Yaw or Yam is the name for the Levantine god of chaos and the power of the untamed sea as found in texts from the ancient city of Ugarit. His archenemy is Ba'al, whose name means "lord" — a euphemism for Ba'al's sacred name Hadad which only his priests could utter. In Ugaritic texts, Ba'al is also known as the king of heaven, and the first born son of El, whom ancient Greeks identified with their god Chronos. He ruled over the gods assembled on the Syrian Mount Tsephon (also Sapan and Casius) which is etymologically identical to Aramaic Zion. Since Yaw/Yam wishes to raise himself to the lofty heights of the gods whom he hates, and since he is the lord of chaos and destruction, the nearest equivalent in modern thought to Yaw/Yam is the Devil.

Compare with the Gnostic Demiurge Yao.

See also Yahweh and Josiah.

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Yaw is also an aeronautical and nautical term which indicates how far a craft is pointing away from its direction of travel due to rotation about its vertical axis. Rotations about the other axes are called pitch and roll. See Flight_dynamics.