TheBibleNet: July 2016

Ba'al

בעל

The principal Phoenician god, whose cultic centre was in Tsur (Tyre) and whose wife - in some versions of the myth his mother - was Astarte, though in Beit Anatot (Bethany) she was named Anat, which links back to the Beney Chet (Hittites) of Anatolia. Ba'al means "lord", "master", "possessor" or "owner", and came to mean "husband"; like the word Adon, Adonis or Adonai, it is a way of addressing the deity.

There are innumerable references to Ba'al in the Tanach, amongst which Judges 2:11; 3:7; 6:25; 8:33; 10:10; 1 Samuel 7:4; 12:10; 1 Kings 16:32; 1 Kings 18:22; 2 Kings 10:18.

Phoenician proper names reflect their god, e.g. Yeruv-Va'al (ירבעל - see my note to Judges 6:32), who is also known as Gid'on (Gideon), Et-Ba'al (אתבעל), and the famous Hannibal Barca, Carthaginian general in the Punic wars (הנבעל). The Aramaean equivalent was named Bel (בל), who the Romans called Belus and who re-appears in various similar name-forms in Celtic mythology, particularly as Beli.

In Tsur (Tyre) his full name seems to have Malkeret Ba'al Tsur (מלקרת בעל צד) = "king of the city of Tyre". The Greeks took him over and attached him to their own equivalent god, likewise son of the moon-goddess, Hercules (properly Hera-Kles, "the glory of Hera"). He was first known in Greece either as Herakles Tyrius or Herakles Melkarth(מלקרת), but the Tyrius was later dropped. Scholars have argued about Ba'al's planetary association, though it seems more probable that the Jupiter proponents are correct and the sun proponents incorrect. The Phoenicians worshiped the stone idol Chaman (חמן, sometimes pronounced Chamon) as the sun, and later associated the two under the combined name of Ba'al-Chaman (the same Chaman/Haman who asks to be worshipped as a stone idol in the Purim story).

The legends of Herakles are reflected both in the Celtic myths of Cúchullain and Ar-Thur and, more relevantly, in those of the Danite (Phoenician) sun-hero Shimshon (Samson).

His major appearance in the Septateuch (the first seven books of the Tanach) is as Ba'al Berit (בעל ברית), "the Lord of Covenants", for it is undoubtedly this deity who has been expurgated from the covenant accounts of Av-Raham, Yitschak and Ya'akov. Judges 8:33 and 9:4 both place the worship of this particular epiphany at Shechem, which is precisely where key covenants with the patriarchs were formulated (see AV-RAHAM).

Ba'al-Zvuv (בעל זבוב) is Beelzebub, "the Lord of the Flies"; he was also known as Ba'al Zvul (בעל זבול), and was the same Ugaritic or Phoenician deity in the form in which he was worshiped at Ekron. King Achaz-Yah insulted him in 2 Kings 1:2 ff. The Galileans later accused Jesus of worshipping him as the Prince of Demons (Matthew 12). His "wife" (presumably) was Jezebel (איזבל), properly Iy-Zevel, the daughter of the Et-Ba'al (אתבעל) king of Tsur (Tyre) mentioned above, who married Ach-Av (Ahab) and supported both Ba'al and Asherah worship in Yisra-El until Eli-Yahu (Elijah) swept it away. (1 Kings 16:31; 18:4; 21:5; 2 Kings 9:7).

The Beney Mo-Av (Moabites) worshiped him as Ba'al Pe'or (בעל פער); cf Numbers 23:28, Deuteronomy 3:29, Joshua 22:17 et al.

Many place names also reflect his worship, and naming a place for a god usually indicates the presence there of a shrine. One particularly interesting place is Ba'al Gad at the foot of Mount Chermon. Gad means "fortune", and is of course also the name of one of the twelve tribes. I believe we have here an indication of the nature of the Beney Gad, that they were distinguished from other Yisra-Elite tribes precisely by their honouring of Ba'al above other deities, in the same way that Asher was distinguished through its worship of either Osher (Osiris) or Asherah, and Yisaschar through its worship of either Yah-Shachur, the "Black Madonna", or Yah Shachar, the daen-star,d epending on how you prefer to read each of their names. I would suggest Gad was originally the Beney Ba'al Gad, and that all the tribes are associated with a particular member of the polytheon, as they were with each of the constellations (click here for more on this).

Ba'al-Hamon (בעל המון) should not be confused with Ba'al Chamon (see above), the latter with a Chet (ח), this with a Hey (ה). It is probably a misreading of Ba'al Ammon (בעל אמון) where Shelomoh (Solomon) had a vineyard, according to Songs 8:11; it was sacred to Amonite Jupiter.

