Neither Rousseau’s optimism, nor Huxley’s pessimism can be accepted as an impartial interpretation of Nature.

Prince Peter Kropotkin

Jerusalem and Judaism before the Return 1.3

Phœnician Cults
Yehouah as the Dying God Baal

Abstract

Early settlements are Canaanite. Pots, decorated shells and stones, carved ivories and bones with Canaanite motifs, roaring lions, a cow suckling a calf, a seated god or king, a grazing stag, are found until the seventh century when Assyrians took over. The question is whether Judah existed much before Samaria was conquered or was sliced off as a new vassal of the Assyrians. Similarly, no evidence is found of an Edomite state before the seventh century BC. The culture of Edom was Phœnician (Canaanite) before then. The Assyrian conquest brought the change from Canaanite to Arab. Edomite language is Western Semitic (Phœnician, Canaanite, but usually called Hebrew). Moab was as poor as Judah and poorer than Israel. Few relics have been found there, besides the famous stele. The capitals of an eighth century building found in Moab were “in a typical Phœnician style’. Evidence in the ground for Moab as a prosperous nation is “more fantasy than reality’.

Phœnician Cults

Lists of cult items and temple functionaries found in Phœnician temples as far west as Marseilles resemble the lists in the bible. They include, though, the lists of the prices of animals bought for sacrifice. Of the images most often found are a standing, seated or horse-born god, a woman perhaps pregnant, supporting her breasts, or a mother suckling a child, and sometimes separate statuettes of the mother and the child, and statuettes of a youth. The infant motif might have been from Egypt around the eighth century.

The well-known Baalam insciption refers to Shagar and Ishtar. The goddess Ishtar appears in the form common to all these Palestinian countries as a naked woman (in statuettes, seals, and so on) offering her breasts. Remarkably depictions of a child god are also found. It is modelled like the Egyptian images of the child Horus, but no inscribed name has been found. Besides these, archaeologists have found hundreds of dedications to a pair of gods round the coasts of the Mediterranean. Sometimes the gods have inscribed names, sometimes more than one—identities or compound names, perhaps. The male is Bal Melquart, Baal Eshmun, Baal Gebal. The female is Baalat Gebal, Ashtorath Tanit, Tanit Pane Baal. Baal was a title common in theophoric personal names among Israelites, Judaeans, Philistines, Moabites, Edomites and Ammonites as well as Phœnicians.

The official Ammonite cult, like that of other Palestinian peoples in this period, was generally based on a divine couple.
E Stern, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible

S Moscati’s explanation was that the Phœnician cults involved a protective father god, a fertile mother god, and their son, whose annual birth or resurrection stood for the growth of vegetation, and therefore the seasonal cycle. These gods seemed common to all Phœnicia, though the names of the gods differed from city to city. So, it was not a pantheon but a trinity differently named according to the place.

The Phoenician cult… became the prototype of all the pagan cults practised by other peoples during the period [the Iron Age] including the Judaeans.
E Stern, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible

It would naturally be so because the Judaeans were simply a Canaanite people like the Phœnicians.

The Phœnician temple of Astarte at Kition accepted the hair of worshippers. A red burnished bowl was found there with a description of the offering. Another find confirmed it. It seemed to be part of a bill of account, and listed the “sacred barbers”. It suggests that the Jewish order of the Nazarites was not peculiar to Judaism. The Nazarites had their head shaved as a penance then did not have it cut again unless they broke a vow.

Evidence from the Phœnician cemetary at Azlit is interpreted as showing the Phœnicians stopped burning their dead at the beginning of the sixth century BC, instead laying the corpses to rest in rock cut tombs. It seems a curious coincidence that this latter was a Persian practice, that the Persians venerated fire and considered it to have been desecrated by burning corpses, and they objected to the burning of young children to be placed in the tophet, as the Phœnicians had dones until the Persian period. In other words, there were good reasons for the change observed in the Azlit cemetary from towards the end of the sixth century but not before, and the dating looks to be at least half a century out. Elsewhere, at Achzib, Persian period shaft tombs have been found alongside what seem to be eighth century ones.

