Yinish is the supreme deity of the Rutuls, a sky-father who is at once the thunderer of the pantheon. His name belongs to a set of Daghestani father-god theonyms — Tsakhur Gynysh, Lak Zal, Avar Bechated, Lezgin Alpan — each of which names the same figure, the celestial ruler whose voice is heard in thunder and who governs the weather and fertility on which mountain agriculture depended. In the surviving record Yinish is invoked chiefly as an abstract high god rather than through a developed narrative cycle; the concrete cults of rain, hearth, and the hunt are worked out beneath him through the lesser powers of Rutul belief.