BAAL,
or Bel (plural Baalim), was also an important character, and indeed, according to Dr. Oppert, all of the Phœnician gods were included under the general name of Baal,[[91]] and human sacrifices were often made upon their blood-stained altars. He had a magnificent temple in Tyre, which was founded by Hiram, where he had symbolic pillars, one of gold and one of smaragdus. An inscription[[92]] on the sarcophagus of Esmunazar, king of the two Sidons, claims that he, too, built a temple to Ashtaroth, and “placed there the images of Ashtaroth,” and also “the temple of Baal-Sidon, and the temple of Astarte, who bears the name of this Baal;” that is, the temple of Baal and the temple of Astarte, or Ashtaroth, at Sidon.
The grossest sensuality characterized some forms of the worship of Baal and Ashtaroth. Indeed, it can only be compared to the unmentionable rites which two thousand years later pertained to the worship of Kṛishṇa and Śiva.
In the inscription of Tiglath Pilesar I, Baal is called “the King of Constellations,” and the fact that he was thus worshipped is a peculiar explanation of the frequent condemnation in the book of Kings of the worship of “the host of Heaven,” which is repeatedly spoken of in connection with the altars of Baal.[[93]]
TAMMUZ.
This is another form of the sun-god, who is represented as being slain by the boar’s tusk of winter. June is the month of Tammuz, and his festival began with the cutting of the sacred fir tree in which the god had hidden himself. A tablet in the British Museum states that the sacred dark fir tree which grew in the city of Eridu, was the couch of the mother goddess.[[94]] The sacred tree having been cut and carried into the idol-temple, there came the search for Tammuz, when the devotees ran wildly about weeping and wailing for the lost one,[[95]] and cutting themselves with knives. His wife, Ishtar, descended to the lower world to search for him, and the tablets furnish another poem which seems to celebrate a temple similar to that recorded by Maimonides, in which the Babylonian gods gathered around the image of the sun-god, to lament his death. The statue of Tammuz was placed on a bier and followed by bands of mourners, crying and singing a funeral dirge. He is also called Dūzi, “the son.” Tammuz is the proper Syriac name for Adonis of the Greeks.
ISHTAR.
This goddess, who is sometimes called Astarte, was the most important female deity of this early pantheon. The Persian form of the word is Astara. In Phœnician it is Ashtaroth,[[96]] and according to Dr. Oppert all the Phœnician goddesses were included under this general name. Another form of the name afterward appeared in Greek mythology as Asteria, and it was applied to the beautiful goddess who fled from the suit of Jove, and, flinging herself down from heaven into the sea, became the island afterward named Delos.
The farther back we go in the world’s history the nearer we approach to the original idea of monotheism, and originally there was only one goddess, Ishtar or Ashtaroth, personifying both love and war, but two such opposite characteristics could not long remain the leading attributes of the same deity, and hence after a time, there were mentioned three goddesses bearing the same name.