Ba'al-Chatsor (בעל חצור) is mentioned in 2 Samuel 13:23 as a village near the tribe of Ephrayim, and another of the same name in Nehemiah 11:33, this one in the tribe of Bin-Yamin.

Ba'al-Chermon (בעל הרמן) is mentioned in 1 Chronicles 5:23 and Judges 3:3 as lying at the foot of Mount Chermon, and may well be an alternate name for Ba'al-Gad.

Ba'al-Tsephon (בעל צפון) appears in Exodus 14:2 and Numbers 33:7, both of which site this shrine to Typhon in the wilderness between the Nile and the Red Sea - appropriately enough, for Typhon was the demon-god of uninhabitable places. The naming is nonetheless slightly surprising, because there is Typhon, but the name here is Tsaphon, and Tsaphon, or Tsaphan, Sapan, Zaphan, even Jebel Aqraa, "Bald Mountain" Mount Casius and many more, all of them the names by which various people at various times knew Ba'al's sacred mountain, his Olympus or Valhalla.

Ba'al-Shalisha (בעל שלשה) in 2 Kings 4:42 is a town in the mountains of Ephrayim.

Ba'al-Tamar (בעל תמר) is mentioned but not described in Judges 20:33. The link of the Phoenician Ba'al with the date-goddess Tamar is surprising, and I wonder if this is not a misreading for Be'er-Tamar, which would be an oasis-shrine - Be'er meaning "well" as in "water-hole". Geographically it is located very close to other, similar shrines, such as the famous Be'er Lechi Ro'i in the story of Hagar (Genesis 16:14).

Ba'aley Yehudah (בעלי יהודה) in 2 Samuel 6:2 is likewise too preposterous to be plausible - or is it? These are surely not "the pagan idols of the tribe of Yehudah", though such a translation would be theoretically valid? And yet...1 Chronicles 13:6 tells us that King David, in order to take the Ark to Yeru-Shala'im, which he had just conquered and was about to make his capital, "went up, and all Yisra-El, to Ba'alah, that is to Kiryat Ye'arim, to bring up thence the ark of ..." (the following phrase then adds confusion, because it attributes the ark to Ha-Elohim, which supports the pantheism of Ba'al worship, but then corrects the god-name to "Adonai yoshev ha-keruvim - my Lord who is seated on the keruvim", יְהוָה יוֹשֵׁב הַכְּרוּבִים, which both is and is not the YHVH with whom we are familiar). Let us take this slowly:

Ba'alah (בעלה) means either "mistress" or "city". King David's Ba'alah is also mentioned in Joshua 15:9, where it is said to be at the foot of Mount Ye'arim, hence its alternate nomenclature. But 15:11 goes on to mention a Mount Ba'alah, from which 15:60 states, and 18:14 confirms, that there is a third name for the town, namely Kiryat Ba'al. So Ba'alah is Kiryat Ba'al (Kiryat - קרית- simply means "village") is Kiryat Ye'arim; and Ye'arim (יערים) means "a thicket of trees" - in other words, once again, we are at a shrine of the twin gods Ba'al and, in this case, Astarte Nemorensis, to use Frazer's phrase. What, we may well wonder, was the Ark of the Covenant, the Mosaic Tablets of Law, doing in such a pagan place for all that time? The answer, it seems to me, is entirely plain: the Beney Yisra-El were worshippers of Ba'al and Astarte, or Ba'al and Anat, or Av-Ram and Sarai, or Av-Raham and Sarah, or El and Chavah, or Yah and YHVH, or quite likely several other variations of the same sun-god moon-goddess relationship, right up until the time of King David, and quite possibly for a long while afterwards; and no notion of monotheism yet existed, or would, for another five hundred more years.

Which leaves only one other unanswered question: for what purpose precisely was David removing the Ark from Kiryat Ye'arim? The obvious answer is: to bring it to Yeru-Shala'im, where he was planning to build a Temple and his political capital, and there to centralise the political and religious confederacy. But none of that required the Ark, which could have been left where it was for ever, and not had any negative impact on his aspirations. The answer to the question lies, I would suggest, in the ancient superstition called "The Tablets of Destiny", or sometimes "The Tablet of Destinies", of which the first of the two links here suggests a precursor to the Genesis Creation tales themselves. For that is what the Ark really contained, made manifest in a set of commandments. It was not the Ark, nor even the Commandments, that were being relocated to Yeru-Shala'im, but the god of Mount Sinai himself, soon to be housed, like Ba'al on Mount Tsaphon, on Mount Tsi'on.

