You're listening to the ancient tradition. A Wonk Media production. Music provided by Joseph McDade. Here's your host, Dr. Jack Logan.

Welcome to the ancient tradition. I'm your host, Jack Logan.

Welcome to the program. It's great to have all of you listening in today. As always, welcome to all of our new listeners. It's great to have you listening in. And of course, welcome back to all of our longtime listeners. Of course, we love having

you back. I've got a long one for us today. We're going to pick up right where we left off in our

last episode. If you remember, I mentioned that one of the things that

really struck me when I first started diving into religious traditions, especially those found

in the ancient world, was the persistent and what I consider fascinating notion that God,

especially the high God, was married.

The ancients taught that God ruled as a king in the heavens with his consort, his wife,

the queen of heaven, and together they reigned from their sacred palace temple located,

symbolically at the top of the sacred mountain that marked the very center,

the sacred center of all creation, their kingdom.

In our last episode, we found that in the ancient texts, the Samarian high god on was married to key, and the ancient Egyptian high god Atom was married to Usaz, who we learned from the ancient

Egyptian pyramid and coffin texts was symbolized by a tree and acacia tree.

In today's episode, we're going to take a look at a couple of other high gods and see what we can learn about their marital status from the ancient record.

We're going to start by jumping into the ancient Canaanite literature.

The Canaanites were an ancient people who lived in the region known as Canaan, which today encompasses modern-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and

Jordan. We refer to this area as the Southern Levant. People lived in this area during the Bronze

Age, which dates to roughly 3,500 to 1,150 BC.

Now, city-states didn't begin to emerge in this area until the middle of the Bronze Age,

between about 2,01550 BC.

And the people that we know as the Canaanites actually refers to a Semitic-speaking

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