Syrian and Palestinian religion

▪ ancient religion

Introduction

      beliefs of Syria and Palestine between 3000 and 300 BC. These religions are usually defined by the languages of those who practiced them: e.g., Amorite, Hurrian, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Aramaic, and Moabite. The term Canaanite is often used broadly to cover a number of these, as well as the religion of early periods and areas from which there are no written sources. Knowledge of the religions of these groups is very uneven; it usually consists of mere glimpses of one or another aspect. Only from the city-state of Ugarit (14th–13th centuries BC) is there a wide range of religious expression. For historical background on the region, see the articles Jordan: history (Jordan); Lebanon: history: Phoenicia (Lebanon); Palestine; and Syria: history (Syria).

Nature and significance

 Internally, the landscape of Syria and Palestine is broken into many different regions. In consequence, the population was generally divided among many polities, each of which had its own official religion. Externally, Syria-Palestine formed a land bridge between the great civilizations of Mesopotamia (Mesopotamia, history of) and Egypt and faced westward across the Mediterranean Sea toward the cultures of the Aegean (Aegean civilizations). Syria and Palestine were subject to influences from these cultures and in turn contributed to them. As a result, the official religions of the area were often syncretistic and sometimes cosmopolitan. Particular cults and myths were carried westward and adopted by the Egyptians of the New Kingdom (1539–1075 BC), by the Greeks, and later by the Romans. Despite their many different outer forms, and the individual stamp given them by the various political powers, the religions of Syria and Palestine appear to have been typologically similar. Out of them, however, emerged the ultimately quite distinctive religion of Israel, from which in turn Judaism, Christianity, and, less directly, Islam (Islām) were formed.

      The evidence available is primarily the product of the small, wealthy, ruling elites of these societies. It bears witness primarily to their religion, giving only indirect testimony to the beliefs or practices of the vast majority of the population. This official religion is polytheistic, the anthropomorphic gods as a whole being referred to as an extended family, or an assembly, or by other collective terms. Most earlier sources come from more cosmopolitan contexts and reflect that fact in their attention to a variety of gods. The sources from the 1st millennium suggest a greater concentration on a few gods or indeed on one supreme god.

      Some divine names appear through most of the period from 3000 to 300 BC. In other cases, different names appear in different periods and in different regions or languages, and often titles are used instead of names. Consequently, it is sometimes not possible to determine to what extent new names have been assigned to gods whose cult is continuous across these boundaries and to what extent different gods may lie behind the same title. In general, it appears that a few types prevailed and persisted over the centuries.

      The most pervasive type was the storm god ( Hadad, Baal, Teshub), who was associated with rain, thunder, and lightning—and thus with fertility and war. Another type was a more patriarchal creator god, bearing the simple name El (“God”). The major female deities appear to have been of either the belligerent type ( Anath, Astarte) or the matriarchal type ( Asherah). These often, but not always, served as the respective consorts of the two male types. Also prominent throughout the period were a solar and a lunar deity.

      Consistent with the sources of documentation, the monarch (monarchy) emerges as a significant medium between god and people, acting on the people's behalf in the cult of the god and on the god's behalf in the care of the people. The cult was generally practiced in a “house” of the god, where a professional priesthood attended to the daily needs of the god, represented in effigy.

      The most recurrent concerns in the written sources are (1) the good relations between monarch and god and the well-being of the monarch and his family (alive and deceased), on which the order of society depended, and (2) the natural conditions—rainfall, sunshine, fertility of soil, flocks, and herds—on which most people depended directly for survival and on which the agrarian economy as a whole depended.

Sources of modern knowledge

      Until the late 19th century most of the information about pre-Hellenistic Syria and Palestine came from the Hebrew Bible and from various Greek and Latin sources.

      While the Hebrew Bible was largely completed by 300 BC, its attitude toward contemporary religions of the area was generally quite hostile, so that its references to these religions may not only devalue them but also exaggerate or distort various aspects of them. On the other hand, Israelite religion was itself an outgrowth of, as well as a reaction to, the religions of its neighbours, so that many features of Israelite religion found in the Hebrew Bible exemplify the religions of the larger area. The only sure guide to making such discriminations is the knowledge gained from indigenous documents.

