From Baal’s Palace to the Empty Tomb: Exposing the Ancient Roots of the Easter Weekend

For centuries, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ have been remembered in a two-day Easter cycle; Friday to Sunday (approx 48 hours). Yet long before the Gospel story, pagan cultures from Canaan to Rome already celebrated a similar rhythm of death and return in their worship of Baal, Astarte, and other fertility gods. This essay exposes how that ancient pattern crept into the Christian calendar and why it cannot define the Lord who created time itself. Yeshua, Yahweh in the flesh, fulfilled His prophecy of three days and three nights (72 hours) exactly as He declared; His resurrection was not another turn of nature’s wheel but the once-for-all victory of the Creator over death.

This blog draws extensively on the research presented in The Ugaritic Baal Cycle, Volume I: Introduction with Text, Translation & Commentary of KTU 1.1–1.2 by Mark S. Smith (Brill, 1994). Smith’s work provides the foundational study of the Ugaritic tablets discovered at Ras Shamra, offering the historical, linguistic, and theological framework that underlies my exploration of how ancient Near-Eastern mythic patterns; especially the Baal cycle of death and return; echo through later religious traditions and influenced how the timing and symbolism of the Easter weekend came to be understood.

Long before the Gospel accounts of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, the pagan nations surrounding Israel were already celebrating seasonal festivals that pretended to imitate life conquering death. Among them was the Canaanite cult of Baal, the storm-god of Ugarit. His worshippers believed that Baal battled the forces of Yamm, the Sea, and Mot, Death itself. When Baal was defeated, drought and famine spread across the land; when he revived, rain and fertility returned. It was a cycle of endless repetition; death and rebirth, darkness and light; played out in the rhythms of the seasons and in the lives of those who bowed to him.

Around Baal stood a whole counterfeit kingdom of gods and goddesses: El and his consort Athirat (Asherah), who presided as aged rulers; Astarte and Anat, Baal’s militant companions and mistresses of sensuality; and Shapshu, the sun-goddess who carried messages between the living and the dead. These figures represented every corner of nature and human passion. Their myths were not divine revelation but humanity’s attempt to deify creation itself. The worship of Baal was the worship of the cycle; the endless turning of the seasons, the illusion that death was only a pause before new growth. In reality, those stories were the mirror image of truth, because Yahweh; the one true God; is not part of nature’s cycle but the Creator of it. Every storm, every sea, every sunrise belongs to Him alone.

Centuries later these same deities appeared under new Greek and Roman names. Baal became Zeus (Jupiter, Heracles) or Adodos; Astarte became Aphrodite or Venus; El became Kronos. The festivals of the Phoenicians and Greeks kept the same storyline: the god descends into darkness, the goddess mourns, and the god rises again with the returning light. The calendar of the empire revolved around this rhythm. The day of Venus; Friday; was the time of mourning and passion; the day of the Sun; Sunday, marked the triumph of light over darkness. This two-day cycle of death and renewal was the heartbeat of ancient fertility religion and would later echo through the empire’s civic calendar.

When Christianity entered the Roman world, it inherited that same calendar framework. The early church proclaimed that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead, but as centuries passed and tradition mixed with Roman custom, the remembrance of His passion and resurrection settled onto those very days already loaded with pagan meaning. The Friday–Sunday pattern that now defines the Easter weekend mirrors the old Baal rhythm far more than it reflects the precise timeline Christ Himself declared. The Creator’s act was absorbed into the creature’s calendar.

Yet Jesus’ own words leave no ambiguity. He said, “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40). This was not poetic exaggeration or an idiom; it was the deliberate prophecy of God in the flesh, the One who made day and night. It is impossible to imagine that the eternal Word could misjudge the timing of His own triumph over death. He spoke exactly what He meant; three full days and three full nights. The modern idea that His burial lasted little more than a day and a half arose later, when church tradition adjusted itself to the Roman weekend. In doing so, it echoed the old two-day myth of Baal’s descent and return, a pattern born not from Scripture but from the pagan imagination.

