of the Exodus, and even the mountain whereon the
oracles of God were revealed to the Hebrew lawgiver was Sinai, the
mountain of Sin. The worship of Sin, the Babylonian Moon-god, must
therefore have made its way thus far into the deserts of Arabia.
Inscriptions from Southern Arabia have already shown us that there too
Sin was known and adored.

Dagon, again, was another god who had his first home in Babylonia. The
name is of Sumerian origin, and he was associated with Ami, the god of
the sky. Like Sin, he appears to have been worshipped at Harran; at all
events, Sargon states that he inscribed the laws of that city "according
to the wish of Anu and Dagon." Along with Arm he would have been brought
to Canaan, and though we first meet with his name in the Old Testament
in connection with the Philistines, it is certain that he was already
one of the deities of the country whom the Philistine invaders adopted.
One of the Canaanitish governors in the Tel el-Amarna correspondence
bears the Assyrian name of Dagon-takala, "we trust in Dagon." The
Phoenicians made him the god of corn in consequence of the resemblance
of his name to the word which signifies "corn"; primarily, however, he
would have been a god of the earth. The idea that he was a fish-god is
of post-Biblical date, and due to a false etymology, which derived his
name from the Hebrew _dag_, "a fish." The fish-god of Babylonia,
however, whose image is sometimes engraved on seals, was a form of Ea,
the god of the deep, and had no connection with Dagon. Doubtless there
were other divinities besides these whom the peoples of Canaan owed to
the Babylonians. Mr. Tomkins is probably right in seeing in the name of
Beth-lehem a reminiscence of the Babylonian god Lakhmu, who took part in
the creation of the world, and whom a later philosophizing generation
identified with Anu. But the theology of early Canaan is still but
little known, and its pantheon is still in great measure a sealed book.
Now and again we meet with a solitary passage in some papyrus or
inscription on stone, which reveals to us for the first time the name of
an otherwise unknown deity. Who, for instance, is the goddess
'Ashiti-Khaur, who is addressed, along with Kedesh, on an Egyptian
monument now at Vienna, as "the mistress of heaven" and "ruler of all
the gods"? The votive altars of Carthage make repeated mention of the
goddess Tanit, the Peni or "Face" of Baal, whom the Greeks identified
with Artemis. S