One of the most important sources that we have for the most ancient stages of the religion of Israel are some epic texts about the gods of Canaan that were found in an archaeological excavation in a place called Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit) early in the twentieth century. These epics reveal a very rich ancient Canaanite mythology, especially in the elaborated stories of the gods ’El and Ba‘al and their rivals and consorts. While, of course, the Israelite branch of the Canaanite group partly defined itself through the rejection of this mythology, much of the imagery and narrative allusions that we find in the works of the Israelite prophets, the Psalms, and other biblical poetic texts are best illuminated through comparison with these ancient texts. These fragments of reused ancient epic material within the Bible reveal also the existence of an ancient Israelite version of these epics and the mythology that they enact. …
The most persuasive reconstruction from the evidence we have shows that in the ancient religion of Israel, ’El was the general Canaanite high divinity while YHVH was the Ba‘al-like divinity of a small group of southern Canaanites, the Hebrews, with ’El a very distant absence for these Hebrews. When the groups merged and emerged as Israel, YHVH, the Israelite version of Ba‘al, became assimilated to ’El as the high God and their attributes largely merged into one doubled God, with ’El receiving his warlike stormgod characteristics from YHVH. Thus, to restate the point, the ancient ’El and YHVH … apparently merged at some early point in Israelo-Canaanite history, thus producing a rather tense and unstable monotheism. This merger was not by any means a perfect union. ’El and YHVH had very different and in some ways antithetical functions, and I propose that this left a residue in which some of the characteristics of the young divinity always had the potential to split off again in a hypostasis (or even separate god) of their own. …
This merger, if indeed it occurred, must have happened very early on, for the worship of only one God characterizes Israel, at least in aspiration, from the time of Josiah (sixth century B.C.) and the Deuteronomist revolution, if not much earlier. This merger leaves its marks right on the surface of the text, where the ’El-YHVH combination can still be detected in the tensions and doublings of the biblical text. …
The general outlines of a theology of a young God subordinated to an old God are present in the throne vision of Daniel 7, however much the author of Daniel labored to suppress this. In place of notions of ’El and YHVH as the two Gods of Israel, the pattern of an older god and a younger one—a god of wise judgment and a god of war and punishment—has been transferred from older forms of Israelite/Canaanite religion to new forms. Here, the older god is now entirely named by the tetragrammaton YHVH (and his supremacy is not in question), while the functions of the younger god have been in part taken by supreme angels or other sorts of divine beings, Redeemer figures, at least in the “official” religion of the biblical text. Once YHVH absorbs ’El, the younger god has no name of his own but presumably is identified at different times with the archangels or other versions of the Great Angel, Michael, as well as with Enoch, Christ, and later Metatron as well.
The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ, by Daniel Boyarin (Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture and rhetoric at the University of California Berkeley), pages 47 - 51