When Ancient Names Collide: The Hebrew El and the Ugaritic Question

One can understand the scholarly impulse. When archaeologists unearthed the clay tablets at Ras Shamra in 1929, revealing the religious texts of ancient Ugarit, they discovered a pantheon headed by a deity called El. The Hebrew Scriptures, of course, also speak of El. The names look similar on the page. The cultures existed in the same geographical neighborhood. The conclusion seemed obvious: the Hebrews must have borrowed their concept of God (YHWH) from the Canaanites.

Many learned scholars hold this position. Some present it as settled fact in undergraduate classrooms across the Western world. The argument possesses a certain surface plausibility, the kind that makes students nod along in lecture halls and skeptics feel vindicated in their dismissal of biblical uniqueness.

But here is the oddity. When we examine the linguistic, chronological, and theological evidence more carefully, the borrowing thesis does not merely bend under scrutiny. It collapses entirely. What we discover instead is something far more interesting than a simple case of religious plagiarism. We find a profound distinction between descriptive language and personal address, between generic divinity and covenant relationship, between a title anyone might claim and a name that echoes through history with singular force.

The Ugaritic El: Father of the Gods

Let us begin where the argument begins, with the Ugaritic texts themselves. The civilization of Ugarit flourished along the Syrian coast around 3000 BC, a Canaanite culture whose religious life centered on a complex pantheon. At the head of this divine assembly sat El, typically portrayed as an aged, patriarchal figure whose wisdom and authority resembled that of other ancient Near Eastern high gods.

The Ugaritic scribes recorded their myths in cuneiform script, pressing wedge-shaped symbols into damp clay. The particular cuneiform signs used for El's name (𐎛𐎍 in Ugaritic script) are conventionally transliterated by scholars as the equivalent Latin letters "i" and "l." To be sure, this transliteration convention has contributed to the assumption that later Hebrew scribes simply adopted the Ugaritic spelling when they wrote about their own deity.

The historical context matters here. By the time of Moses (somewhere around 1400 BC on most conservative reckonings, perhaps later on critical chronologies), the Ugaritic civilization had already been leaving its cultural mark on the region for well over a millennium. One can see why scholars might assume influence flowing from the older culture to the newer one. The Canaanites were there first. Their religious vocabulary was established. Why would the emerging Hebrew people not have borrowed from the dominant religious lexicon around them?

So far, we understand the position. The question is not the sincerity of those who hold it. The question is coherence.

The Hebrew Distinction: Mighty One, Not Proper Name

Here is where the argument begins to unravel. In Hebrew, the word אֵל (typically transliterated as "El") does not function as a proper name at all. The Hebrew letters themselves tell the story: aleph (א) and lamed (ל) transliterate to A and L, not the i and l of the Ugaritic cuneiform. Even at the most basic level of letter mapping, we are dealing with different linguistic systems.

According to Strong's Concordance (H410), El serves as an adjective meaning "mighty one" or "powerful." But the concept runs deeper than mere strength. The term carries with it the notion of residence in the spiritual realm, a being whose dwelling place transcends the material world. It can refer to any powerful being inhabiting that higher dimension. One might speak of a mighty warrior as an el in poetic language. One might even, in certain contexts, speak of a false god as an el, precisely because the word describes both power and dimensional location rather than identifying a specific person.

This matters enormously. When we read "El Shaddai" (God Almighty) or "El Elyon" (God Most High) in the Hebrew Scriptures, we are not reading proper names. We are reading descriptive titles that speak of power and heavenly residence. The biblical writers were saying something about the nature and dwelling place of the God they worshiped, not importing a foreign deity into their theology.

There was a professor of Semitic languages who put it this way: "Calling God 'El' would be like calling your father 'Dad.' It's a category word, not a birth certificate." The comparison is apt. My father has a name, but I call him "Dad" because it describes his relationship to me. The Hebrew people had a name for their God too. We will come to that shortly.

Moreover, the Hebrew spelling itself (aleph-lamed: אֵל) differs fundamentally from the Ugaritic cuneiform symbols (𐎛𐎍) that are merely transliterated as "i-l" by modern scholars. The resemblance exists only at the level of transliteration convention, not linguistic reality. To assume borrowing based on this superficial similarity is rather like assuming the English word "gift" derives from the German "Gift" because they look identical. They do look identical. But one means a present, and the other means poison. The resemblance is coincidental, not genealogical.