      Greek and Latin sources may be less hostile, but they are also much later, from the Roman period. While they may be more reliable in their description of the contemporary character of the religions of the area, that character may have been significantly different after several centuries of Hellenism from what it had been even in the middle of the preceding millennium. Notable among the Greek and Latin sources are De dea Syra (“About the Syrian Goddess”) from the 2nd century AD, attributed to Lucian of Samosata, and the section of Eusebius of Caesarea's Praeparatio evangelica (“Preparation for the Gospel”; 4th century AD) that cites extracts from a history of Phoenicia by Philo of Byblos (c. AD 100); Philo himself claimed to be translating the work of an early Phoenician priest, Sanchuniathon. While indigenous sources now confirm isolated elements of this allegedly early description of Phoenician religion, its distortions also have become more demonstrable. Philo's history is in fact an attempt to recount early Phoenician history by constructing a systematic chronological sequence of events out of the various local traditions of his time and interpreting the latter euhemeristically—that is, by treating gods and myths as representative of historical individuals and events.

      Beginning in the late 18th century, the finds of early explorers of the area and subsequently of archaeologists (archaeology) engaged in more systematic excavation have produced a rapidly increasing number of firsthand sources. Successive generations of epigraphers and philologists have deciphered the texts and attained an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the languages. Unfortunately, the texts that are best understood tend to be formulaic and yield only the most external kinds of information about the religion, while the more distinctive texts, which seem more interesting and promise to be more revealing, are usually more difficult to penetrate.

       cuneiform archives from various 2nd-millennium sites and from the 3rd millennium at Ebla in northwestern Syria provide some documentation of the religion. The most abundant documentation comes from the 14th- and 13th-century remains of the city of Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra), on the Mediterranean coast of Syria. This includes the only native examples of extended religious narrative. It also comprises the widest range of genres, including myths, legends, liturgical texts, god lists, omens, and correspondence.

      From the 1st millennium come scores of Phoenician inscriptions, both from the Phoenician coast and from other areas of the eastern Mediterranean; neo-Hittite hieroglyphic inscriptions and Aramaic inscriptions from northern Syria, almost all from the 9th and 8th centuries; and Moabite, Ammonite, and Hebrew inscriptions. These are very limited in genre, and relatively few are more than a few lines long.

      Uninscribed materials from excavated sites throughout Syria and Palestine supplement the picture: they include the foundations of temples, temple furnishings, figurines, images of gods and their emblems, and scenes of gods, myths, and religious activities on reliefs and seals. However, criteria for identifying religious materials have not always been carefully considered, nor has discriminating attention been given to the question of the reflection of religious life in material remains in general. It is often difficult to correlate with confidence written and unwritten materials.

      In spite of these new and ever-growing sources of knowledge, the resulting picture is still very irregular. While there is an unparalleled variety of sources, covering a century and a half, from the large cosmopolitan city of Ugarit, other written materials give a much more limited picture. For many periods, areas, and topics there are no written remains. Descriptions of the religion of any one period or area (with the exception of Ugarit) are extremely limited and superficial. Generalizations about the religions of Syria and Palestine may well prove to have significant exceptions as some of these gaps are filled by new discoveries.

Institutions and practices

      The temple typically occupied a dominating site in the city along with the palace. Like the palace, it had political, administrative, and economic functions, as well as its distinctive religious functions. The temple, or the temple and palace together, were often raised or walled off in a separate precinct or acropolis. The temple was the “house” of the god—often so in both name and form. It was also a storehouse for the god's treasures and hence sometimes particularly thickly walled. The temple staff played a leading role in the life of the city.