The Baal cycle repeated endlessly, bound to the rhythm of seedtime and harvest; Christ’s rising from the tomb was a single, unrepeatable event; the victory of the Creator over death itself. The gods of Ugarit and of Greece lived and died within nature; Yahweh, the Lord of Israel, stands outside creation, because He is its Maker. He spoke the seas into being, commands the storm, and holds even death under His authority. What Baal’s worshippers sought every year through ritual, God accomplished once for all through the cross and the empty tomb.

From Baal’s Bureaucracy to the Celestial Hierarchy

The Ugaritic Baal Cycle portrays heaven as a royal bureaucracy. At its top stand El and Athirat (Asherah), the aged monarchs whose remote authority holds the cosmos together. Below them operate the “managerial” gods; Baal, Yamm, and Mot; who regulate the forces of weather, sea, and death.Still lower come the craft-gods, such as Kothar-wa-Hasis, the divine artisan who fashions palaces and weapons, and finally the messenger deities, who carry out the will of their superiors. Each god’s dwelling mirrors his or her sphere: El’s cosmic abode, Baal’s rain-soaked Mount Zaphon, Mot’s underworld, Yamm’s sea, Kothar’s workshops in Memphis and Kaphtor.The result, as Mark S. Smith observes, is a universe imagined as one political order; a seamless hierarchy binding together the cosmic, natural, and human realms under Baal’s royal administration.

That picture never entirely vanished. When Hellenistic and Roman philosophers later spoke of “the great chain of being,” they were echoing the same assumption: that reality is a ladder of powers descending from the highest mind down through intermediate spirits to the material world. Neoplatonism systematized this idea into ranks of intelligences; One, Nous, Soul, and the cosmic intermediaries that carry divine influence into matter. It was this intellectual atmosphere that the anonymous author later known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite inherited.

Writing about a thousand years after Ugarit’s scribes, Pseudo-Dionysius described the universe as ordered through nine ranks of angels grouped into three triads; Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; Dominions, Virtues, Powers; Principalities, Archangels, and Angels. Each rank receives illumination from the level above and passes it down to the level below, forming a perfect hierarchy from God to creation.The resemblance to the ancient Near-Eastern pantheon is structural, not theological: the same pyramidal cosmos, translated from many gods into a cascade of celestial ministries. El and Athirat become the ineffable Godhead; Baal’s managerial stratum reappears as the archangelic orders; the craftsman and messenger deities become the lower angelic ranks who execute the divine will.

The difference is intent.The Ugaritic hierarchy divinized the elements of creation itself; Pseudo-Dionysius sought to preserve Christian monotheism while using the old hierarchical template to explain how the transcendent God communicates with His creatures. Yet the architectural likeness is unmistakable.The forged Dionysian name gave this Neoplatonic cosmology apostolic weight, allowing the ancient idea of a tiered heavenly bureaucracy; so familiar from Baal’s court; to re-enter Christian theology under the guise of revelation.

In short, the Celestial Hierarchy of the pseudo-Dionysian writer is the intellectual descendant of the same worldview that once arranged El, Baal, Asherah, and their courtiers in cosmic ranks. Both systems envision the universe as an ordered chain of intermediaries between heaven and earth. What began in Ugarit as the politics of the gods resurfaced a millennium later as the metaphysics of angels.

The Data of the Tablets and Their Journey Toward Rome

The Baal Cycle, one of the most significant mythological works of the ancient Near East, survives on six clay tablets written in Ugaritic cuneiform and discovered between 1930 and 1933 at Ugarit, modern Ras Shamra on the Syrian coast. These tablets, catalogued as KTU 1.1–1.6, were unearthed in the so-called Library of the High Priest, a scribal archive located between two temples; traditionally identified as belonging to Baal and Dagan; on the city’s acropolis. The archaeological context, tablet style, and associated pottery layers all place their composition in the first half of the fourteenth century B.C.

