Several of the gods and goddesses listed here can be found on their own pages in the Dictionary of Names. They are all linked accordingly.
ANAT: Also written as Anath and Anathah, she was the Ugaritic love-goddess in whose honour Yirme-Yahu's (Jeremiah's) priestly birthplace of Beit Anatot was named. The town, in the tribe of Bin-Yamin, later became known as Beit Anat or Bethany. Judges 3:31 refers to one Shamgar ben Anat who smote 600 Pelishtim (Philistines) with an ox-goad. References in Yirme-Yahu suggest that she was perceived as "The Queen of Heaven", exactly the same as Ishtar in Bavel and Asherah in Kena'an.
APSU: from Abzu, the imaginary sweet-water abyss from which Enki emerged, and from which Yehudit acquired the word Ephes for Zero, and English the word "abyss". Apsu's coition with Tiamat was the source of Creation in Babylonian mythology, and is reflected in the marriage of Tehom and the "waters" of Genesis 1:2.
ASHERAH: Mother-goddess and the sea. El's wife. Like Astarte she is often called Ba'alat = mistress. Represented as a lioness, she was worshipped in sacred groves (Judges 3:7; 6:25; 1 Kings 16:33; 18:19 etc), and as an idol (2 Kings 21:7; 2 Chronicles 17:6 etc), usually in the form of a totem pole. Despite the homophone, there is no etymological connection with Osher (Osiris), the Egyptian deity, whose name is spelled with an Ayin (ע), where Asherah is spelled with an Aleph (א). There may, however, be a connection between Asherah and Asher, the son of Ya'akov, and in precisely the same way that two other of Ya'akov's children are connected, Dan and Dinah.
ASTARTE: Also called Ishtar, Ashtorot, Ester (Esther). A goddess of the Phoinikim (Phoenicians) as well as the Pelishtim (Philistines), she appears Tanachically in Judges 2:13 and 10:6; 1 Samuel 31:10; 1 Kings 11:5 and 11:33; 2 Kings 23:13. Identified with Anat, Jeremiah 7:18 has her being offered cakes as the Queen of Heaven, and 44:15-19 of the same book has her being worshipped by exiles to Mitsrayim (Egypt) with cakes and libations. She too is identified as the wife of Ba'al, confirming that Ishtar, Astarte, Ashtoreth and Anat (and probably Sarai and Sarah too) are simpy regional-dialect variations of the same goddess (in exactly the same way that the central European deity is known as Dieu in France, Gott in Germany, Deos in Spain etc).
BA'AL: The name means "Lord" or "Master", as does the Yehudit Adonai used as the pronounceable name of YHVH. BA'AL was therefore a title rather than an actual name, and specifically a title of HADAD, the weather-god with special responsibility for thunder; HADAD controlled the rain, mist and dew (cf Genesis 2:5/6). He was obviously worshipped by the Edomites too, as their kings were named after him (Cf Genesis 36:35 and 1 Chronicles 1:46). In the epoch of the early books of the Tanach, he was generally represented as a bull, as was his father EL - probably because this was the Age of Taurus; later representations show him as a ram, because the age that followed was that of Aries. More on this here.
BA'AL-HADAD: Many scholars (including the Britannica, which is my link) believe that he was the same deity who is called Rimon on various occasions in the Tanach (Exodus 28:33, Song of Songs 4:3, 2 Kings 25:17, Joel 1:12 for the fruit and tree, Joshua 15:32 and 19:7 among others for the town; Judges 20:45 for the rock, 2 Kings 5:18 for the idol). I am inclined to disagree, because Rimon (or Rimmon) is the pomegranate in Yehudit, and while the pomegranate is associated with the death-cult in the Greek world (cf Persephone), in the Kena'ani world, including the Phoenician, the pomegranate was the ultimate symbol of the fertility cult - the origin of the Jewish custom of the groom stamping on a glass at the wedding ceremony is rooted in the custom, still-extant in the Lebanon to this day, of doing the same with a pomegranate, deliberately splashing its myriad seeds over as many married couples as possible, to symbolically engender fertility. The seeds are obviously male, but Ba'al Hadad's role as rain-god was to water them and make them fecund (the rain is the semen of the heavens), not to ejaculate them; that was El's role, the equivalent of Greek Ouranos, who was eventually castrated by his son Chronos because his continuous ejaculation of seed across the Cosmos was creating the risk of over-creation.
BA'AL CHANAN: See my notes at the link.
BA'AL-ZVUV (Beelzebub): the Lord of the Flies. He was worshipped at Ekron, and rejected by the Prophet Eli-Yahu (Elijah) in 2 Kings 1:2ff. He is often confused with Ba'al-Zevel, the Lord of the Dross, though given the attraction of the former to the latter, they may indeed turn out to be the same Underworld deity. King Achav's (Ahab's) wife was Queen I-Zevel (Jezebel), from the same root as Ba'al Zevel.
CHEMOSH: The principal deity of the Beney Mo-Av (Moabites).
DAGON: A "planetary power", according to Philo Byblius, worshipped by the Pelishtim (Philistines) in the form of the corn-god. The captured Ark was responsible for the destruction of an idol of Dagon in the temple at Ashdod, according to the Book of Samuel (1 Samuel 5); in Judges 16:30 it was the entire temple of Dagon at Azah (Gaza) that Shimshon (Samson) brought down.
