The book demonstrates that Canaanite and other Near Eastern mythologies were drawn on by the Hebrews in a deeply coherent, selective, and adaptive way. Despite the impression given by modern Bible scholarship that the Scriptures are a patchwork of forgotten fables, in them was found a very directed collective effort, motivated by a single overriding concept or inspiration.

Out of the whole menagerie of Canaanite gods, only El, Baal, Mt. Tsaphon and Asherah/Anat, were meaningfully drawn on, and these as ideograms of God's Omniscience, Justice, Omnipresence, and special love for Israel.  This book acknowledges the full extent of Canaanite influence, and  to note the systematic abstraction of the myths into symbols of a moral philosophy.

It is felt by the author that this view of the material accounts more economically and less ingeniously for the facts than any other so far advanced.  

Scientifically  speaking, religion is not "real" and does not "work".  To claim otherwise is to insult both the intelligence and the moral sense.  Setting aside also the claims of religion to be politic or psychology or even - what people really tend to mean when they insist on the importance of religion -  a sort of interior policeman to keep people from behaving to badly -  we maintain that religion has value as both Poetry and Philosophy that is, as  a tool by which we can understand and experience the world as meaningful. (This is not to exclude the possibility that religion may have value and power of another sort.)  It is on these levels of Poetry and Philosophy that the archetypes discussed may demonstrably be shown to have been the lifeblood of the Jewish religion.  From the Prophets, through Talmudic legend, into Kabbalah and Hassidism: at every point of self renewal the Jewish people have returned to their Symbols and Archetypes, and found in them the power to reintegrate the scared with a historically altering secular by creating new forms.  

It must also be stressed that the archetypes are not merely Poetry, but also Philosophy.  They contain concepts - and  the Hebrews have shown themselves, from the beginning, masters at isolating and reading their context on this level.  In Jewish hands the archetypes became images of the world, philosophies in the palm of one's hand, who contemplation, comprehension and veneration reliably suffused life with significance, and made it actively livable.  

To be made privy to the meaning of the tribe's religious symbols which contain the essence of its Poetic and Philosophic wisdom, in the purest and most archaic sense, and initiation, of becoming Human.