The Argaman Press

Azaz-El

עזאזל

The Azaz-El was the scapegoat sent away by the Beney Yisra-El at the beginning of the agricultural year, or in Yeru-Shala'im thrown over the cliff into Gey Hinnom (Gehenna)

Previously, from the story of Kayin (Cain), during the age of Taurus, and still reflected in the ceremonies of the bullfight, it would have been a scape-bull.

There is much dispute among scholars as to whether the name, as written, should be read as Azazel, or Azaz-El - I am going with the latter for reasons that should become clear in the essay. Gesenius reckons that it is actually neither, because Azazel is oddly spelled Ayin-Zayin-Aleph-Zayin-Lamed; he prefers ti drop the second Zayin, which leaves it as Aza'el, from the root AZAL = "to remove" or "separate". We will see, later in the essay, that this is probably correct in itself, but actually refers correctly to something completely different - the name of an evil demon in Arab mythology which may have become confounded at some point.

The connection between the Crucified Jesus as "scapegoat" and the Azaz-El cannot be ignored; but as it as a matter of theology, and not of comparative mythology, it will not be undertaken here.

What follows is cited from my book "The Day of Atonement" (pages 100-101):

The Book of Jubilees (5:17-18), a pseudepigraphic volume from the Second Temple period which influenced both the Midrashic authors and the sect of the Essenes, claimed that the date of Yom Kippur was a commemoration of the date that Ya'akov (Jacob) heard of Yoseph's death and mourned for him; the sacrifice of the male goat, the Azaz-El, according to the Book of Jubilees, was a reminder of the goat his brothers slaughtered in order to have blood to stain Yoseph's coat of many colours and thereby convince Ya'akov of the tragic fate that had befallen him. The Kara'ites have always followed this version of events, regarding the fast day as a day of mourning, and it may be a residue of this fate that led mediaeval communities to institute the practice of lighting twin memorial candles, one for the living and the other for the dead, and the strangest of all rituals – Kapparot, performable at any time between Rosh ha-Shana and Yom Kippur, but deemed best of all (most efficacious, in the way of white magic) at just after dawn on the eve of Yom Kippur itself.

There is nothing in the Bible, nor in the Talmud, to suggest Kapparot. It was an invention of the Ge'onim, the Babylonian sages of the 9th century, though even they were in disagreement as to what should happen. Rashi, in Shabos 81b, describes a ritual entirely at odds with the one described, for example, in Rosh, in Yoma 8:23, in Tur Orach Chayim 605; and unusually it's the Rashi which is out of use.

At Rosh ha-Shana the Book of Life is opened, in which our deeds for the past year have been recorded, and where, come Yom Kippur, they will be judged in order to determine our karma for the coming year. Through the Ten Days of Awe, through the five prayer services of Yom Kippur especially, we have the chance to make amends, through penitence, and convince God to write our names in the Book of Life for a happy, healthy, prosperous and joyful next twelve months. But nothing that pertains to God’s creation can be taken from the world. So where, if we are forgiven, do our sins go? For they must go somewhere. In Temple times, they went into the body of the Azaz-El; but now, now that there is no Temple? Sifra, Acharey Mos 8:1, tells us that the Day itself is now sufficient, and supplants the Azaz-El; but clearly the orthodox do not accept this ruling. For now they go – into the body of a rooster. Or a hen, if a woman is performing the expiation. And why a rooster? Because the Yehudit word "gever" can mean both a man and a rooster.

The ritual, then, is one of symbolic transference, spiritual as well as etymological. By a process akin to self-exorcism, a person's sins depart him and enter the fowl instead; deceived, apparently, by linguistics. Or simply too giddy, too punch-drunk, to spot the chicanery. The chicken is taken in the right hand (some recite the phrase "Nephesh tachat nephesh – a life for a life" while doing so), lifted above the head, and then swung around three times, a process not unlike consuming three consecutive pina coladas in a smoke-filled discotheque. However, before swinging, the "Beney Adam" is recited, a construction of Psalmic out-takes (107:10, 107:14, 107:17-21), with two verses of Job (33:23-24). Only the opening phrase is original to the prayer:

"Children of Man, who sat in darkness…I have found atonement."

Then the formula for transference, varied according to who is performing the ritual, in what company, on whose behalf.

"This is my substitute, my vicarious offering, my atonement. This rooster shall go to its death, but I will have a long and pleasant and a peaceful life."

Originally, and preferably still today, the hen and rooster should be as white as purity, but as the relentless pursuit of the white dove, the bird of Asherah, was a pagan virtue, Jews were encouraged not to be too choosy. Like the penny in the old man's Christmas hat, if you haven't got a white hen, a speckled one will do; and if even that is beyond your means…in 9th century Babylonia it was customary to use baby rams (in recollection of Av-Raham's substitution at the Akeda), or even simple vegetables such as peas or beans. As sacrifice became forbidden with the destruction of the Temple, so no animal fit for sacrifice could be subjected to kapparot, lest the act be misunderstood. It is also acceptable, since the Kapparah is destined for charity, to use money. The rooster will be slaughtered and given to the needy for a meal – though fortunately we Jews are not an animistic people; there is no suggestion that he who eats the rooster will absorb the sins.