The last tablet of the series, KTU 1.6 VI 54–58, bears a colophon naming King Niqmaddu II of Ugarit. This king was a known contemporary of Amenophis IV (Akhenaten) of Egypt and Shuppiluliuma I, ruler of the Hittite Empire. Using diplomatic archives from Egypt and Hatti, scholars have synchronized these reigns to date the tablets between 1380 and 1360 B.C., though some prefer the broader window of 1400–1350 B.C. The Baal Cycle therefore belongs to the cosmopolitan world of the Late Bronze Age, when international trade, diplomacy, and mythic ideas flowed freely across the eastern Mediterranean.

At that time, Ugarit was a coastal hub between three great powers: Egypt to the south, the Mitanni to the east, and the Hittite Empire to the north. Under Shuppiluliuma I (ca. 1350–1322 B.C.), the Hittites extended their control over northern Syria, turning cities like Ugarit into loyal vassal states. Their archives at Hattusa mention Ugaritic rulers by name and show the exchange of envoys, treaties, and royal daughters. The Hittite world itself was deeply religious, centered on the storm-god Tarhunt (Teshub) and his consort Hepat, whose functions mirror Baal and Asherah almost exactly. Through centuries of contact, the imagery of divine kingship, cosmic battle, and fertility spread across the whole Anatolian-Syrian corridor. The myths recorded in Ugarit were not isolated local legends; they were part of a shared cultural vocabulary that linked Anatolia, Syria, and Mesopotamia.

When Ugarit fell around 1180 B.C. during the collapse of the Bronze Age, its scribes and merchants did not vanish without legacy. Its religious and literary traditions lived on through its Phoenician descendants; the seafaring Canaanites who re-established coastal cities such as Byblos, Tyre, and Sidon. These Phoenicians carried their gods and myths westward across the Mediterranean, founding colonies as far as Carthage and Sicily. In Phoenician and Punic inscriptions, Baal becomes Baal-Shamem (“Lord of Heaven”), Astarte his consort (Queen of heaven) and Melqart take on the roles of divine patrons of cities and kings.

When Greek traders and settlers encountered Phoenician religion between the 8th and 6th centuries B.C., they translated these deities into their own pantheon:

• Baal merged with Zeus (Jupiter) and Adodos, the thunder-wielding king of gods.

• Astarte became Aphrodite (Venus), goddess of love and the morning star.

• El corresponded to Kronos (Saturn), the distant father of gods.

• Melqart, the Tyrian god of resurrection and fire, became Herakles (Hercules).

Through this process of cultural translation, the old Canaanite and Ugaritic myths entered Greek religion and then, through Hellenistic and Roman syncretism, the imperial cult of Rome. By the Roman era, the Mediterranean was spiritually unified by a network of ideas whose roots reached back to Ugarit: the divine king who conquers chaos, the death and return of the god, and the heavenly court mirrored by earthly empires.

Thus, while the clay tablets of Ugarit never physically traveled to Rome, their ideas did; by sea and by memory. Through Phoenician traders, Greek poets, and Roman theologians, the worldview first inscribed under King Niqmaddu II found new forms in Zeus, Jupiter, Venus, and the imperial cult itself, where emperors ruled as earthly reflections of the heavenly hierarchy.

The Baal Cycle, therefore, stands at the beginning of a long cultural chain:from a 14th-century scribal school in Ugarit, through the Hittite and Phoenician empires, into the mythologies of Greece and Rome, and finally into the symbolic language that shaped the religious imagination of the ancient world; an imagination the God of Israel later confronted and overturned with the revelation of Yahweh, Creator of all things, whose kingdom does not rise and fall like Baal’s rains, but endures forever.

The Break, Not the Continuation

The religious imagination of the ancient world had always repeated the same cycle: the storm-god rises and falls, chaos returns, the world renews itself, and death waits again at the door. Every empire that inherited Ugarit’s theology; from the Hittites to Rome; reflected the same assumption: that divinity is bound to the seasons, that kingship and life are temporary, that even the gods must die and return.

Into that world stepped Yahweh, the God who revealed Himself to Moses not as part of the cycle but as the I AM (Exodus 3:14); the eternal existence itself, uncreated and unending. He did not battle the sea as Baal did; He commanded it (Psalm 106:9).He did not descend and rise each year; He reigns forever (Psalm 29:10).When Israel’s prophets described Yahweh as riding the clouds or crushing the serpent of the sea, they were not borrowing Baal’s imagery; they were confronting it, declaring that the symbols once used for the false gods belonged to the Creator alone.

