El

ʾĒl (written aleph-lamed, i.e.אל, etc.) is the Northwest Semitic word for "deity", cognate to Akkadian ilum.

In the Canaanite religion, or Levantine religion as a whole, Eli or Il was the supreme god,[2] the father of humankind and all creatures and the husband of the goddess Asherah as recorded in the clay tablets of Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra, Syria).[2]

The word El was found at the top of a list of gods as the Ancient of gods or the Father of all gods, in the ruins of the Royal Library of the Ebla civilization, in the archaeological site of Tell Mardikh in Syria dated to 2300 BC. He may have been a desert god at some point, as the myths say that he had two wives and built a sanctuary with them and his new children in the desert. El had fathered many gods, but most important were Hadad, Yam, and Mot.

Linguistic forms and meanings

Cognate forms are found throughout the Semitic languages. They include Ugaritic ʾil, pl. ʾlm; Phoenician ʾl pl. ʾlm; Hebrew ʾēl, pl. ʾēlîm; Aramaic ʾl; Akkadian ilu, pl. ilānu.

In Northwest Semitic usage ʾl was both a generic word for any "god" and the special name or title of a particular god who was distinguished from other gods as being "the god", or in the monotheistic sense, God.[3] Ēli is listed at the head of many pantheons. Eli was the father god among the Canaanites.

However, because the word sometimes refers to a god other than the great god Ēli, it is frequently ambiguous as to whether Ēli followed by another name means the great god Ēli with a particular epithet applied or refers to another god entirely. For example, in the Ugaritic texts ʾil mlk is understood to mean "Ēli the King" but ʾil hd as "the god Hadad".

The Semitic root ʾlh (Arabic ʾilāh, Aramaic 'alāh, 'elāh, Hebrew 'elōah) may be ʾlu with a parasitic h. In Ugaritic the plural form meaning "gods" is ʾilhm, equivalent to Hebrew ʾelōhîm "gods". But in Hebrew this word is also regularly used for semantically singular "God" or "god".

The stem ʾl is found prominently in the earliest strata of east Semitic, northwest Semitic, and south Semitic groups. Personal names including the stem ʾl are found with similar patterns both in Amorite and South Arabic which indicates that probably already in Proto-Semitic ʾl was both a generic term for "god" and the common name or title of a single particular "god" or "God".

Also in Northwest Semitic the typical belief and thought for El is that he controls the Moon and the Sun. In the myth, while he controls them they often fight for a place as his favorite. The results, day, night, day, night, are often explained as following. When it is day, the Sun has beaten the Moon. When it is night, the Moon has beaten the sun. When this myth formed it was not known that one part of the planet was in night and one in dark. They said that no heavenly body won twice in a row, except on the days of the eclipse.[citation needed][original research?] [edit] Proto-Sinaitic, Phoenician, Aramaic, and Hittite texts

A proto-Sinaitic mine inscription from Mount Sinai reads ʼlḏ‘lm understood to be vocalized as ʼil ḏū ‘ôlmi, 'ʼĒl Eternal' or 'God Eternal'.

The Egyptian god Ptah is given the title ḏū gitti 'Lord of Gath' in a prism from Lachish which has on its opposite face the name of Amenhotep II (c. 1435–1420 BCE) The title ḏū gitti is also found in Serābitṭ text 353. Cross (1973, p. 19) points out that Ptah is often called the lord (or one) of eternity and thinks it may be this identification of ʼĒl with Ptah that lead to the epithet ’olam 'eternal' being applied to ʼĒl so early and so consistently. (However in the Ugaritic texts Ptah is seemingly identified instead with the craftsman god Kothar-wa-Khasis.)[4]

A Phoenician inscribed amulet of the 7th century BCE from Arslan Tash may refer to ʼĒl. Rosenthal (1969, p. 658) translated the text:

An eternal bond has been established for us. Ashshur has established (it) for us, and all the divine beings and the majority of the group of all the holy ones, through the bond of heaven and earth for ever, ...

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