Ephraim Stern says burial in stone anthropoid coffins began in the Egyptian twenty sixth dynasty and the Phœnicians, Ammonites and Palestinians copied them. What point is he highlighting here as having been copied, the anthropoid feature or that the coffins were of stone. Plainly, it is that the coffins were of stone because anthropoid coffins had been common in Egypt for a long time. Yet burial in stone, whether in coffins or in caves of mausoleums made of stone, was a Persian ritual necessary from their desire not to pollute the elements with a corpse. The Persians constituted the twenty seventh dynasty, beginning in 525 BC when the Egyptian twenty sixth dynasty was overthrown by Cambyses.

Yehouah as the Dying God Baal

The Persian colonists seemed to have expunged any inscriptional signs of Yehouah as a nature god, and made any reversion to it an apostasy against the proper god, Yehouah. Even so, there still are poetical references to the storm god, Yehouah, and the sun god, Yehouah, in the poetical sections of the bible. Garbini points to the struggle with a sea monster called Rahab or Leviathan. (Ps 74, 79; Isa 27; 51; Job 40-41). Elsewhere Phœnician elements occur as in Psalms 104, a cosmogony from Tyre relating to the god Elqunirs. Part too of the story of Esau and Jacob (Gen 27) seem identifiable in the work of Philo of Byblos on the origins of Tyre. One could hazard a guess that, if we ever found details of the mythology of the Phœnicians, much more of the Jewish scriptures would be found in it. Fragmentary Phœnician texts written in Greek in the Hellenistic period show what Phœnician history must have been like. Mochus, Philo of Byblos and the Annals of Tyre show literature that could have been used as a model, if not a source, of parts of the Hebrew bible. The histories of Phœnicia written by Philo of Byblos and Mochus began with a cosmogony just as the Hebrew bible does. Already, allusions in the Song of Deborah and Psalms 29 have been found in the Ugaritic tablets.

Ras Shamra is the modern name of the ancient city Ugarit, discovered by accident in 1928 on the coast of Syria in what was once Phœnicia. In May 1929, archaeologists uncovered the clay tablets bearing cuneiform writing, unusually written in a cuneiform alphabet of 30 characters. From the summer of 1930, the Ras Shamra cuneiform was decoded. The language of the script, called Ugaritic, was a Northwest Semitic language, closely related to Phœnician and Hebrew but preceding them.

In the scriptures initiated by the school of Ezra, Baal is an idolatrous god and sometimes a rival to Yehouah for the attention of the Israelites. In Elijah’s dispute with Baal’s prophets on Mount Carmel (1 Kg 18), Yehouah—not Baal—proved to be the controller of rain and storm, or lightning which “fell as fire”. Yet, the Ras Shamra tablets associate Baal with rain, storm, and fertility, and proclaim him as “Haddu, lord of the Stormcloud”. Through rain, Baal provided fertile ground which produced crops on which both animals and men depended. Baal’s worshippers sought to maintain his supremacy so that their life-sustaining crops could continue.

Scholars noted parallels between the Ugaritic texts and the Hebrew Bible, suggesting the Israelite religion was an adaptation of Pagan religious myths and practises to worship of Yehouah. Early agricultural societies were polytheistic. They had a pantheon of gods with different functions, although they often had a high god above them all. The main function of agricultural gods was to keep the land fertile, and many of the rites of these gods were sexual. This manifests itself in the Jewish scriptures where the opponents of the Israelites are shown as fornicating with their gods, and the same type of abuse is applied to the supposedly apostate Israelites who follow the same practices. It shows that the Canaanite religion was what could have been expected in that kind of society. Yet the monotheistic worship of Yehouah was imposed on to the formerly polytheistic people.

So, the bible speaks of “sons of El”, “sons of God”, one of whom is Yehouah. The bible itself has evidence that Yehouah was worshipped by non-Israelites, though biblicists can usually find reasons that they really were. Even the admired scholar Martin Noth defends this:

In no case is the name Yehouah to be encountered outside and independently of Israel. So the tradition of the book of Exodus could be right, namely that the divine name Yehouah arose for the first time in Israel, or better for the first time with the people of Israel, and therefore in some way goes back to the work of Moses.