By the time Christ came, Rome’s pantheon still echoed the old Ugaritic order; Jupiter enthroned, Venus shining, Mars warring, and the emperor ruling as the divine mediator between heaven and earth. But on the cross and at the empty tomb, that entire structure collapsed.The endless myth of death and return was replaced by a single act of history: the eternal Creator entering His creation, dying once, and rising once; for all. Where Baal’s rain revived the land for a season, Christ’s resurrection remade the world forever. Yahweh did not evolve from the gods of the nations; He exposed them, proving that what the ancient world longed for in shadow was fulfilled in His light.

The Baal Cycle shows how the ancient mind imagined order; the Gospel shows how the true Author of that order revealed Himsel; not as one more god within creation, but as the Creator of everything, whose kingdom will never be shaken.

Let’s turn back to the resurrection itself.

In Old English, the word Ēastre (or Ēostre) referred to both a spring month and the festival that fell within it. The historian Bede (writing around 725 AD) records that this month was named for a pagan goddess, Ēostre, who was associated with the dawn and the returning light of spring.

That Old English name itself comes from Proto-Germanic Austron, the name of a dawn goddess whose very title meant “the shining one” or “the radiant one.” Go one step further back, and both words trace to the Proto-Indo-European root aus-, which means “to shine,” “to be bright,” or “to dawn.”  It’s the same root that gives us east (where the sun rises), aurora (the Latin word for dawn), and Eos, the Greek goddess of the sunrise.

So in essence, the entire family of words; east, Easter, Eos, aurora, Ēostre; springs from a single ancient image: light breaking over the horizon, the triumph of day over night, and the cyclical rebirth of life with the morning.

Where “Lucifer” Comes Into It

Now, here’s where the connection deepens symbolically. The Latin word Lucifer literally means “light-bringer” or “morning star.” It was used in the Vulgate Bible translation of Isaiah 14:12 to describe the helel ben shachar ; the “shining one, son of dawn.” Linguistically, Lucifer is made from lux (light) + ferre (to bear or carry). It’s the same concept as aus- ; radiance, brightness, dawn — just expressed in Latin instead of the older Indo-European dialects.

In the ancient world, before “Lucifer” became a name for the fallen angel, it simply referred to the planet Venus; the bright morning star that rises in the east just before sunrise. The Romans personified Venus as both a goddess of love and of war; ironically, the same culture that later gave rise to the Roman Church, which developed its ‘just war’ theory despite Yahweh’s clear commandment, Thou shalt not kill.

This celestial “light-bringer,” and in earlier Semitic traditions corresponds to Astarte/Ishtar, Baal’s consort; the very goddess linked with fertility, dawn, and the planet Venus.

So linguistically and symbolically, Easter, eastern, and Lucifer all orbit the same set of ancient ideas:

• The rising light in the east,

• The renewal of life with dawn or spring,

• The appearance of the bright star before the sun.

When Christianity expanded into the Germanic and Latin-speaking world, it encountered societies that already celebrated the rebirth of light at the spring equinox, festivals devoted to dawn goddesses and the planet Venus, the so-called “morning star.” Rather than erasing these customs, the Roman church gradually merged them into its own calendar, rebranding the ancient equinox feast as the commemoration of Christ’s resurrection. This was not a continuation of apostolic teaching, but a syncretic adaptation—a way of aligning Christianity with popular pagan observances already tied to the turning of the seasons.

The term Easter, though later associated with the risen Christ, is Germanic and pagan in origin. Its linguistic root reaches back to the dawn-goddess Austron (or Ēostre), whose name itself meant “the shining one.” Thus, even the word chosen for the central Christian festival carries the memory of a pre-Christian deity of light; not the Creator, but one of the created luminaries worshipped as divine in the ancient world.

