At the beginning of his study on the book of Hosea, G. Östborn remarked that the relation between Yahweh and Baal is ‘the main problem of the history of the Old Testament religion’. This is true in so far as scholars attempt to trace the links between the Canaanite religious tradition and the forms of religion occurring in Israel and Judah. It may appear that a solution to this problem has now been found, since recent studies have argued forcefully for the derivation of Yahweh's conflict with the sea from the Ugaritic myth of Baal's combat with Yam. While in terms of a literary debt there is a strong case for this, the corollary that seems to be drawn, that Yahweh is a form of Baal, is perhaps more questionable. How are we then to account for the apparently persistent rivalry between the two deities envisaged for example in Deuteronomistic thought? What are we to make of the fact that on the Ugaritic evidence Baal is a dying and rising god, whatever that means, while there is no such attribution given to Yahweh? And above all, what of the Old Testament's own evidence to the effect that Yahweh has a close relation with El? Clearly these and other questions remain to be answered. It is difficult to know where to start an enquiry into these matters. To the obvious retort that we should start at the beginning, one can only reply that it is difficult to know just where the beginning is, since traditions purporting to deal with the remote past often turn out on further enquiry to be dealing with a later period.