I. Name

The Hebrew word for ‘fire’, ʾēš, is common Semitic (with the exception of Arabic) but there is not a strong tradition of deified fire in the ancient Near East. Any echoes of this tradition in the Bible, therefore, are harder than usual to detect. In spite of an apparent similarity with the Semitic word for ‘fire’ and even some association with fire (Roberts 1972), the Babylonian god Išum was not a god of fire. However, ^dI-ʾša-tú does occur as a divine name in Ebla (Pettinato, OrAnt. 18 [1979] 105) and išt i…