The Baal Cycle is a group of Ugaritic poems centered on Baal, the storm god, his conflict with Yamm, the sea, his struggle with Mot, death, and the building of his house or palace. Preserved on tablets from ancient Ugarit, the cycle presents divine kingship through recurring images of storm, fertility, conflict, enthronement, death, and return.
The texts belong to the Northwest Semitic world that forms an essential cultural horizon for biblical Israel and later Mediterranean religion. They are important not as a simple source for later traditions, but as a neighboring symbolic field in which kingship, sacred mountain, divine combat, temple, and the renewal of life were already being imagined with great force.