The Seventy Sons

Question: Is there more information available about the 70 Sons of El and Asherah, other than the stories about their most famous members?

Specifically? No, not really, sad to say. We've lost a great deal of Canaanite myth, and we're lucky to know about the seventy sons at all. But there are a lot of things we can extrapolate from the things we do know!

For one thing, "seventy" may not be a literal number. Just as the Japanese refer to the "eight million" kami or the Aztecs refer to the "four hundred" stars in the sky, it may be intended as a symbolic number, meaning that El has a lot of sons and is the powerful progenitor of the universe and its gods rather than that he has literally exactly that number. You certainly can use it as a literal number if you want to, though, and it still gives you an impression of a pretty large number of gods fathered by the almighty creator.

On another level, "sons" may also be figurative; that is, all the gods are considered El's sons because he's the leader of the pantheon and the creator of the world, so they're referred to as his sons no matter what their actual geneaology is. Daughters aren't addressed at all, so where all these goddesses came from is anybody's guess; most likely they're also offspring of El, and unmentioned because daughters were far less important than sons in an ancient Canaanite mindset. Calling someone the father of a bunch of sons implies that he's strong, virile and commanding; calling him the father of a bunch of daughters only implies that he's going to have to find a lot of husbands for them if he wants his house to himself.

Of the sons of El, we only know the names of five of them specifically: Baal, Yam, Mot, Shalim and Shahar. There's also a little confusion because Baal is sometimes referred to as the son of Dagon instead of El, making Dagon the direct son of the big guy, and our lack of evidence has so far made it impossible for scholars to come to a consensus on that one. Past that point, you're in the realm of conjecture; it's reasonable to assume that the gods whose parents aren't directly named are also sons of El (because El's everybody's daddy, right?), so you can add Moloch, Kothar, Athtar, Melqart, Resheph, Chemosh, Marqod and Yarikh to the list (and possibly Eshmun if you want to assume his father Sydyk = Jupiter = El, but trying to figure out what Sanchuniathon was talking about will give you a migraine if you're not careful).

So that gives us thirteen to fifteen out of seventy, depending on interpretation. The other fifty-five gods remain a mystery, which leaves Storytellers plenty of room to play with who they might be, where they are now and what they're doing in the general landscape of the godly realms of the Canaanite deities. Our writeup on the pantheon suggests that they probably reside in Sedeq as servants of their Titanic father, but there are a lot of them and there's no reason you can't splinter some off to go do other things if you think it would make for a neat story. Some scholars even suggest that Yahweh might originally have been one of the sons of El, so those of you who are always on the lookout for ways to drag the monotheistic religions into things can sneak him in that way while being fully scholarly legit.

I wish I had more for you, but that's about all there is, unfortunately. Unless there's another happy farming accident in Syria or Lebanon, we probably won't know much more any time soon, so let your imagination run wild!