      In the early 3rd millennium BC the temples were built on the same plan as houses: a rectangle with the entrance on one of the long sides, with a small altar or a niche for the cult statue opposite the entrance. Sometimes there were benches around the three uninterrupted walls. An outer court contained the main altar, where the larger community could participate in worship. At the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC the house of the god was extended by the expansion of the niche into an additional room (“cella”) and of the entrance into a porch—the form later used by the Phoenician architects of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. There were also outdoor shrines, such as the “high place” at Gezer (near modern Ramla, Israel) with its row of standing stones and monumental stone basin (and surviving charred animal remains). Over the centuries there was an increasing variety of forms at different sites. At particular sites, however, the plans of temples often remained virtually identical, even after previous superstructures had been destroyed.

 Typical temple furniture included the cult statue, standing stones, bowls and their stands, altars, and benches around the walls. Hazor, in the Jordan Valley north of the Sea of Galilee, has yielded a 13th-century BC statue of a male deity on a bull-shaped base. In another temple a set of cultic objects, also from the 13th century, was found behind a stone slab: a seated male figure and a group of standing stones, the central one of which has engraved on it a vertical pair of arms with hands outstretched toward a disk and crescent.

      The palace too might have a chapel. The palace at Mari, on the Euphrates in eastern Syria, housed a statue of a goddess holding a vase from which she dispensed flowing (“living”) water; the water was channeled through the statue to the vase. Wall paintings in the palace depict the same image, as well as scenes of the king being presented to a god and making offerings to a god.

      A common religious object, not confined to sacred places, is the “Astarte” (Astarte) figurine, depicting a nude woman, often with exaggerated breasts and genitalia, and sometimes holding a child. This was perhaps a fetish representing the mother goddess and used to stimulate conception, childbirth, or lactation.

      The temple was staffed by cultic personnel (priests) under a “chief of priests,” and by practitioners of the various other skills required by the functions of the temple. These included singers and other musicians, diviners, scribes, and other specialists, depending on the size of the temple. The temple staff was sustained by some of the sacrifices, by supplies from the estates of the temple or palace, or by direct contributions imposed on the surrounding population. Its essential religious function was the care of the cult statue, the offering of sacrifices, and the performance of other rituals for the welfare of god, monarch, and community.

      Typically the monarch (monarchy) and sometimes other members of the royal family played a leading role in the most significant cultic acts and festivals. A king of Sidon refers to himself as “priest of Astarte.” One text from a town near Ugarit concerns a sacrifice by the queen.

      In tombs formed from subterranean caves beneath the western palace of Ebla during the second quarter of the 2nd millennium BC, skeletal remains and treasures suggest a cult of deceased monarchs. From Mari and Ugarit researchers have learned of a significant cult of former rulers (called “Healers” or “Shades” at Ugarit)—from putative or mythical figures to the most recently deceased—who supported the reigning monarch with divine blessings. The monarch's expectations of life after death are expressed in an inscription on an 8th-century monumental effigy of the god Hadad from Zincirli (Zincirli Höyük) (ancient Samʿal) in south-central Turkey. King Panammu directs that his future heir, when making sacrifice to Hadad, pray that Panammu's soul may eat and drink with the god. Phoenician kings of Sidon later refer to a resting place with the Healers/Shades, and the same word is used by the Israelites to refer to all the dead.

      People attempted to influence the gods through animal sacrifices (sacrifice), petitions, and vows (promises of gifts contingent on the deity's response to a request for help). Sacrifice was central to the cult. Domestic animals were the main victims—cattle, sheep, and goats—and also birds. There is clear evidence for two types of sacrifice: simple gifts and whole burned offerings. There also is scattered evidence of human sacrifice, probably limited to situations of unusual extremity (contrast the account of the sacrifice of his eldest son by the king of Moab in 2 Kings 3:26–27 with the more abundant evidence of child sacrifice from Carthage and other Phoenician colonies in the west).

      The will of the gods was discovered in various ways. Use of the Mesopotamian technique of liver divination (hepatoscopy) is evidenced by the discovery of clay liver models (sometimes inscribed with omens) at such sites as Ugarit and Hazor, as well as by abundant written testimony at sites closer to Mesopotamia, such as Mari. Ugarit also had a list of omens based on abnormal births. King Idrimi of Alalakh refers to divining by observation of the flight of released birds.