The Pronunciation Puzzle: What the Masoretes Changed

Now we must venture into slightly more technical territory, though the point is straightforward enough. The Hebrew letter aleph (א) carries within it a linguistic history that most modern readers of the Bible never encounter. Originally, aleph functioned as a glottal stop with an "ah" sound. We can see this preserved in Strong's H408, where the same aleph-lamed spelling appears with the meaning "never" and the pronunciation reflecting that original "ah" quality.

By the time of the Masoretes (those meticulous Jewish scribes working in the seventh century AD), Hebrew had evolved. These scholars added vowel pointings (called nikud) to the ancient consonantal text, attempting to preserve what they understood to be correct pronunciation. In doing so, they shifted the vocalization of aleph from "ah" to "eh" in many contexts. This seemingly small change had ripple effects. Readers began pronouncing words differently. Understanding shifted, sometimes subtly, sometimes more dramatically.

What strikes me as most remarkable is not the change itself, but what it reveals about the distance between us and the original texts. We handle Scripture across a vast gulf of time and language, mediated by centuries of scribal tradition, translation, and interpretation. When we forget this, we risk simplistic readings that flatten the complexity of the ancient world into modern categories.

That is the problem with the borrowing thesis. It assumes we can compare ancient languages like entries in a dictionary, matching word to word without attending to the deep grammar of how each culture understood divinity itself.

The Chronological Earthquake: Enosh and the Name

Here is where the borrowing argument does not merely stumble but falls headlong into an unbridgeable chasm. The biblical text itself provides a chronological marker that few proponents of Ugaritic influence seem to notice.

Genesis 4:26 states: "To Seth also a son was born, and he called his name Enosh. At that time people began to call upon the name of YHWH."

Let us be clear about what this verse claims. It places the invocation of the divine name YHWH (often rendered "Yahuah" in attempts to recover original pronunciation) at the time of Enosh, the grandson of Adam. If we take the biblical genealogies with any degree of historical seriousness, we are looking at roughly 4000 BC. The text does not say people began calling on "El." It says they began calling on the personal, covenant name of the God of Israel.

Now consider: the Ugaritic civilization flourished around 3000 BC, a full millennium after the time the biblical text assigns to Enosh. The chronology runs in precisely the wrong direction for the borrowing thesis. If anyone borrowed from anyone, the Ugaritic texts would have borrowed from the Hebrew tradition, not the reverse.

Of course one can dismiss the Genesis genealogies as mythological. Many scholars do, and for reasons they find compelling. But intellectual honesty requires a reckoning with this fact: if we accept the biblical text's own historical claims, the supposed borrowing becomes chronologically impossible. The effect supposedly precedes the cause by a thousand years.

The Gift That Is Poison: When Words Deceive

Perhaps a homely example will clarify what is at stake. In English, when we say "gift," we mean a present, something given freely to express affection or generosity. In German, "Gift" means poison, something that brings harm or death. A German speaker encountering the English word "gift" on a birthday card would be understandably confused. Are you celebrating me or threatening me?

The words are identical in appearance. They even share a distant etymological connection through Proto-Germanic. But their meanings diverged so completely that treating them as the same word would lead to disaster. One does not give a birthday "Gift" in Germany, not if one wishes to remain friends.

The same principle applies to Ugaritic El and Hebrew El. Yes, the words bear a superficial resemblance when transliterated into Latin characters. Yes, both cultures existed in the ancient Near East and used Semitic languages. But resemblance is not identity, and proximity is not borrowing. The Hebrew understanding of El as a descriptive term for might and heavenly dwelling, paired with the personal covenant name YHWH, stands utterly distinct from the Ugaritic worship of El as a proper-named deity at the head of a polytheistic pantheon.

This is not a small distinction. It is the difference between describing what something is like and naming who someone is.

The Name That Echoes: Personal Address and Covenant

We come now to the heart of the matter. The Hebrew people did not primarily address their God as El. They called on the name YHWH. This four-letter sacred name, sometimes vocalized as "Yahuah" or "Yahweh" in scholarly reconstruction, appears throughout the Hebrew Scriptures as the personal identifier of Israel's covenant Lord.

