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I. Name The name of this deity must be explained in accordance with Heb. bēt-ʾēl, i.e. ‘house/temple of god/El’ (God, El), cf. also the name of the town Bethel in central Palestine (former Lûz, see Judg. 1.23). The name Bethel is a shortened version of the designation ‘(El of the) House of El’, a kind of tautology or hypostasis not unfamiliar in Semitic god-names. This name originally did not point to the town of Bethel, but may have referred to open cult-places, as the aetiology of Bethel in the OT suggests ( Gen. 28.10–19). The god is known from the 7th century bce, mostly in an Aramaic con…

I. Name Gad is the name of a deity of good luck, equivalent to the Greek Tyche and Latin Fortuna. Gad is mentioned together with Meni in Isa. 65.11 as being worshipped in post-exilic Judah. The god is also attested in personal names (e.g. Gaddî, Num. 13.11; Gaddîʾēl, Num. 13.10; ʿAzgād, Ezra 2.12) and place names (e.g. Baʿal-gād, Josh. 11.17 etc.; Migdal-gād, Josh. 15.37), most probably in the sense of an appellative meaning ‘(good) fortune’ rather than as the name of a deity. As god of fortune, Gad is attested in texts from Canaan, Phoenicia (and the Punic world), Hauran and Arabia. II. I…

I. Name According to the classical texts, Baitylos (Greek τ for θ: see Eissfeldt 1962:228 n. 1; Hemmerdinger 1970:60) is a ‘Stone-god’. According to Semitic etymology the divine name could be interpreted as ‘House of God/El’, Bethel. Some scholars therefore identify Baitylos with the deity Bethel. The divine name Bethel is known from Gen. 31.13, Gen. 35.7, Amos 5.5 and elsewhere; it may be intended in Jer. 48.13; as a theophoric element in a Babylonian personal name it occurs in Zech. 7.2. The issue of the origin of the divine name Baitylos, of its occurrence in the OT, and…

I. Name Reseph occurs as ršp in Ugaritic, Phoenician, and Aramaic, as rešep in Hebrew (8 times), as ra-sa-ap at Ebla and in Akkadian, and as r-š-p(-w) in Egyptian. It is the name of one of the most popular West-Semitic gods, venerated in Syria, Palestine and Egypt. The etymology of the name is still very uncertain. It is often assumed that it is related to a root *ršp (?) with the basic meaning “to light, to set on fire” or “to burn” (cf. e.g. Jud.-Aram. rišpâʾ “flames, lightning”). Yet also a derivation from roots such as *srp, *šrb (metathesis?), or even *rṣp can be considered, as wel…

I. Name Yahweh is the name of the official god of Israel, both in the northern kingdom and in Judah. Since the Achaemenid period, religious scruples led to the custom of not pronoucing the name of Yahweh; in the liturgy as well as in everyday life, such expressions as ‘the Lord’ ( ʾădōnāy, lit. ‘my Lord’, LXX κύριος) or ‘the Name’ were substituted for it. As a matter of consequence, the correct pronunciation of the tetragrammaton was gradually lost: the Masoretic form ‘Jehovah’ is in reality a combination of the consonants of the tetragrammaton with the vocals of ʾădōnāy, the ḥaṭēf p…