      The correspondence from Mari abundantly testifies to the institution of prophecy—spontaneous pronouncements by cult personnel and occasionally others, delivering messages from the deity. By this means the deity disclosed his or her wishes or gave divine warnings or promises to the king. The Aramaean king Zakir records that he appealed to his god in desperation during a siege and that the god answered him through prophets with promises of deliverance—obviously fulfilled, since the king makes so much of this in his inscription. According to the Egyptian “Report of Wen-Amon,” a young man of Byblos went into a trance and resolved a diplomatic deadlock by announcing that the Egyptian envoy whom the local king had refused to see had indeed been sent by the Egyptian god Amon. Biblical narratives portray similar prophetic phenomena in Israel. The gods also revealed themselves through dreams, which again were carefully reported to the monarch by his officers at Mari.

      According to later classical sources a central focus of Syrian religion was the rituals surrounding the myth of the dying god. The myth, according to these sources, variously draws on other Middle Eastern or Egyptian traditions but essentially tells of the deity's death and subsequent sojourn in the underworld and of an accommodation reached between the queen of the underworld and the goddess associated with the god that allows him to return to earth for six months of the year. Associated rituals include the sacrifice of a male pig, mourning for the dead god in a funeral procession, cultivating “gardens” in small pots and baskets, and a threshing rite.

Gods, mythology, and worldview

      There are significant differences between the divine names used in personal names, those of literary myths and epics, and those of more official pantheons, as found in cultic and political texts.

      Personal names are probably the most conservative of these sources. Some of the deities referred to in personal names are not mentioned in other contemporary sources. They may also preserve the memory of old family or clan cults. The piety expressed in personal names shows that people often saw themselves (or their children) as related to a god especially by kin or service. At Ugarit the god was variously conceived as father, mother, brother, sister, mistress, king, or judge, and the person named could be the son, daughter, offspring, servant, boy, or man of the god. The names also refer to individuals as the “gift” or “beloved” of the god. In personal names the relationship between an individual and a god is more important than the particular deity's role in traditional mythology or the official cult.

      The projection of anthropomorphic features onto the gods and the need to explain things—from specific rituals to the nature of the world—led to the telling of stories about the gods. The written versions of such myths and epics often preserve older traditions and may figure as their chief divine actors gods other than those prominent in the current official pantheon. The only source of such native Syro-Palestinian religious literature is 14th-century BC Ugarit.

El

      In the Ugaritic myths, El is depicted as a bearded old man, kindly and wise. In the legend of King Keret, El is the sole benefactor of Keret in that king's various sufferings: he responds to Keret's misery at his lack of a family by appearing to him in a dream and giving him detailed directions for making a certain princess his wife. When Keret has successfully followed these directions, El appears at his wedding and pronounces a blessing, promising the couple many children. After the children are born, Keret becomes sick because of his failure to fulfill a vow. No mortal or deity is able to help him until finally El again intervenes and creates a creature for the specific task of healing him. No sooner has Keret recovered and resumed his duties than he faces another crisis—his son proposes to take his place as king—but the sequel (a third intervention by El?) has not been preserved. In the text El is called “the Father of humankind.” He is the patriarch of the gods, the final power and authority, though he does not always act decisively and he is not always treated with due respect. As the creator god, “the Creator of Creatures” (though no creation myth has been preserved) and the king of the gods, he is the owner and chief executive of the world. Even the forces of chaos, Yamm and Mot (“Sea” and “Death”), are his beloved children. El is called “the Bull” and is represented iconographically by a bull. His consort is Elat, usually known as Asherah, the “Progenitress of the Gods.” She is associated with the sea and with serpents.

