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In sum, the much-vaunted parallels with the Hurrian and Semitic material are mostly isolated items – names, mythical motifs – which are not part of the main intellectual framework of the treatise, with the exception of the presentation of cultural advance of human genealogy (above). They include the Phoenician names of Mo̅t/Mouth; Chousor; Elioun; and story-patterns which recall certain episodes or motifs in Genesis (1.10.9, the sons of god and the daughters of men ~ Gen. 6: 1–8; 1.10.10, fraternal hostility, if not fratricide itself ~ Gen. 4). There are also jumbled elements of myths familiar from Greek sources: the first god dies in an encounter with wild beasts (1.10.15), like Adonis, and Ouranos’s castration turns the rivers red (1.10.29), a phenomenon elsewhere located at the Adonis river (DDS §8; Lightfoot 2003: 327–328). That should warn us of the un-canonicity of any given mythical narrative.

In principle, Philo’s Euhemerism is an ineluctably Greek feature, however true it is that the Ras Shamra texts, with their anthropomorphic deities, lent themselves to a euhemerizing approach. Philo’s introduction presents us with the standard version according to which the gods originated as mortals, subsequently deified for their services to mankind (1.9.29). What is interesting, though, is that although the technogony does indeed present us with inventors and technologists, the theogony does not; the future gods do not act in a way which is at all beneficent, euergetistic, or worthy of deification. It is true that Euhemerus’s succession myth (as rendered by Ennius) also involved violence, both threatened and actual, but he seems to have wanted to downplay the culpability of both Saturn and Jupiter by assigning a large role to Saturn’s jealous and vindictive brother, Titan, and by attributing Jupiter’s final coup d’état to a reaction to a plot (to which Saturn was prompted by an oracle); the narrative builds toward a Jupiter who, once established on the throne, is a worthy, not a tainted, object of future veneration (T. 62, 64A, 66–67 Winiarczyk). Philo has not designed a scheme which climaxes in a universal “good king” whose deserts speak for themselves (might the Ugaritic Baal have provided such a model?); on the contrary, the Ouranos/Cronos conflict grinds on for 32 years before the castration which, in Hesiod, was the beginning and end of the matter (1.10.29; Th. 173–182). In this section it looks as if Euhemerism has been grafted onto a scheme with which it does not sit happily; another possible sign of tension is that the section following the consolidation of Cronos’s power (1.10.31–38) often refers to its protagonists – prematurely – as gods (Baumgarten 1981: 39, 226–227).