It is agreed the text served as an exercise for novice scribes, but the principles guiding the arrangement of the listed deities remain unknown.
[10] Apprentice scribes were expected to copy increasingly complex lexical lists, starting with enumerations of signs arranged based on similar shapes of the first wedges or pronunciation, and eventually progressing to similar compilations of various words, arranged thematically, for example based on accompanying determinative, as in the case of lists of names deities.
[17] The Weidner god list has the form of a single-column enumeration of theonyms, starting with An and continuing with a variety of other Mesopotamian deities, both well-attested and obscure.
[7] In a more recent assessment Aaron Tugendhaft adopts a similar position and notes that for example, only the beginning of the list follows a clear hierarchical order.
[25] Through the second millennium BCE, the Weidner god list diffused through Upper Mesopotamia and beyond, as evidenced by copies found in Ugarit, Emar and Amarna.
[26] As the copies match each other, most likely Ugaritic scribes worked with preexisting Hurrian editions,[27] presumably meant to facilitate bilingual scribal education.
[30] However, the size of local western pantheons was comparatively smaller, leading to multiple Mesopotamian deities being presented as corresponding to a single Hurrian or Ugaritic one.
[33] Some entries might have been reinterpreted for theological reasons, for example while a Hurrian form of the goddess Aya is attested, in the Ugaritic list her name is reinterpreted as an uncommon spelling of Ea and therefore equated with Eyan (a Hurrian variant of Ea) and Kothar, a local god of similar character, presumably to avoid the implications that the goddess Shapash, the counterpart of Aya's husband, had a wife.
[34] A further commonly noted peculiar aspect of the trilingual list is the fact that Baal, the Ugaritic weather god, is equated with the goddess Imzuanna.