?El (written aleph-lamed, e.g. Ugaritic: ????, Phoenician: ????, Classical Syriac: ???, Hebrew: ???, Arabic: ??? or ???, cognate to Akkadian: ilu) is a Northwest Semitic word meaning "deity".
In the Canaanite religion, or Levantine religion as a whole, El or Il was the supreme god, the father of humankind and all creatures and the husband of the goddess Asherah as recorded in the clay tablets of Ugarit (modern Ra's Shamra - Arabic: ??? ?????, Syria).[2]
The noun ?el was found at the top of a list of gods as the "Ancient of gods" or the "Father of all gods", in the ruins of the royal archive of the Ebla civilization, in the archaeological site of Tell Mardikh in Syria dated to 2300 BC. The bull was symbolic to El and his son Ba?al Hadad, and they both wore bull horns on their headdress.[3][4][5][6] He may have been a desert god at some point, as the myths say that he had two wives and built a sanctuary with them and his new children in the desert. El had fathered many gods, but most important were Hadad, Yam, and Mot.