The Baal cycle

      Baal (Hadad) is regularly denominated “the son of Dagan,” although Dagan (biblical Dagon) does not appear as an actor in the mythological texts. Baal also bears the titles “Rider of the Clouds,” “Almighty,” and “Lord of the Earth.” He is the god of the thunderstorm, the most vigorous and aggressive of the gods, the one on whom mortals most immediately depend. Baal resides on Mount Zaphon (Cassius), north of Ugarit, and is usually depicted holding a thunderbolt. He is the protagonist of a cycle of myths from Ugarit. These tell of a challenge from Yamm, to which Baal responds. Armed with magical weapons made by the craftsman god, Kothar, Baal manages to overcome Yamm. Another major episode is instigated by Baal's lack of a house. With the assistance of Asherah and Anath, Baal gets El's approval to build a house; Kothar accomplishes the construction; and Baal celebrates by inviting the gods to a feast. The other major story concerns Baal's relations with Mot, whom he initially defies, but to whom he eventually succumbs. After Baal is swallowed up by Mot, Anath, Baal's sister, goes in search of her brother. Anath, who is called “the Maiden,” is a goddess of fertility and of warfare. She is depicted in this story in scenes of bloody slaughter in single combat with various monstrous enemies. After finding Baal, Anath buries him and informs El of Baal's death. Attempts are made to find a god adequate to assume Baal's role and to restore fertility to the land, but these attempts fail. Anath then confronts and defeats Mot and disposes of his body as if it were grain, grinding him up and scattering him over land and sea. In a dream, El learns that Baal is alive again. Mot also reappears and he and Baal fight until the sun goddess warns Mot of the consequences of Baal's defeat. There is apparently a final definition of the two gods' spheres of influence.

      Anath also appears as the villain in the tale of Aqhat, or Aqhat Epic. In this story the gods grant Danel a son, Aqhat, on whom Danel confers a bow made by the craftsman god, Kothar. Anath offers Aqhat riches and immortality in exchange for the bow, but Aqhat refuses her offers. After bullying El into letting her have her way with Aqhat, she proceeds, with the aid of her henchman Yatpan, to have Aqhat killed. Danel performs various rites to try to remove the consequent blight on the land, until he is informed of his son's murder. He then seeks his remains and buries him, curses the towns closest to the site of the murder, and mourns for seven years, after which he gives his blessing to his daughter's proposed mission to avenge Aqhat's (Aqhat Epic) death. She sets out and comes to the camp of Yatpan, where the two of them start drinking—at which point the preserved portion of the tale ends. Anath is often associated with Athtart (later Hebrew Ashtoreth, Greek Astarte). Both are renowned for their beauty, and both are closely associated with Baal.

      Another group of gods play important subordinate roles in the myths. The sun goddess, Shapash, “Light of the Gods,” helps Anath in her retrieval of the dead Baal and intervenes in the final conflict between Baal and Mot. The craftsman god, known as both Kothar (“Skilled”) and Khasis (“Clever”), makes the weapons with which Baal disposes of Yamm and builds the palace for Baal. He is the source of Aqhat's bow, coveted by Anath. The Kathirat are goddesses of marriage and pregnancy, who appear before the conception of Aqhat and in a brief myth about the marriage of Yarikh (“Moon”) and his Mesopotamian consort Nikkal. Shahar and Shalim are the gods of dawn and dusk, whose conception and birth are recounted in a liturgical myth.

      While the great cycle of narratives about Baal from Ugarit is clearly a literary work and not a myth, it is doubtlessly composed of religiously significant mythic material. It depicts the prevailing order of things as the result of struggles among the gods—successive bids for power in which Yamm and Mot are confined to their present bounds and Baal and Anath (associated with fertility and military prowess, respectively) prevail. Having descended into the underworld and survived Death, Baal embodies the assertiveness and continuity of life.

      It is the official documents of religious practice—god lists, sacrificial lists, and temple rituals, as well as the inscribed monuments—that disclose most directly the gods favoured by the authorities of the time. While virtually all the gods of the myths are Semitic in name, the gods of the cult are much more diverse. This official pantheon presumably included the gods of leading families within this cosmopolitan state and the gods of allied neighbouring states.