EL: Father of BA'AL-HADAD; chief of the gods. El is specifically a bull-god as well as an oak-god. Was El a variant form of Hel and Helios? Hel is the Nordic devil-god, the brightest star who fell. Why does El become The in Spanish languages? (the answer is: by pure coincidence). The modern Israeli airline is known as El Al, and no I am not joking when I make the connection. EL is also the preposition "to", and the inference of the god-name is that it metaphorically describes the kinetic and dynamic impulses that drive all life, the forward motion into life, through life, only ebbing out with death. The god as the manifestation, or at least the symbolic allegory, of the Universal Pulse. So an airplane goes EL - forward - in order to go AL - up. See my notes to Genesis 1.
HEBA: In her earliest manifestation among the Beney Yisra-El she becomes Chavah = Eve, but even Heba may be a local variant - there is an earlier form, Ḫepat (pronounced Chepat), known among the Hurrians of Kena'an, and others, as Hebat or Hepatu, the wife of the storm-god Teshub. But even earlier (click here) she was the wife of the Hittite storm-god Tarḫunna, and rode naked on a lion's back (the English tale of Lady Godiva may well be the residue of this ancient legend; though probably it is historical). To the Greeks she became Hebe, the wife of Herakles and goddess of youth.
EL: Father of BA'AL-HADAD; chief of the gods. El is specifically a bull-god as well as an oak-god. Was El a variant form of Hel and Helios? Hel is the Nordic devil-god, the brightest star who fell. Why does El become The in Spanish languages? (the answer is: by pure coincidence). The modern Israeli airline is known as El Al, and no I am not joking when I make the connection. EL is also the preposition "to", and the inference of the god-name is that it metaphorically describes the kinetic and dynamic impulses that drive all life, the forward motion into life, through life, only ebbing out with death. The god as the manifestation, or at least the symbolic allegory, of the Universal Pulse. So an airplane goes EL - forward - in order to go AL - up. See my notes to Genesis 1.
HEBA: In her earliest manifestation among the Beney Yisra-El she becomes Chavah = Eve, but even Heba may be a local variant - there is an earlier form, Ḫepat (pronounced Chepat), known among the Hurrians of Kena'an, and others, as Hebat or Hepatu, the wife of the storm-god Teshub. But even earlier (click here) she was the wife of the Hittite storm-god Tarḫunna, and rode naked on a lion's back (the English tale of Lady Godiva may well be the residue of this ancient legend; though probably it is historical). To the Greeks she became Hebe, the wife of Herakles and goddess of youth.
LILIT: Chavah's (Eve's) predecessor, according to Midrash. In "Gilgamesh and the Willow Tree" she appears as Lillake. Isaiah 34:14, her only explicit mention in the Tanach, has her inhabiting desolate ruins. In Sumer she was a fertility goddess.
MILKOM: An Amonite deity, possibly connected to the Yehudit Milchamah = War; though it is more likely that both are sourced in the Yehudit Lechem = bread, with Milkom as yet another variant upon the archetypal corn-god.
MOLOCH: The Kena'ani god of the underworld. The root is MALACH = "leader", from the root HALACH = "to go"; and therefore used for any ruler, not necessarily a king, who is the representative on Earth of the deity, serving either as High Priest, or as tribal chief, or elder, or indeed as monarch. As such he is comparable with the AV of the Beney Yisra-El (as in Av-Raham et al).
The principal followers of MOLOCH were the Amelekites. Sacrifices to MOLOCH took place by the delivering of children into the burning mouth of the bull-god who symbolised him - a variation on the rites of King Minos of Crete. The sacrifice of the king (ritual regicide) by crucifixion (or otherwise), itself symbolic of the death and rebirth of the god, was later transformed into the sacrifice of the first-born, and finally, much later, of practically anyone, though specifically a political prisoner, local traitor, runaway slave, fourteen Athenians in the case of King Minos, or any other otherwise-suitable victim was chosen instead. The Akeda, or binding of Yitschak reflects the Yisra-Eli of this custom. The Romans later adopted it as a favourite form of execution. In another manifestation, the bull is the symbol of EL. MOLOCH is also represented as a god of the Underworld.
See also the Lapiths of Northern Thessaly. Their mother goddess was called Leukothea in Greek, but the Centaurs called her Ino or Plastene. Her rock-cut image is at Tantalus; she was the mother of Melikertes, the Hercules or Herakles Melkart of Kena'an who is known in the Tanach as Moloch.
See also the Lapiths of Northern Thessaly. Their mother goddess was called Leukothea in Greek, but the Centaurs called her Ino or Plastene. Her rock-cut image is at Tantalus; she was the mother of Melikertes, the Hercules or Herakles Melkart of Kena'an who is known in the Tanach as Moloch.
RACHAV: The Prince of the Sea who defied YHVH exactly as Poseidon did Zeus (note that Poseidon in Greek means "Lord - posei - of the Earth-goddess - das). Yesha-Yahu (Isaiah 51:9) has YHVH killing Rachav with a sword, exactly as Marduk killed the Babylonian prince of the sea Tiamat; Job 26:12 repeats the claim. Poseidon was Creto-Mycenean; his animal the bull (yet again the connection to King Minos) and his attribute the trident; he inhabited the sea, the springs and the waters beneath the Earth. In almost every way he was identical to Hindu Siva.
But there is also the question: is Rahab, the famous "harlot" of Yericho who helped the spies in Joshua 2:1 and 6:17, in fact a priestess of Rachav, and her name a typographical error? See my notes on this by clicking here.
RESHEPH: Lord of war and the underworld.
RIMMON: Or Rimon. See under Ba'al-Hadad above.
SHAMASH - the sun god, SHIMSHON to the Pelishtim (see under TAMMUZ)
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