In the land of the blind the one eyed man should be king, but Christians will not even open a single eye to the evidence:

The ark drawn by the Philistine cows ends up in a field of a Canaanite from Beth Shemesh, but he has a theophoric name in Yehouah—Joshua (1 Sam 6:14,18). Names which incorporate the name of a God implies worship of him. Yeho, Yo, and Yah are Yehouah appearing in names and imply worship of Him, but this man was not an Israelite, he was a Canaanite!
The son of the king of Hamath, an Aramaean kingdom north of Israel, is Joram (2 Sam 8:10). Biblicists with their usual reverence for the ineptitude of the Holy Ghost say it is an error for Hadoram—theophoric in Hadad.
Jochabed is Moses’s mother (Ex 6:20, Num 26:59), so she anticipated God’s revelation to the prophet.
Yaubidi was the Aramaean king of Hamath known from the annals of Sargon II. Though he is plainly an Aramaean king of an Aramaean country, Noth makes his theory perfectly valid by declaring this king to have been an Israelite!
Names in the tablets of Mari and other Syrian cities of the eighteenth century BC have theophoric elements “yahwi”, “yawi” and “ya”. These are plainly enough theophoric references to Yehouah, supposed to be exclusive to the Israelites in the theories of biblicists like Noth. Biblicists of the Albright school continued the pretence, but “The name of my son is Yaw”, appeared on a fragment from Ugarit. Needless to say, biblicists began to find ingenious ways of denying what is obvious—Yehouah was a god of the Ugaritic people long before Moses. Even a Catholic scholar, Abbé H Cazelles protests that “yaw” at Ugarit has been “challenged without reason”. More absurd still is that no one doubts that the god “Ieuo” was worshipped at nearby Berytus as Porphyry testifies and Eusebius was happy to accept.
“Ya” and its variants are also found in the Ebla tablets, even having a divine determinative. G Pettinato deciphers a sign found commonly on the Ebla tablets as “ia” (“ya”), and, though most experts read it also as “i”, “li” and “ni”, biblicists have begun to treat third millennium Syria as evidence of the bible, ignoring in their typical fashion, the actual bible and all previous opinion. Suddenly the Biblicists were glad to accept this “ya” as justification for the biblical cycle of Abraham myths. Abraham found himself wandering around Syria a thousand years earlier than he had been, and Moses became suddenly an embarrassment! It does not work. A widespread regional god could not at the same time have been the exclusive god of one patriarch and his family.

There is no doubt that “yau” was a god of the local Syrian pantheon towards the beginning of the second millennium, worshipped by both nomads and the sedentary population. That Yehouah was a god of the pantheon of the Levant back into time contradicts the Mosaic legend that it was brought by him from Egypt. This pre-Israelite god became the exclusive God of the Israelites but it is certain that it did not happen as the bible says it did. Yehouah was a god of the people that the Israelites supposedly converted long before they arrived in the Mosaic myth.

Psalms 29 has been extensively analysed in comparative studies of the Hebrew and Ugaritic texts. H L Ginsberg, in 1935, suggested a Canaanite origin of this psalm as a Pagan hymn to the storm-god, Baal, later adapted to the worship of Yehouah. Baal is the storm-god, sending lightning with thunder, his holy voice, causing his “enemies to quake”. Baal’s voice “convulses the earth” and causes the “mountains to quake”. In the Ugaritic tablets, the wood for Baal’s palace was from “Lebanon and its trees, From Sirion its precious cedars”. Psalms 29 also speaks of the cedars of Lebanon and Sirion:

From Sirion its precious cedars.
Psalms 29:6

In the psalm, Yehouah is described in the same terms as Baal (29:3-5,7-9)—his voice “breaks the cedars” (29:5), “shakes the wilderness” (29:8) and “strips the forests bare” (29:9). Since Yehouah is depicted as a neurotically jealous god, it is not possible for a psalm to Baal to have been transferred to Yehouah. The Israelites must actually have been worshipping Baal under the name of Yehouah. The scriptures admit (Jg 3:7) that the Israelites worshipped Baal when they had occupied Canaan. This admission is a slip of the “second” temple priesthood who had written the scriptures. The priests had set up a temple in Jerusalem at the behest of the Persian king, so that all Hebrews—the people of Abarnahara—would worship one god. The reward for the priests was to get rich quick, and for the Persians to raise revenue and unite a mixed people into the common culture of Persia. So the scriptures were written as a polemic against older gods—the gods the Israelites had worshipped before the colonists were sent. This oversight shows the reality but a critical examination of the Jewish scriptures does not suggest any ancient Israelite allegiance to an almighty transcendental god.

