Table of Contents
Kronos goes by several names: Kronos or Cronus in Greek, Saturn in Roman myth, and El in the Phoenician account that Philo of Byblos gives. The page title takes its wording from Philo. Some readers also link Kronos with Ea, the Babylonian water god.
Kronos in Greek myth
Hesiod’s Theogony tells the main Greek story. Kronos is the youngest child of Earth and Heaven (Gaia and Uranus), the youngest of the Titans. Earth gives him a jagged sickle, and with it he attacks his father and takes his place as ruler.
Kronos then swallows his children as they are born: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades and Poseidon. He has learned that one of his own sons will overthrow him.
Hesiod gives the swallowing and the prophecy behind it.
These great Cronos swallowed as each came forth from the womb to his mother’s knees with this intent, that no other of the proud sons of Heaven should hold the kingly office amongst the deathless gods.
Hesiod, Theogony, ll. 453-491, translated by H. G. Evelyn-White (1914)
Rhea hides the newborn Zeus. When he is grown, Zeus makes Kronos bring up the swallowed children, and in the war of the gods against the Titans (the Titanomachy) Kronos is defeated and the Titans are held under Tartarus.
The Romans matched Kronos with Saturn, whose reign they remembered as a golden age of plenty. In art he often carries a sickle or scythe. He is also often called the god of time, but that idea probably comes from Kronos being mixed up with Chronos, the Greek word for time.
Kronos in the Chaldean flood story
Kronos also turns up in the Babylonian flood story told by Berossus, a Babylonian priest who wrote in Greek. There, “Cronos” is the Greek name for the god who warns the flood hero Xisuthrus.
In Berossus, Kronos warns Xisuthrus of the coming flood.
In his time happened a great Deluge, the history of which is thus described: The Deity, Cronos, appeared to him in a vision, and warned him that upon the fifteenth day of the month Daesius, there would be a flood, by which mankind would be destroyed.
Berossus, as given in Cory's Ancient Fragments, pp. 26-29, quoted by George Smith in The Chaldean Account of the Deluge
Philo of Byblos and Sanchuniathon
The link between Kronos and El comes mostly from Philo of Byblos, a Greek writer of the late 1st and early 2nd century CE. Philo said he had translated the work of Sanchuniathon, an old Phoenician historian, and he retold Phoenician myth with Greek names so Greek readers could follow it.
In Philo, Uranus and Ge (Earth) have four sons, and the first is “Elus who is also Kronos.” The followers of Elus are called the Eloim. Philo’s Kronos also castrates Uranus, as in Hesiod, and he gives the city of Byblos to the goddess Baaltis.
Eusebius of Caesarea
Philo’s own book is lost. What we have survives in quotations by Eusebius of Caesarea in his Praeparatio Evangelica (Preparation for the Gospel), written in the early 4th century CE.
One of these passages tells how Kronos sacrificed his only son when war threatened the country. Eusebius quotes it twice, in Book I and again in Book IV.
Philo, as Eusebius quotes him, names Kronos as El and tells of the son’s sacrifice.
Kronos, therefore, whom the Phoenicians call El, who was king of the country, and subsequently, after his decease, was deified and changed into the star Saturn, had by a nymph of the same country called Anobret an only-begotten son (whom on this account they called Jeiid, the only-begotten being still so called among the Phoenicians); and when extreme dangers from war had befallen the country, he arrayed his son in royal apparel, and prepared an altar and sacrificed him.
Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica, Book IV, chapter 16, p. 156d, translated by E. H. Gifford (1903)
In Book I, chapter 10, Gifford’s version of the same passage reads “Kronos then, whom the Phoenicians call Elus.” The name “Israel” in this page’s title comes from this passage: Greek copies of Eusebius are said to read “Israel” at this point where Gifford prints El or Elus. That is the textual root of the idea of Kronos as “Israel.” It is also why some writers compare the story with Abraham and his son, and with the patriarch Jacob, who is renamed Israel. The page Kronos/Saturn and Jacob/Israel in Phoenician Tradition follows that thread further.
Phoenician and Ugaritic inscriptions
Few inscriptions name Kronos in Phoenician texts, since Kronos is a Greek name. Many name El, who was seen as the chief god and father of the gods in Canaanite and Phoenician religion.
The Ugaritic texts (14th to 12th centuries BCE), found at Ras Shamra in modern Syria, describe El as the head of the council of the gods. Ugarit was not strictly Phoenician, but its religion was closely related.
In Carthage, inscriptions name Baal Hammon, whom later Greeks and Romans matched with Kronos and Saturn. Greek and Roman writers said that Kronos received child sacrifices at Carthage, and the burial ground archaeologists call the Tophet is often linked to that practice. This helps explain how Kronos came to be matched with older Semitic gods such as El.
Classical and Rabbinic sources
Some later Classical and Rabbinic writers also matched Canaanite gods with known Classical ones, and this helped the idea that Kronos could be seen as the Semitic El. El was also known as El Elyon, “God Most High” (see El Elyon).
What the sources show
Philo of Byblos, through Eusebius, plainly equates Kronos with El. The Ugaritic texts show who El was in the wider Canaanite world. Carthage shows Kronos matched with Baal Hammon. The name “Israel” for Kronos rests on a single manuscript reading of one passage, so it is better treated as a reading to test than as a settled fact.