When Moses encountered the burning bush (Exodus 3), he did not ask, "What mighty one are you?" He asked, "What is your name?" The answer was not "I am El." The answer was "I AM WHO I AM," followed by the revelation of the sacred name YHWH. This is personal. This is covenantal. This is something altogether different from the Canaanite pantheon where El sits as a detached, elderly sky-father dispensing cosmic authority from afar.

The distinction runs through everything. When David writes in Psalm 23, "YHWH is my shepherd," he is not making a generic claim about divine power. He is invoking a personal name, a relationship, a history of covenant faithfulness. When the prophets thunder about Israel's apostasy, they do not accuse the people of forgetting that God is mighty. They accuse them of abandoning YHWH, of breaking covenant with the one who brought them out of Egypt.

I grew up hearing "the Lord" and "God" used almost interchangeably in Christian worship, a linguistic inheritance from centuries of avoiding the pronunciation of the sacred name. Only later, studying Hebrew and digging into Strong's Concordance, did I begin to grasp what had been lost in translation. The biblical writers were not speaking generically about divinity. They were speaking personally about YHWH.

This is not, let me be clear, an argument for rigid reconstructions of pronunciation or for dividing the Body of Messiah over Hebrew versus Greek linguistic preferences. It is an argument for recognizing what the text actually claimed: not that Hebrews worshiped a borrowed deity from Ugarit, but that they knew the personal name of the Creator and entered into covenant relationship with him.

When Jesus (YHWShA) Invoked the Name

The pattern continues into the New Testament, though most English readers miss it entirely. When Jesus (YHWShA) taught his disciples to pray, he said, "Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name" (Matthew 6:9). What name? Not "Mighty One." Not even "Father" as such, though that relationship mattered profoundly. The name to be hallowed was YHWH, the covenant name of Israel's God, now revealed as Father through the coming of the Son.

When Jesus stood in the temple courts and declared, "Before Abraham was, I AM" (John 8:58), the Jewish leaders understood exactly what he was claiming. He was not merely asserting preexistence. He was identifying himself with the YHWH who spoke to Moses, the covenant Lord of Israel. That is why they picked up stones. They recognized the claim as either profound truth or ultimate blasphemy, with no comfortable middle ground.

The story we find in Scripture is not one of borrowed names or imported deities. It is the story of a God who makes himself known by name, who enters into covenant with a particular people, and who ultimately reveals himself fully in Jesus (YHWShA), the Word made flesh. You can accept or reject that story. Many do reject it, and for reasons that seem sufficient to them. But you cannot coherently claim it is merely a recycled version of Ugaritic mythology. The chronology, the linguistics, and the theology all resist that reduction.

The Invitation That Remains

So we return to where we began. Did the Hebrews borrow their concept of God from the Ugaritic El? The evidence, examined carefully and honestly, says no. The resemblance between the words is superficial. The chronology runs in the wrong direction. The theological meanings diverge completely. Hebrew El functions as a descriptive adjective denoting power and heavenly residence, while Ugaritic El serves as a proper name. Hebrew faith centers on the personal covenant name YHWH, revealed to Enosh a millennium before Ugarit flourished, and carried through to the coming of Jesus (YHWShA), the Messiah who made that name fully known.

What we have, then, is not plagiarism but something far more interesting: the testimony of a people who claimed to know the personal name of the Creator. Whether that claim is true stands as the real question, the one that matters. Not whether linguistic similarities exist, but whether the God who spoke to Enosh, who revealed himself to Moses, who became flesh in Jesus (YHWShA) of Nazareth, is who he says he is.

The invitation, of course, remains. One can dismiss the entire biblical narrative as myth, though doing so requires explaining away chronological and linguistic evidence that refuses to cooperate with the dismissal. Or one can take seriously the possibility that the Hebrew people possessed something the surrounding nations did not: not borrowed religious vocabulary, but personal knowledge of the one true God, the Lord (YHWH) whose name echoes still through history.

The choice, as always, belongs to each reader. But let us at least be clear about what we are choosing between. Not between an original and a copy, but between a claim to revealed truth and the rejection of that claim. The name remains, echoing across millennia, waiting for those who will call upon it.

That is the point. The resemblance between words does not determine the reality they point to. And in this case, the reality the biblical writers testified to stands utterly distinct from the Ugaritic pantheon, separated not merely by linguistic quirks or cultural borrowing, but by the unbridgeable gulf between a title anyone might claim and a name revealed only to those who would listen.

So are you listening?