Christians, who are troubled by this, desperately point out that the Ugaritic texts are not “exactly” the same as Psalms 29. One wonders how they can be exactly the same when they are in different languages written in different scripts. The psalmist might have modified a Canaanite hymn essentially by replacing the name Baal with the personal name of the Jewish God. That other changes occurred in translation and subsequently seems obvious and unavoidable, but to pretend that the two hymns are independent because they are not “fully alike”, is typically Christian.

They add that the bible can say what it likes as the word of God and whatever it says implies no dependence on Baal worship or anything else Pagan. Here is an even funnier joke:

The Old Testament was intended also for the gentile world, it is but natural that the biblical authors availed themselves of figures of speech and imagery with which also Israel’s neighbours were familiar, or which were at least easily understandable to them.
Alexander Heidel, cited by Garry G Brantley

“Familiar figures and literary style would facilitate gentiles’ understanding of the truth”. Note how these bizarre Christian kooks think the ancient Jewish priests were writing for gentiles and that they were writing the truth! This is only true in the sense that the Hebrews were not all Israelites. They inluded Phœnicians, Levantine Canaanites, Aramaeans and the residue of Hittites and other older invaders as well as the influxing Arabs. Hebrew was their sacred language and script, not just that of the Israelites.

Anyway, in typical Christian polemical style, having argued that there is no link at all between these ancient texts and the Hebrew bible, they then give it all away, hoping that you will not notice because you are as thick and uncomprehending as the average bird-brained believer, by adding that:

The existence of these similarities argues eloquently for the bible’s integrity.

And these similarities…

…provide one of the chief evidences that the bulk of the Psalms were not written after the Babylonian exile. Their language fits that used by Israel’s neighbours in the very time our Hebrew Bible says the Psalms were written.

So these similarities, rather than militating against the bible’s credibility, buttress its integrity. What was denied as being dependent or even connected suddenly proves to be a virtue.

They can, if they wish, believe that black is white and the earth is flat, but intelligent people do not believe either. Nor do they believe that the bible appeared perfectly formed at God’s bidding. Rational people reject this nonsense. Of course, Christianity has never been rational, which is probably the reason Christians want us all to be like them. Christians blindly claim:

the bible’s ethical and spiritual concepts are unparalleled by Pagan sacred literature;
the gods of Pagan myths are guilty of degenerate behaviour of all sorts;
Yehouah is infinite in purity;
Pagans constantly had to pacify their angry gods.

On wonders whether these people ever actually read the Jewish scriptures. They seem to use them simply to dig out some authoritative quotation to suit whatever they are saying. Try reading your Old Testament and tell us then that this syncretistic god, Yehouah, is free of degenerate behaviour, practises unparalleled ethical concepts, is infinitely pure and does not have to be pacified. If they cannot see that the bits of the scriptures that they like are not precisely the sycophantic writings of fearful and superstitious men, eager to pacify the most monstrous ogre that ever got a billion people worshipping him, then they are not only blind but insane.

Aliyan Baal’s supposed death and resurrection has big holes in it at the crucial points, according to Christian apologists. Yet, the text says “Baal is reported to have died” after descending to the underworld. There he is “as dead”. Anat recovers his corpse and buries it. Later El sees in a dream that Baal yet lives. After another gap, Baal is in a battle. What is missing? Baal is reported to have died and is described as dead yet he reappears fighting a battle. Meantime, he must have been revivified.

Baal’s other form, Hadad, is apparently even less prone to dying because he just sinks into a bog for seven years. When he emerges, blighted nature renews itself. There is no suggestion of death and resurrection and no hint of ritual re-enactment of the myth. Christians who believe this should look at Zechariah 12:11, where Hadad-Rimmon is inconsolably mourned. It is not post-Christian and they can only be mourning his death. If the nit-picking Christians deny that seven years in a bog is death, then let us not disagree. But the difference is merely a variation on a theme. The Nag Hammadi and other Gnostic texts vary as to whether the Redeemer took on flesh. Some deny it, others accept it. Some have a fleshly body but an apparent death. Others a real death, but only of the human Jesus, merely a shroud of flesh discarded once the Saviour chose to show his spiritual self. These are variations on a common theme. Christians do not believe them but they stem from the same sources as Christianity.

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Last uploaded: 22 May, 2008.