The act of transference itself transfers. The sins to the fowl, the fowl to the hungry. And the entrails of the fowl, given by the hungry to the needy birds and beasts. Nothing may be wasted.

How should a pregnant woman perform Kapparot? (These are the sorts of question that have sustained an industry of Jewish scholarship for two millennia.) For herself, a white hen. But she must also atone for her unborn child. With the same hen, or with a second one? And if a second one, since she cannot know the sex of the unborn child, should she use a rooster or a hen, or one of each, to be on the safe side? And maybe they're twins.

What do you mean, it doesn't matter? Of course it matters. To save a single human soul, the Rabbis teach, is equivalent to saving the whole world. Believe me, it matters.

Not all the world approves of the ritual of kapparot, and it isn't hard to see why. Vegetarians and animal rights campaigners have their own reasons, and they are probably valid. But in Jewish tradition other reasons apply. In the Responsa "Darchei Emon", Rabbi Solomon ben Abraham Adret, the Rashba, opposed Kapparot precisely because it transferred the rite of sacrifice from Temple to courtyard, from Azaz-El to rooster. Post-modernists would take pleasure from such symmetry, but to Adret it was contradictory; the Temple practice was YHVH's Law, the Kapparot mere heathen superstition, and the one could not be allowed to stand substitute for the other. Adret's teacher Nachmanides – his "other" teacher; the Rashba always regarded Jonah ben Abraham Gerondi as "my teacher" – shared his pupil's view, as did Joseph Caro who, in the Orach Chayim (the book being clarified in the Mishnah Berurah), derogates it as "a stupid custom". (Orach Chayim 605)

It was the Kabbalists who really gave it credence, and thereby a tradition; and this may explain why it is particularly prominent amongst Hasidic Jews today. What more mystical act than this symbolic transiration, this ghostly passage from body to body as though a sin was no different from a wart or a louse or a virus? Isaac Luria and Isaiah Horowitz both advocated it, and Moses Isserles not only decreed it compulsory, but ordained for it all manner of ceremonies that attached it unequivocally to the cult of sacrifice – the laying of hands upon the animal, for example, the slaughter in the immediate aftermath of the rite, the accompanying Vidu'i or confession.

One final thought on kapparot. In Yiddish, the term is used for any futile effort, any waste that might have been avoided, any loss of goods or cash or time. Is there, in this, a measure of criticism to be deduced? (pages 8-11)

The Reading: Leviticus 16:1-34

This is the text that gives us the concept of the Azaz-El, the scapegoat so fundamental to the ancient sacrificial ceremonies of Yom Kippur, though in fact the goat was not ritually slaughtered, as was customary with Jewish sacrifice, but merely cast out, sometimes into the desert and sometimes over a cliff; and in all probability the name Azaz-El refers to the many places to which goats were despatched, rather than the goat or the act of sacrifice itself.

Yoma 6:4, a tractate of Mishnah, tells us that the Babylonians would pluck the hair of a goat before driving it away; we know from other sources that this happened at the feast of Akitu, the New Year, and that the goat was dedicated to Ereshkigal, the goddess of the abyss. The Babylonians and their predecessors the Akkadians both regarded despatching a goat in this manner as a cure for sicknesses of various sorts; in some cases the goat was tied to the patient's bed, in order that the sin responsible for the sickness be transferred contagiously; the goat was then taken into the desert and decapitated or left to die – the early Beney Yisra-El, like their middle eastern neighbours, regarded the desert as the habitat of daemons, so that sending the goat into the wilderness wasn’t a deportation but a repatriation, and as such understood as the white magic of propitiation.

The same tractate (Yoma 4:1-2) describes the process by which the High Priest would draw lots to determine what was "L'Adonay" and what was "L'Azaz-El"; if the goat was selected for expulsion a thread of crimson wool was bound around its throat and the animal taken to the gate to wait until the "Ish Itti" (c.f. Leviticus 16:21) or designated man, who had to be of priestly status, was ready to take the goat up to the cliff, and push it over, backwards. Height and backwardness ensured that the goat was well dismembered before reaching the sandy bottom. But this only applied to the Jerusalem rituals.

The thread of crimson wool is interesting. When Parets' brother Zerach came out of his mother's womb (Genesis 38:30), he had precisely such a thread wrapped round his wrist, to show that he was technically the first-born; though how this connects to Azaz-El remains obscure. More pertinently, we know that the Beney Chet (Hittites) fought off the plague by making crowns of coloured wool and binding goats with these, sending the goats into enemy territory so that, again, the sickness be transferred contagiously.

