El is the high god of the Canaanite pantheon inherited by early Israel, an aged and beneficent creator who presides over the assembly of the gods on his mountain and apportions the nations among them. He is remembered in the patriarchal names of the deity, El Elyon, El Shaddai, El Olam and El Roi, and in the name Israel itself. The Song of Moses preserves an archaic scheme in which El Elyon distributes the peoples to the sons of God and assigns Israel to Yahweh; in the mainstream religion El and Yahweh are fully merged, so that El's epithets, his creator role and his council all become Yahweh's. In the older West Semitic background his consort is the goddess Athirat, the Asherah later paired with Yahweh in Israelite inscriptions.