Patriarchal Palestine

by A. H. Sayce

The Semites of Babylonia themselves had already begun the work of transformation. They too spoke of Istarât or "Istars," and used the word in the general sense of "goddesses." In Canaan, however, Ashtarôth had no such general meaning, but denoted simply the various Ashtoreths who were worshipped in different localities, and under different titles. The individual Ashtoreth of Gebal was separate from the individual Ashtoreth of Bashan, although they alike represented the same divine personality.

It is true that even in the West Istar did not always become the feminine complement of Baal. Here and there the old form of the name was preserved, without any feminine suffix. But when this was the case, the necessary result was that the female character of the deity was forgotten. Istar was conceived of as a god, and accordingly on the Moabite Stone Ashtar is identified with Chemosh, the patron-god of Mesha, just as in Southern Arabia also Atthar is a male divinity.

The worship of Ashtoreth absorbed that of the other goddesses of Canaan. Among them there was one who had once occupied a very prominent place. This was Ashêrah, the goddess of fertility, whose name is written Asirtu and Asratu in the tablets of Tel el-Amarna. Ashêrah was symbolized by a stem stripped of its branches, or an upright cone of stone, fixed in the ground, and the symbol and the goddess were at times confounded together. The symbol is mistranslated "grove" in the Authorized Version of the Old Testament, and it often stood by the side of the altar of Baal. We find it thus represented on early seals. In Palestine it was usually of wood; but in the great temple of Paphos in Cyprus there was an ancient and revered one of stone. This, however, came to be appropriated to Ashtoreth in the days when the older Ashêrah was supplanted by the younger Ashtoreth.

We hear of other Canaanitish divinities from the monuments of Egypt. The goddess Edom, the wife of Resheph, has already been referred to. Her name is found in that of the Gittite, Obed-Edom, "the servant of Edom," in whose house the ark was kept for three months (2 Sam. vi. 10). Resheph, too, has been mentioned in an earlier page. He was the god of fire and lightning, and on the Egyptian monuments he is represented as armed with spear and helmet, and bears the titles of "great god" and "lord of heaven." Along with him we find pictures of a goddess called Kedesh and Kesh. She stands on the back of a lion, with flowers in her left hand and a serpent in her right, while on her head is the lunar disk between the horns of a cow. She may be the goddess Edom, or perhaps the solar divinity who was entitled  in Babylonian, and whose name enters into that of an Edomite king A-rammu, who is mentioned by Sennacherib.

But, like Istar, a considerable number of the deities of Palestine were borrowed from Babylonia. In the Tel el-Amarna tablets the god of Jerusalem is identified with the warlike Sun-god of Babylonia, Nin-ip, and there was a sanctuary of the same divinity further north, in Phoenicia. Foremost among the deities whose first home was on the banks of the Euphrates were Arm and Anat, and Rimmon. Anu, whose name is written Anah in Hebrew, was the god of the sky, and he stood at the head of the Babylonian pantheon. His wife Anat was but a colourless reflection of himself, a grammatical creation of the Semitic languages. But she shared in the honours that were paid to her consort, and the divinity that resided in him was reflected upon her. Anat, like Ashtoreth, became multiplied under many forms, and the Anathoth or "Anat" signified little more than "goddesses." Between the Ashtaroth and the Anathoth the difference was but in name.

The numerous localities in Palestine which received their names from the god Rimmon are a proof of his popularity. The Babylonian Rimmon or Ramman was, strictly speaking, the god of the air, but in the West he was identified with the Sun-god Hadad, and a place near Megiddo bore the compound title of Hadad-Rimmon (Zech. xii. 11). His naturalization in Canaan seems to belong to a very early period; at all events, in Sumerian he was called Martu, "the Amorite," and seal-cylinders speak of "the Martu gods." One of these has been found in the Lebanon. The Assyrian tablets tell us that he was also known as Dadu in the West, and under this form we find him in names like El-Dad and Be-dad, or Ben-Dad.

