represented on early seals. In Palestine it was
usually of wood; but in the great temple of Paphos in Cyprus there was
an ancient and revered one of stone. This, however, came to be
appropriated to Ashtoreth in the days when the older Asherah was
supplanted by the younger Ashtoreth.

We hear of other Canaanitish divinities from the monuments of Egypt. The
goddess Edom, the wife of Resheph, has already been referred to. Her
name is found in that of the Gittite, Obed-Edom, "the servant of Edom,"
in whose house the ark was kept for three months (2 Sam. vi. 10).
Resheph, too, has been mentioned in an earlier page. He was the god of
fire and lightning, and on the Egyptian monuments he is represented as
armed with spear and helmet, and bears the titles of "great god" and
"lord of heaven." Along with him we find pictures of a goddess called
Kedesh and Kesh. She stands on the back of a lion, with flowers in her
left hand and a serpent in her right, while on her head is the lunar
disk between the horns of a cow. She may be the goddess Edom, or perhaps
the solar divinity who was entitled A in Babylonian, and whose name
enters into that of an Edomite king A-rammu, who is mentioned by
Sennacherib.

But, like Istar, a considerable number of the deities of Palestine were
borrowed from Babylonia. In the Tel el-Amarna tablets the god of
Jerusalem is identified with the warlike Sun-god of Babylonia, Nin-ip,
and there was a sanctuary of the same divinity further north, in
Phoenicia. Foremost among the deities whose first home was on the banks
of the Euphrates were Arm and Anat, and Rimmon. Anu, whose name is
written Anah in Hebrew, was the god of the sky, and he stood at the head
of the Babylonian pantheon. His wife Anat was but a colourless
reflection of himself, a grammatical creation of the Semitic languages.
But she shared in the honours that were paid to her consort, and the
divinity that resided in him was reflected upon her. Anat, like
Ashtoreth, became multiplied under many forms, and the Anathoth or
"Anat" signified little more than "goddesses." Between the Ashtaroth and
the Anathoth the difference was but in name.

The numerous localities in Palestine which received their names from the
god Rimmon are a proof of his popularity. The Babylonian Rimmon or
Ramman was, strictly speaking, the god of the air, but in the West he
was identified with the Sun-god Hadad, and a place near Megiddo bore the
compound title of Hadad-Rimmon