Other early gods

      At 3rd-millennium Ebla the most important god was Dagan, “Lord of Gods” and “Lord of the Land.” Other gods of Ebla included El, Resheph, the storm god, Ishtar, Athtart, Chemosh, and the sun goddess. The gods of the city included several referred to by their Sumerian names. The great rivers of northern Syria were also deified, so that their local names remain unknown. Personal or family gods were referred to as “the god of my father” and “the god of the ruler.”

      In the early 2nd millennium the great goddess, Ishtar, was widely portrayed in contemporary northern Syria as both warrior and fertility goddess. A standing stone from Ebla depicts her in a winged shrine, standing on a bull. Dagan was also popular—there are references to the local Dagan of various towns: Dagan of Terqa, Dagan of Tuttul, and so on. The royal establishments of Mari and Ugarit owed special allegiance to a deity called “the Lady of the Palace.”

      The Indo-European gods Varuna (Varuṇa), Mitra, and Indra were recognized in the kingdom of Mitanni in northeastern Syria, where a Hurrian population was ruled by an Indo-Aryan aristocracy in the third quarter of the 2nd millennium. Little is known of the religion of the Hurrians beyond the names and general character of their chief gods: Teshub, a storm god, and his consort Hepat; their son, Sharruma, also a storm god; the goddess Shaushka, identified with the Mesopotamian Ishtar; and Kushukh and Shimegi, lunar and solar deities, respectively. Hurrian mythology is known only through Hittite versions.

      King Idrimi of Alalakh designates himself “servant of the storm god; of Hepat; and of Ishtar, the Lady of Alalakh, my lady.” He acknowledges his dependence on the storm god in his adventures and concludes his autobiographical inscription by invoking deified Heaven and Earth, the gods of heaven and earth, the storm god “the lord of heaven and earth,” and the great gods. Thus an individual king of the mid-2nd millennium pays tribute specifically to the storm god and then to the two major goddesses of his world, and he acknowledges the rest by means of collectives.

      The documentation at Ugarit attests to a more explicit and specific comprehensiveness. Several god lists have been recovered from Ugarit. The most “official” one, which has survived in two Ugaritic copies and one Akkadian translation, consists of 33 items, beginning with a generalized ancestral deity, Ilib, “God of the Father.” (One version prefixes the “God of [Mount] Zaphon”—presumably the deity of the mountain north of Ugarit, which is later referred to directly as a god.) Then comes El, followed by Dagan, Baal of Zaphon, and six other Baals. (El, Ilib, or Baal of Ugarit variously come at the head of other god lists.) There follows a small group of gods and goddesses bracketed by Earth-and-Heaven and Mountains-and-Valleys, including the Kathirat, Yarikh, Mount Zaphon, Kothar, and Athtar. Then comes a group of major goddesses, led by Asherah, Anath, and Shapash and concluding with Athtart. The list ends with another group beginning with “the gods who are Baal's auxiliaries,” and including the assembly of the gods. This group includes Resheph, Yamm, and Shalim.

      Figurines from throughout the area and from a period of many centuries represent an enthroned couple (corresponding to El and Asherah) and a belligerent pair (corresponding to Baal and Anath or Athtart). These figurines are probably replicas of life-size (or larger-than-life) cult images. In any case, they attest to the ongoing official significance of these four types of deity under whatever names.

Developments in the 1st millennium BC

      In the 1st millennium BC the written documentation shrinks to formulaic inscriptions, very occasionally developed into more expressive literary miniatures. Gods are often referred to in these texts by titles or by new names, so that it is often difficult to ascertain their relationship to the deities of the 2nd millennium, or indeed to determine their individuality in relation to one another. It appears that there was a tendency in this millennium to concentrate all divine power in one deity, as has been noted of Mesopotamia and as is most obviously and extremely the case in Israel.

      The storm god, Hadad, appears as the chief god of the Aramaeans in northern Syria in the 9th and 8th centuries. The moon god (under the name Sahar) also is prominent in this area. Some rulers speak of their own dynastic deity. A king who owes his position to the Assyrian emperor refers to the latter and the dynastic deity equally as “my master.”