The D'vei of Rabbi Yishmael¹ regarded the goat-ritual as an atonement for the acts of the fallen angels, specifically Uzza and Aza-El (Yoma 67b), whose names, they claimed, had become mixed up. The First Book of Enoch (Chanoch in Yehudit), some fragments of which were discovered at Qumran and form part of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but most of which has survived only in Ethiopian translations, treats Azaz-El, or Aza'el, as one of the leaders of the angels who desired the daughters of men (Genesis 6:1-4), and taught the skills of manufacturing weaponry and ornaments (Genesis 8:1-2). Almost certainly we should read Aza'el as correct and regard any connections with the Azaz-El as merely the consequences of post-Biblical dyslexia.

¹ See page 142 of "Day of Atonement", and also chapter 7 of "A Myrtle Among Reeds".

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Azah (Gaza)

עזה

Known to us as Gaza (an issue of the guttural nature of the letter Ayin - ע -which is pronounced deep in the throat, as if swallowing and pronouncing simultaneously; for western Europeans trying to pronounce it, it tends to come out as a G)

Genesis 10:19 states that the border of Kena'an in the south-west ended at Azah.

Joshua 11:22: After his purge of the Anakim (usually translated as "giants", though it almost certainly means the earliest aboriginal settlers of Kena'an), the tribe survived only in Azah, Gat and Ashdod. Legends of giants continued, of which the most famous is Gol-Yat (Goliath), who became a hero of the Pelishtim after they occupied the region. Is it possible that Gol-Yat was an Anak who became associated with the Pelishtim by conquest, rather than by nativity?

Judges 16:1/3: The central location for the adventures of Shimshon (Samson), the sun-hero of the Pelishtim whom the Beney Yisra-El made their own by adopting the Dana'an Phoenicians as a Jacobite tribe. Shimshon's adventures throughout echo those of the Greek sun-hero Herakles (properly Hera-Cles, "the beloved of the moon-goddess Hera, which parallels Yedid-Yah, the full name of both David and Shelomoh) and the Celtic sun-hero Cúchullain. His name comes from the word Shemesh (שמש), "the sun", and is a variant on the Babylonian Tammuz; his spouse-cum-nemesis Delilah takes her name from the Aramaic form of Lailah (לילה), "the night", which is to say that she represents the moon as he does the sun; shaving his long, flowing locks to incapacitate and blind him is precisely what the moon does to the sun every night.

1 Samuel 6:17 names the five principal cities of the Pelishtim as Ashdod, Ashkelon, Azah, Gat and Ekron, all fortified, all ruled by their own prince. Plutarch said that Azah was the greatest city in all Syria!

Jeremiah 25:20 refers to the kings of the Pelishtim as Ashkelon, Azah, Ekron and the remnant of Ashdod, allowing city-names to stand eponymously for tribal chiefs, a convention followed consistently in the Tanach though it often leads to some confusion, especially in the genealogical lists.

Amos 1:6/7 talks of the crimes of the Pelishtim against Yisra-El and their punishment to come, as do Zephaniah 2:4 and Zechariah 9:5.

Judges 1:18 records that Yehudah had previously captured Azah but could not drive out the inhabitants as they had iron chariots; later the Pelishtim recovered it.

The war between David and the Pelishtim is recorded in 1 Samuel 28 ff.

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Ayl Pa'ran

איל פארן

Genesis 14:6 mentions Ayl Pa'ran as one of the regions which Kedar-la-Omer and the other Elamite kings ravaged in the War of the Kings. Located in Beney Chor territory, in the vicinity of Mount Se'ir, the Edomite capital.

Ayl means "a strong and robust tree", probably an oak, and is linked to the more common word Elon (אלון).

Pa'ran usually describes a region of caves and foliage, such as are found in the desert in the vicinity of oases, and are therefore often treated as holy places; indeed, in the ancient Middle East, where desert was plentiful but water scarce, virtually every watering hole with a shade-providing tree was guarded by a protecting water-deity, invariably female, through the priestesses of the shrine. This is demonstrated especially in stories of Rivkah (Rebecca), Rachel, Tsiporah and Mir-Yam (Miriam), the first three of whom all meet their husbands at the side of a well, the last of whom is also connected with water through Mosheh's journey through the bulrushes, her song at the Sea of Reeds (Exodus 15:20), and the many oases in the desert which are the stations of the epic journey.