The same imagery once devoted to Eos, Ishtar, and Lucifer; the “light-bringer” or morning star; was later repurposed under Roman influence to describe the resurrection of Christ. Yet the substitution did not erase its origin: it maintained the solar and Venusian framework of death and return, darkness and light, that defined pagan fertility and celestial worship. What had once honored the cyclical light of the dawn became, in name and symbolism, the so-called Easter celebration; retaining the timing, the celestial language, and the equinox alignment of the old religion.

In short, while Easter and eastern share the same root meaning “dawn” or “to shine,” and Lucifer belongs to that same family of dawn-language, this continuity is not evidence of divine design but of pagan inheritance. It reveals how the ancient world’s obsession with light rising in the east—the daily victory of day over night; was absorbed and repackaged by the Roman Church, transforming the Baal and Venus cycle into a new liturgical form that still carries the mark of its origin.

If Friday is the day of Venus, and Venus in antiquity was the morning star; Lucifer, “the light-bringer”; then in the old cosmology that day carries the motif of the light that shines before the sun but then disappears. The planet rises in the dawn sky, glows for a short time, and vanishes as the real sun comes up. To the myth-makers this looked like the light that dies so that the greater light may rise.

In the Baal cycle, that same pattern plays out over roughly two symbolic days:

• the first day of descent; Baal’s defeat and death, darkness, drought;

• the second of return; his re-emergence with rain and life. His consort, the goddess of the morning star (Astarte/Ishtar), shares his rhythm: her light appears, fades into the underworld, and returns.

If you read this through the old two-day mythic lens, Friday–Sunday reproduces the Baal pattern exactly: the light-bearer descends (Venus/Lucifer, day of death), darkness reigns (Saturn’s day), then the true sun rises (day of the Sun, the return of light).

In symbolic terms, the alignment of Friday (the day of Venus, the fading morning star) and Sunday (the day of the Sun) reflects an ancient rhythm already familiar in Canaanite myth; the passage from the dimming of light to its return, the pattern embodied in Baal’s death and renewal. Whether by coincidence or cultural inheritance, the Christian weekend reproduces that same cosmic sequence. The lesser light; the morning star; dies before the greater light rises; the false or borrowed glory fades as the true illumination breaks over the horizon.

• Friday = the fall of the light-bearer, the extinguishing of Venus/Lucifer’s glow;

• Sunday = the rise of the real Sun, the triumphant light.

I have demonstrated that Christ was crucified on Wednesday and rose on Saturday, before the end of the Sabbath, not on Sunday as is commonly claimed. Scripture itself makes this plain: “At the end of the Sabbath” (Matthew 28:1), when Mary went to the tomb while it was still dark, she found it already empty. This means the resurrection had already occurred before sunrise on Sunday; at Sabbath’s close, Saturday sunset.

The Didache supports this chronology. It records that the apostles fasted on Wednesday, the day of the betrayal, which in Jewish reckoning began at sunset. Christ was arrested after that sunset, tried through the night, and crucified the following daylight period; still Wednesday by Hebrew timekeeping. When the sun set that evening, Thursday began: the first High Sabbath of that Passover week, the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Friday then followed as the preparation day for the weekly Sabbath, which began at sunset Friday and ended at sunset Saturday. Thus Christ was in the tomb exactly three days and three nights; Wednesday night, Thursday, Thursday night, Friday, Friday night, and Saturday; just as He Himself foretold. By the time the first day of the week began at sundown, He had already risen.

See my breakdown of the timeline

https://www.rebuildspirit.com/post/after-three-days-before-corruption-reclaiming-the-biblical-resurrection-timeline

The Didache also affirms that the early believers continued to fast before the Sabbath and to worship on the Sabbath after the resurrection; proving that the apostolic church kept the same seventh-day observance that Christ Himself honored. And Revelation declares that those who keep the commandments of God will have eternal life (Revelation 22:14), with the Sabbath being one of those commandments, described in Exodus 31 as a perpetual covenant between God and His people. The book of Hebrews 4:9 confirms that the Sabbath remains after the resurrection: “There remains therefore a Sabbatismos—a Sabbath-rest—for the people of God.” Even after His resurrection, Christ is still Lord of the Sabbath (Saturday) (Mark 2:28).