      It is clear that several different deities are referred to by the form Baal-X (“Lord of X”). Hadad is probably represented by Baal-Shamen (“Lord of the Heavens”). El appeared under the title Baal-Hammon—rarely on the mainland, but abundantly in the Phoenician colonies of Africa; under this name he becomes the chief deity of Carthage. In the Phoenician heartland the supreme goddess of Byblos—presumably Asherah—is called simply Baalat Gubl (“the Lady of Byblos”). Anath becomes much less visible during the 1st millennium than at Ugarit. Athtart (Astarte), on the other hand, becomes more prominent. At Sidon, as earlier at Ugarit, she is referred to as “the Name of Baal,” perhaps indicating that she was called upon as a mediator with the supreme Baal ( Hadad). Alongside other long-familiar deities such as Resheph and Shamash appeared certain new names, including Eshmun (especially at Sidon), Melqart (“king of the [underworld] city”; especially at Tyre), and, of course, Yahweh (in Israel—but also represented at least in personal names at Hamath and Larnaca). According to the Hebrew Bible, Asherah and Astarte were both worshiped in Israel during the first half of the millennium, and Hebrew inscriptions attest to a pairing of Yahweh and Asherah.

       Chemosh, known from Ebla and Ugarit, reappears as the national god of Moab. King Meshaʿ of Moab interprets Israel's occupation of his country as a consequence of Chemosh's anger with his land. He claims that, at Chemosh's direction, he reconquered land occupied by Israel, and he attributes his success to Chemosh. He reports that he dedicated the Israelite inhabitants to Chemosh by slaughter and says that Chemosh will henceforth dwell in these territories. This is recorded on the Moabite Stone (now in the Louvre, Paris), a stela that commemorates these events and the building by Meshaʿ of a sanctuary for Chemosh in gratitude. The formal identity of these expressions and this kind of religious interpretation of events with those found in some of Israel's literature encourages the surmise that they may also have been shared by the Ammonites with respect to their national god, Milcom, and by the Edomites with respect to their national god, Qos.

      The Philistines (Philistine), traditionally believed to have originated in Crete, were one group of the Sea Peoples that moved from the Aegean Sea to the southeastern Mediterranean. They settled in southwestern Palestine after being repulsed by the Egyptians. Their religion, while it retains some Aegean and Egyptian elements from the Philistines' origins and route of migration, appears largely indistinguishable from Canaanite religion in general. The Bible refers to the gods of the Philistines by the familiar Canaanite names Dagon (Dagan), Baalzebub, and Ashtart. The name of Asherah has been found inscribed on storage jars in a cultic room at Ekron.

Simon B. Parker Ed.

Additional Reading

Patrick D. Miller, Jr., Paul D. Hanson, and S. Dean McBride (eds.), Ancient Israelite Religion (1987), includes essays on Mari prophecy, on aspects of the religion of Ugarit, the Aramaeans, and the Phoenicians, and several on the religion of Israel in relation to its Canaanite environment. A more extensive survey of Phoenician religion with good illustrations may be found in Sergio Ribichini, “Beliefs and Religious Life,” in Sabatino Moscati (ed.), The Phoenicians (1988), pp. 104–125. A good overview of Ugaritic religion with photographs of the major religious artifacts is André Caquot and Maurice Sznycer, Ugaritic Religion (1980). James B. Pritchard, The Ancient Near East in Pictures Relating to the Old Testament, 2nd ed. (1969, reissued 1974), contains photographs of many important religious objects from throughout the period and area. Also worth consulting is Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. van der Horst (eds.), Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, 2nd ed. (1999). Harold W. Attridge and Robert A. Oden (trans.), The Phoenician History (1981), offers Philo of Byblos' Greek text, an English translation, and notes on that work. A more extensive commentary without translation is found in Albert I. Baumgarten, The Phoenician History of Philo of Byblos (1981). A reconstruction of the early ritual basis of the dying god cult is offered by Noel Robertson, “The Ritual Background of the Dying God in Cyprus and Syro-Palestine,” Harvard Theological Review, 75(2):313–59 (1982).Simon B. Parker Ed.

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