Numbers 10:12, 13:3 and 13:26; Deuteronomy 1:1; 1 Samuel 25:1, 1 Kings 11:18 all refer to a region called Pa'ran; while Habakuk 3:3 has Har Pa'ran for the Mountain of Pa'ran, as does Deuteronomy 33:2, both as a synonym for Mount Chorev/Sinai. That latter is particularly significant, because most scholars place Chorev and Sinai together, and in the wilderness between Mitsrayim (Egypt) and Kena'an, whereas this - see the link to Par'an - would place it on the east of the river Yarden, closer to Midyan.

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Ayah

איה

Genesis 36:24 has Ayah as the brother of Anah (עֲנָה), whose daughter Ahali-Vamah married Esav (Esau); their father was Tsiv'on ha Chori/Chivi (the Horite or Hivite; both are given in this chapter).

2 Samuel 3:7 says that Sha'ul had a concubine named Ritspah bat Ayah, by whom he had two sons (2 Samuel 21:8) Armoni and Mephi-Boshet; however 2 Samuel 9 regards Mephi-Boshet as Sha'ul's grandson, one of the sons of Yehonatan (Jonathan). This may be a confusion with Ish-Boshet, who appears in 2 Samuel 2:10, but elsewhere is called Ish-Ba'al, and who became the king of Yisra-El after the death of Sha'ul, only to become the object of a coup by Av-Ner, when he complained that Av-Ner had taken Ritspah bat Ayah as his concubine. King David later gave Mephi-Boshet as one of the hostages to settle a feud with the Beney Giv-On (Gibeonites).

The word AYAH is linked etymologically to hawk, vulture, falcon, and is probably the kite; all unclean birds according to Leviticus 11:14 and Deuteronomy 14:13, but also very much the royal bird, and sacred to the sun-god. Job 28:7 claims that it had remarkable acuteness of sight.

Not to be confused with Ai, the royal city of the Beney Kena'an, which Yehoshu'a destroyed.

The Argaman Press

Ai

עי

Also ha-Ai (העי) on several occasions, and Ai'ah (עיא) in Nehemiah 11:31, the latter the Aramaic rendition.

A royal city of the Beney Kena'an which Yehoshu'a sacked (Joshua 7/8); it was standing again in Yesha-Yahu's time (Isaiah 10:28). Possibly El-Tel, one mile south of Beit-El (Bethel), though a case is now being made for Khirbet el-Maqatir.

The name means "ruins", from which we can presume that it was not its real name. The town of AVIT also means "ruins", though the two are not geographically connected.

Genesis 12:8 names it as a city east of Beit-El where Av-Ram pitched his tent and where he built his altar on arriving in Kena'an.

Genesis 13:2 ff states that, after travelling to the Negev, Av-Ram again pitched his tent near Ai; he and his nephew Lot parted there.

Joshua 7:2 places it near Beit Aven, east of Beit-El in the northern part of Bin-Yamin.

Ezra 2:28 states that among the "returnees" from exile in Babylon (536 BCE) were two hundred and twenty-three men from Beit-El and Ai.

Not to be confused with Ayah, spelled with an initial Aleph and closing Hey (איה), which appears as the name of two different women.

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Avit

עוית

Genesis 36:35 names it as the city of the Edomite king Hadad (הֲדַד) son of Bedad (בְּדַד), who defeated the Beney Midyan in Mo-Av.

However, Avit means "ruins", so we can presume that this was a description of the left-overs, rather than the original name of the place.

The same applies to the city of Ai.

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Avi-Melech

אבימלך

The word Av (אב) = "father" was an epithet for the deity, as well as forming part of the royal title (cf Jupiter = Iou-pater = sky-father). Thus Av-Ram (אברם) and Av-Raham (אברהם) for Abraham, but also here Avi-Melech.

Melech (מלך) means king (from the root HALACH = "to go", but in the Hiph'il or Causative form, "to make someone go", and thus "a leader"), and its root is the same as Moloch; probably Avi-Melech meant "my father is Moloch" rather than "my father is king", a name that would describe perfectly the title of the High Priest, or of the tribal sheikh, though those two roles were generally combined.

Genesis 20:2 ff; 21:22 ff; 26:1 ff and Psalm 34:1 make it the name of a king of the Pelishtim (Philistines), which in the Genesis references is slightly odd, in that it contradicts the belief that the Pelishtim did not begin to attack Yisra-El's shores much before King Sha'ul's time; their arrival led to the tribe of Dan being forced to move away from the coastal plain to a new home at La'ish in the north-east of Yisra-El. But the tribe of Dan cannot have settled there until the time of the conquest by Yehoshu'a, thereby rendering impossible the presence of Pelishtim in Genesis or Exodus.

