Note 106.2 — Chapter VI · The Deities as Nature-Powers.

We have now to consider the other Anatolian cults from the point of view of nature-worship. The survey need not detain us long as our evidence is less copious. As regards the western Semites, our trustworthy records are in no way so ancient as those that enlighten us concerning Mesopotamia. Philo of Byblos, the interpreter of the Phoenician Sanchuniathon, presents us only with a late picture of the Canaanite religion, that may be marred by their own symbolic interpretations. Because we are told106.2 that “the Phoenicians and Egyptians were the first to worship the sun and the moon and the stars,”106.2 or “the first to deify the growths of the earth,”106.3 we cannot conclude that in the second millennium the religion of the Phoenicians was purely solar or astral, or merely the cult of vegetation-gods. “Baalshamin” means the lord of the heavens, an Aramaic and Phoenician god, and Sanchuniathon explained him as the sun;107.1 but Robertson Smith gives good reason for the view that the earliest conception of the local Baal was of a deity of the fertilising spring, a local divine owner of a well-watered plot, hence the giver of all life to fruits and cattle.107.2 Nor are we sure what was the leading “nature-aspect” of the cult of Astarte. The title “Meleket Ashamaim,” “the Queen of the Heavens,” which Ezekiel attaches to her, does not inform us precisely concerning her earliest and original character. From her close association with the Minoan goddess of Cyprus, she was no doubt worshipped as the source of the life of plants and animals and men. Also, it is of some value to bear in mind the later records concerning the worship of Helios at Tyre in the Roman Imperial period, and of Helios and the thunder-god at Palmyra, where Adad-Rimmon, the storm-god who was in power among the western Semites in the earliest period, may have survived till the beginning of Christianity. We may conclude from all this that in the oldest period of the western Semite societies the cult of special nature-deities was a prominent feature of the religion. But even these may already in the second millennium have acquired a complex of personal attributes ethical and spiritual. In the later Carthaginian religion, the personal deities are clearly distinguished from the mere nature-powers, such as the sun, earth, and moon; and this important distinction may have arisen long before the date of the document that proves it.107.3