Chapter One - Baal and the Amorite Hegemony

Summary

Baal is a foreign god in the Southern Levant. His cult spread throughout the Near East concurrently with Amorite expansion, in the early second millennium BC. Elements of Baal mythology carry both his storm-god identity and the Amorite ideology of conquest. The claim of Amorite supremacy over indigenous religious values revolves around the theme of a mythical struggle with the serpent. In the Levant, however, both the positive symbolism of the serpent and the indigenous storm-god survived the Amorite conquest. This trend denotes a continual opposition to Amorite hegemony and religious values, as well as potential conflicts with it.