wreathed in storm clouds that gather and break without warning. The Canaanites called it Sapanu, the Mountain of the North, and they could see it from the city of Ugarit, forty kilometers to the south. The scribes there watched storms form around the summit and recorded the myths those storms inspired.

To them, the mountain was where heaven touched the earth. Its roots reached into the underworld. Its peak belonged to Baal. The storms that rolled down from its heights were the storm god's voice, and the rain that followed was his gift to the fields below. So completely did this peak define the sacred landscape that its name entered the Semitic languages as the word for "north" itself: tsaphon in Hebrew.

The Palace of Baal

After Baal defeated Yam the sea god, he possessed the power of a king but had no palace on his mountain. He needed Asherah's intercession to petition El, winning the mother goddess's support with lavish gifts before she traveled to El's dwelling at the source of the cosmic rivers. El granted permission, and Kothar-wa-Khasis built the palace on Zaphon's summit.

Kothar set a fire within the structure that blazed for six days. When it subsided on the seventh, raw silver and gold had been transformed into walls and floors. Cedar from Lebanon provided the timber. Lapis lazuli adorned the walls. The completed palace hosted a banquet for the assembled gods.

One question had divided builder and king: whether the palace should have windows. Baal refused them, fearing his enemies Yam or Mot might enter through the openings. Kothar persuaded him to relent. Through those windows of lapis lazuli, Baal released his voice of thunder and poured rain upon the earth. The palace became the instrument through which the storm god watered the world.

The Vacant Throne

When Mot swallowed Baal and the storm god died, rain ceased and the earth began to dry. El and Asherah had to fill the vacant throne. Asherah proposed Athtar, god of the morning star.

Athtar ascended Zaphon and sat in Baal's seat. His feet did not reach the footstool. His head did not reach the headrest. He was too small for a throne built for the storm god. Athtar acknowledged his failure and descended to rule the earth below, a lesser domain.

No other deity could occupy Baal's throne or perform his work. Only when Anat destroyed Mot and Baal returned from the dead did the storm god reclaim his seat. El saw the restoration in a dream: the heavens rained oil and the wadis flowed with honey. Life-giving storms poured from the summit once more.

The Mountain of Mourning

Before Baal's return, Anat searched the earth for his body and found him fallen in the fields of Mot's domain. She carried him back to Zaphon and buried him there with funerary honors: seventy bulls and seventy oxen slaughtered at the grave. The mountain that had been the seat of his kingship became his tomb.

Then Anat went after Mot. She seized the god of death and split him with a blade, then ground him with millstones and scattered him in the fields. The grain god's body was sown like seed.

The Harbor

At the foot of the mountain, near the harbor at what is now Ras el-Bassit, stood a sanctuary to Baal Zaphon where sailors offered prayers before crossing the Mediterranean. The storm god who ruled from the summit also governed the sea winds. Phoenician traders carried his cult along their routes, establishing shrines at harbors across the sea. An Egyptian papyrus from Tahpanhes records a letter addressed to "Baal Zaphon and all the gods of Tahpanhes," evidence that the mountain god's worship had reached the Nile Delta by the sixth century BCE.