However, if Genesis and Exodus are correct, then the Pelishtim were clearly established in the region of Azah (Gaza) much sooner, and the departure of Dan would have to be a consequence of their failure to conquer their designated territory from the Pelishtim, rather than their being expelled by the new arrivals, and would support the alternate scholarly theory that the Danites came from the region of La'ish and attempted to colonise further to the south and west, rather than the other way around.

There is, however, yet a third possibility, which is that they were actually the same people, and that the movement of Dan was not an expulsion at all, but either a further stage of colonisation, or a conflict within the tribe that caused it to split. See my essay on "The Leprachauns of Palestine" for a fuller account, but the probability is that two different groups of Cretan refugees, both of them Dana'ans, clashed, and the weaker group moved away, becoming the tribe of Dan.

Avi-Melech's capital was at Gerar (Genesis 21:33), though this was the name of the kingdom as well as the capital, something in the city-state tradition of the later Greeks. It stood on the south-west border of Kena'an, between Azah and Be'er Sheva, possibly Wadi Sahr'ah, possibly Wadi Ghaza. Most evidence, Biblical and otherwise, suggests that the Pelishtim came from Kaphtor, which was Minoan Crete. Daedalus, the father of Icarus, also came from Kaphtor, where he built its famous labyrinth and was known as Kothar wa-Khasis ("Wise and Skilful"); elsewhere among the Greeks he was Hephaestus, among the Egyptians Ptah, and was known among various of the Beney Kena'an, including the Pelishtim, by the same name; or slightly varied, as Choshar va Chasis (כושר וחסיס‎), in the Yehudit.

The People of the Sea (also known as Phoenicians) were aboriginal Greeks, who bore such tribe-names as the Pulasati (whence the Yehudit Bene Pelesht and Beney Pelet, as well as the more commonly used Pelishtim, from which the English creates Philistine and later Palestine) and Purasati; elsewhere we can find Ekwesh, which is probably a variant on the Achaeans, in a dialect that suggests possible Chivite links.

The Pelishtim seem to have called themselves Puresatu or Pulesatu in their own language, which was Cretan Phoenician; the word meant "wanderers" or "foreigners", and they came from Crete after the fall of Knossos - so really they weren't of that tribe, but referring to themselves adjectivally - as post-Holocaust Jews were "displaced persons", and many people today are "economic migrants". This is ironic because the word Apiru, or Hapiru, or Habiru (all three variations can be found among the ancient texts) had exactly the same connotation, and is the source of the word "Hebrews". Ditto for the Anglo-Saxon word Wal-es, whence Welsh.

Homeric Greek accounts regard the aboriginal Greeks as having come from Kena'an (see "The Leprachauns of Palestine"), and called these people Dana'an, which is highly likely the tribe of Dan; making Dan a colony of the Dana'ans of Argos. They were worshippers of the Phoenician sun-god Moloch and the moon-goddess Danaë, whose shrine they established at Shechem (today's Nablus) under the name Dinah. Several "Hebrew" stories in the Bible, which are attributed to the tribe of Dan, have very strong links with the Greek myths and legends, especially the Shimshon (Samson) legends, which echo Herakles, and the David legends during his bandit years (1 Samuel 27 ff) and at Tsiklag (1 Samuel 29 ff), which echo Orpheus.

Both the Av-Raham/Sarah and Yitschak/Rivkah stories take place in Gerar, which may have been (debated, as above) a city of the Pelishtim. An identical story is told for both Av-Raham/Sarah (Genesis 20) and Yitschak/Rivkah (Genesis 26), of sister-pretense and royal marriage; the third version, of Av-Ram and Sarai, makes the Mitsri Pharaoh the king, which suggests an error of the scribes, or the repetition of some genuine marriage ritual, or simply the incapacity of the Redactor to leave out tales that were important to different tribes in their own version.

Was there then one Avi-Melech, or more than one? The meaning of the name is identical to the Persian Padishah, and Atalik of the Khans of Bhokra. "Our Father Our King" (Avinu Malkeynu) is a very ancient Yisra-Eli epithet for, and hymn to, YHVH, which echoes the name Avi-Melech, and may actually be a remnant of the liturgy of Moloch worship absorbed into the Yisra-Eli cult, when Yeru-Shala'im was established. 1 Samuel 21:11 suggests that Avi-Melech may also have been called Achish; or that Achish was the name of the Philistine King of Gat, and Avi-Melech his title. Achish is also mentioned in 1 Samuel 27:2 and 1 Kings 2:39.

Psalm 34's reference to him by name infers a non-Yisra-Eli origin for that song.

Judges 8:31 ff makes Avi-Melech a son of Gid'on (Gideon - גדעון) by his concubine in Shechem (we can deduce that the concubine was in fact Dinah - or at least one of her priestesses). His story is told in full in Judges 9; he also crops up in 2 Samuel 11:21 which has the story of the murder of Avi-Melech ben Yeruv-Eshet.