Given these clear witnesses; Scripture, the Didache, and the early apostolic practice; no human authority had the right to change the divine command.Yet the Roman Catholic Church, without biblical warrant, transferred worship from the seventh day to Sunday, the day of the Sun; the same day already sacred in Roman and earlier Near Eastern sun-cults.This change was not made in obedience to Christ but to distance the Roman church from its Jewish roots, even though Jesus and His apostles were themselves Jews. The Peshitta, already in circulation before the Latin Vulgate, preserves this older truth, showing that the earliest believers never claimed that Christ rose on Sunday morning.That later claim arose only when Rome sought to align its worship with imperial culture rather than apostolic instruction.

Therefore, it is not true that Sunday worship celebrates the resurrection of Christ. Both Scripture and the Didache testify otherwise.The shift to Sunday was the product of human alteration, not divine command—a move that mirrors the old Baal-Sun cycle, exchanging the true Sabbath of Yahweh for the solar veneration of Rome.

The Peshitta and the Timing of the Resurrection

The Peshitta, the ancient Syriac version of the Bible, preserves how the earliest Semitic-speaking Christians understood and transmitted the Gospels; those closest in language, culture, and mindset to Jesus Himself. The New Testament portion of the Peshitta was circulating among Eastern believers by the second century A.D., long before the Latin Vulgate was completed in the West. Because it was written in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, the very language Jesus spoke, it often retains nuances that later Greek and Latin readers misunderstood.

One of the clearest examples appears in Matthew 28:1, which in the Peshitta reads (in literal English translation):

“In the evening of the Sabbath, when the first day of the week was drawing on, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to see the tomb.”

The key phrase; “in the evening of the Sabbath”; is translated from the Syriac words b-ramsha d-shabta, meaning at the close of the Sabbath. This corresponds to the Greek phrase opse de sabbatōn, which can mean either “after the Sabbath” or “late on the Sabbath.” Both expressions describe the transition from Sabbath to the first day, that is, Saturday at sundown in Jewish timekeeping.

In the Hebrew reckoning of days, each day begins and ends at sunset (see Genesis 1:5: “and the evening and the morning were the first day”). Thus, “the evening of the Sabbath” marks the end of Saturday and the beginning of Sunday. According to this reading, when Mary Magdalene came to the tomb while it was still dark, the Sabbath had just ended; and the tomb was already empty.

This means that, according to the Peshitta’s natural Semitic sense, Christ’s resurrection occurred before the Sabbath closed, not at sunrise on Sunday. He rose as the Sabbath ended; precisely fulfilling His own prophecy of being “three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40).

This reading also aligns with early Eastern Christian practice, in which the Sabbath continued to be observed as the day of rest and worship, while the twilight following it became a time of rejoicing in the risen Christ. Over time, as Christianity spread westward into Latin-speaking Rome, the Vulgate translation and the Roman calendar reshaped that understanding, identifying the resurrection with Sunday morning instead.

Yet the Peshitta remains a vital witness to the older, original chronology; showing that the earliest Aramaic-speaking followers of Jesus understood His resurrection to have taken place at the end of the Sabbath, not at dawn on the first day of the week.

Sources Consulted

• Mark S. Smith, The Ugaritic Baal Cycle: Introduction with Text, Translation and Commentary of KTU 1.1–1.6 (Leiden: Brill, 1994).

• Philo of Byblos, The Phoenician History (fragments preserved in Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 1.9–10).

• G. W. Ahlström, Aspects of Syncretism in Israelite Religion (Lund, 1963).

• The Holy Bible — Matthew 12:40; Luke 24:7; John 2:19–22.

• The Peshitta (Syriac New Testament). Critical editions consulted:

  • Peshitta New Testament Interlinear (The Aramaic Bible, Leiden: Brill, 1987–) and

  • The Syriac Peshitta Bible with English Translation, ed. George Anton Kiraz (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2016).Used especially for comparison of Matthew 28:1 (“In the evening of the Sabbath, when the first day of the week was drawing on”) with the Greek and Latin traditions.