Like Rimmon, Nebo also must have been transported to Palestine at an early epoch. Nebo "the prophet" was the interpreter of Bel-Merodach of Babylon, the patron of cuneiform literature, and the god to whom the great temple of Borsippa—the modern Birs-i-Nimrud—was dedicated. Doubtless he had migrated to the West along with that literary culture over which he presided. There his name and worship were attached to many localities. It was on the summit of Mount Nebo that Moses died; over Nebo, Isaiah prophesies, "Moab shall howl;" and we hear of a city called "the other Nebo" in Judah (Neh. vii. 33).

Another god who had been borrowed from Babylonia by the people of Canaan was Malik "the king," a title originally of the supreme Baal. Malik is familiarly known to us in the Old Testament as Moloch, to whom the first-born were burned in the fire. At Tyre the god was termed Melech-kirjath, or "king of the city," which was contracted into Melkarth, and in the mouths of the Greeks became Makar. There is a passage in the book of the prophet Amos (v. 25, 26), upon which the Assyrian texts have thrown light. We there read: "Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? Yet ye have borne Sikkuth your Malik and Chiun your Zelem, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves."

Sikkuth and Chiun are the Babylonian Sakkut and Kaivan, a name given to the planet Saturn. Sakkut was a title of the god Nin-ip, and we gather from Amos that it also represented Malik "the king." Zelem, "the image," was another Babylonian deity, and originally denoted "the image" or disk of the sun. His name and worship were carried into Northern Arabia, and a monument has been discovered at Teima, the Tema of Isaiah xxi. 14, which is dedicated to him. It would seem, from the language of Amos, that the Babylonian god had been adored in "the wilderness" as far back as the days when the Israelites were encamping in it. Nor, indeed, is this surprising: Babylonian influence in the West belonged to an age long anterior to that of the Exodus, and even the mountain whereon the oracles of God were revealed to the Hebrew lawgiver was Sinai, the mountain of Sin. The worship of Sin, the Babylonian Moon-god, must therefore have made its way thus far into the deserts of Arabia. Inscriptions from Southern Arabia have already shown us that there too Sin was known and adored.

Dagon, again, was another god who had his first home in Babylonia. The name is of Sumerian origin, and he was associated with Ami, the god of the sky. Like Sin, he appears to have been worshipped at Harran; at all events, Sargon states that he inscribed the laws of that city "according to the wish of Anu and Dagon." Along with Arm he would have been brought to Canaan, and though we first meet with his name in the Old Testament in connection with the Philistines, it is certain that he was already one of the deities of the country whom the Philistine invaders adopted. One of the Canaanitish governors in the Tel el-Amarna correspondence bears the Assyrian name of Dagon-takala, "we trust in Dagon." The Phoenicians made him the god of corn in consequence of the resemblance of his name to the word which signifies "corn"; primarily, however, he would have been a god of the earth. The idea that he was a fish-god is of post-Biblical date, and due to a false etymology, which derived his name from the Hebrew dag, "a fish." The fish-god of Babylonia, however, whose image is sometimes engraved on seals, was a form of Ea, the god of the deep, and had no connection with Dagon. Doubtless there were other divinities besides these whom the peoples of Canaan owed to the Babylonians. Mr. Tomkins is probably right in seeing in the name of Beth-lehem a reminiscence of the Babylonian god Lakhmu, who took part in the creation of the world, and whom a later philosophizing generation identified with Anu. But the theology of early Canaan is still but little known, and its pantheon is still in great measure a sealed book. Now and again we meet with a solitary passage in some papyrus or inscription on stone, which reveals to us for the first time the name of an otherwise unknown deity. Who, for instance, is the goddess 'Ashiti-Khaur, who is addressed, along with Kedesh, on an Egyptian monument now at Vienna, as "the mistress of heaven" and "ruler of all the gods"? The votive altars of Carthage make repeated mention of the goddess Tanit, the Peni or "Face" of Baal, whom the Greeks identified with Artemis. She must have been known in the mother-land of Phoenicia, and yet no trace of her worship there has as yet been found. There were "gods many and lords many" in primitive Palestine, and though a comprehensive faith summed them up as its Baalim and Ashtaroth they yet had individual names and titles, as well as altars and priests.