But more significant is the statement in Judges 7:1 that Gid'on's real name was Yeruv-Va'al (ירבעל) - note the repetition of YERUV ("strife"), though the previous linked to Eshet, who is Egyptian Isis, where this links to Mesopotamian Ba'al. Gid'on (Gideon) was called to judgement while threshing wheat by the winepress under the oak in Ophrah (Judges 6:11), which belonged to Yo'ash the Avi-Ezrite. Every detail of this, names and places as well as actions, tells us we have a "pagan" Kena'ani tradition which the later redactors of the Tanach have attempted to rewrite as a Yisra-Eli legend.

1 Chronicles 18:16 has an Achi-Melech, meaning "brother-king", obviously a related term, pardon the pun.

See Ancestry of the Patriarch 1, Taurus Mountains 400,000 BCE for the link between Avi-Melech and Eurystheus, the king who set Herakles his twelve labours.

The Argaman Press

Avi-Ma-El

אבימאל

Genesis 10:28 names him as a son of Yaktan, descended from Shem (cf 1 Chronicles 1:22), which places him in southern Arabia. Strabo noted a nomadic tribe called the Minoi in the region of Mecca, and identified them with the Mani of Greece, but this seems too far away in letters, even if not in geography, for what I guess we would have to call the "Ma-El" (Avi means "father").

It is thought by some scholars that this is the same tribe, though the absence of any clear connection between the names leaves this requiring more evidence. I am inclined to think it also unlikely, but less unlikely than the Mani theory, that Avi-Ma-El simply meant "my father is from El", something in parallel with Avi-Da, and not a tribe at all.

The Argaman Press

Avi-Da

אבידע

Genesis 25:4 makes him a son of Midyan (himself a son of Av-Raham by Keturah), in which we can see yet again the attempt to make all peoples eponymously Yisra-Eli. The name properly means "My Father is Knowledge", which is as absurd a name as many.

The Argaman Press

Avel MItsrayim

אבל מצרים

The "Meadow of the Egyptians", according to Genesis 50:11. A threshing-floor near the river Yarden (Jordan), which was previously known as the threshing-floor of Atad; this was where Yoseph and his Egyptian entourage stopped en route to Kena'an to mourn for Ya'akov. To mourn, for seven full days (to "sit shiva" in Yehudit means "to sit in mourning for seven days") but not to bury him there; odd to mourn before burial, but Genesis 50:13 insists that they travelled on from Avel Mitsrayim-Atad to Chevron, and buried Ya'akov in the Cave of Machpelah, alongside most of the other patri- and matriarchs.

The concept of an Avel or "meadow" for a burial-ground fits our modern sense of cemeteries, but was in fact far less normative in Biblical times, where tombs, pyramids, cairns, sepulchres and tumuli tended to be rather more common, and in some of the lands further to both the west and east cremation. Other "meadows" are known, as for example Avel Beyt Ma'achah (אבל בית מעכה), also known as Avel Mayim (אבל מים) "the meadow of water" (2 Samuel 20:14); Avel Ha-Shittim (אבל השטים), "the meadow of acacias" on the plains of Mo-Av (Numbers 33:49); Avel-Keramim (אבל כרמים), "the meadow of the vineyards", in Ammonite territory (Judges 11:33); Avel Mecholah (אבל מחולה), "the meadow of dancing", the village in Yisaschar where Elisha the prophet was born (Judges 7:22); and others.

In each case we can presume that by meadow is meant "a burial-ground", probably associated with megalithic dolmen-barrows. This would explain why the word Evel (אבל), which is written the same without the nekudot, means "mourning" - modern Jews use the term Avelut, which comes from the same root. It therefore makes much more sense to translate Avel Mitsrayim as "the mourning-place of the Egyptians" and to locate it at Atad, rather than attempting an irrelevant re-naming.

The use of the threshing-floor as a place of mourning and a place of burial links Ya'akov, and more particularly Yoseph, to the corn-god, who would have been threshed on such a floor, and being Egyptian specifically to Osher (Osiris).

Gnostic/Egyptian legends of Jesus have him born on a threshing-floor in Beit-Lechem, which is not strange since Beit Lechem means "the house of bread", the form in which the corn-god is eaten - fully Beit Lechem Ephratah, the Shrine of the Corn-God of the Euphrates, which is to say Tammuz, the Babylonian equivalent of Osher. And quite probably "manger" is just a poor translation of "threshing-floor" - both are stables filled with straw, after all.

King David purchased the threshing-floor of Ornah (or Araunah) as the site upon which Shelomoh would build the Temple.

The Argaman Press