The religion of the Phœnicians

CHAPTER XI

The Religion of the Phœnicians—And the False Accusations of the Greeks and Hebrews

The religion of the Phœnicians has been more systematically misrepresented than any other aspect of their civilisation. The Greeks equated Phœnician deities with their own and treated the originals as debased versions. The Hebrews denounced the gods of Canaan as idols, even while borrowing their names, their temples, and their rituals. The truth must be recovered from the Phœnician sources themselves.

The Principal Deities

· El: The word simply means "god." The father of the pantheon, the aged, wise ruler. The Hebrew names for God — El, Elohim, Elyon, El Shaddai — are borrowings from this older Canaanite tradition.

· Baal: "Lord" or "Master." A title applied to various local manifestations: Baal Shamem (Lord of Heaven), Baal Hammon (chief god of Carthage), Baal Saphon (Lord of Mount Cassius).

· Melqart: "King of the City." The tutelary deity of Tyre. Equated by the Greeks with Heracles. His temple at Tyre dated to c. 2750 BCE.

· Astarte (Ashtart): Principal goddess of Sidon and Tyre. Consort of Melqart. Equated by the Greeks with Aphrodite.

· Eshmun: Healing god of Sidon. Equated by the Greeks with Asclepius.

· Dagon: "Bread-corn." The deified discovery of cultivated grain.

· Baalat Gebal: The "Lady of Byblus," worshipped from the third millennium BCE.

· Tanit: Consort of Baal Hammon, worshipped primarily at Carthage.

The Tophet and the Question of Child Sacrifice

The Hebrew scriptures repeatedly condemn the Canaanites for making their children "pass through the fire to Moloch." Classical authors, including Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch, describe the burning of children at Carthage. The archaeological evidence — the tophet precincts containing cremated remains of infants — has been the subject of intense debate.

I, Gad Yaton, must state my position honestly. The revisionist view that the tophet is simply a cemetery for infants who died naturally is not supported by the full weight of the evidence. The inscriptions on the stelae explicitly dedicate the offerings to Baal Hammon and Tanit, using the term molk. But the practice was not the routine slaughter imagined by the Hebrews or the Romans. It was a rite reserved for times of extreme crisis, as Sanchuniathon himself described. The Hebrews, who denounced this practice, preserved the story of Abraham and Isaac, which ends with a substitute ram — a memory of the same cultural world. To condemn the Phœnicians while excusing the parallels in Hebrew scripture is hypocrisy.

The Endurance of the Gods

The Phœnician gods did not die when the cities fell. Melqart became Heracles. Astarte became Aphrodite. Eshmun became Asclepius. Baal Shamem became Zeus. The Greek and Roman pantheons were built, in part, upon Phœnician foundations — a debt the antagonisors have never fully acknowledged.

Sources for Chapter XI: Sanchuniathon, in Eusebius, Præparatio Evangelica 1.10; Leviticus 18:21; 1 Kings 18; 2 Kings 23:10; Jeremiah 32:35; 1 Samuel 5; Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 20.14; Plutarch, De Superstitione 13; Herodotus, Histories 2.44; Eshmunazar sarcophagus (KAI 14); Ugaritic texts (KTU); Glenn E. Markoe, Phoenicians (2000); Sabatino Moscati, The World of the Phoenicians (1968); Lawrence E. Stager and Samuel R. Wolff, "Child Sacrifice at Carthage: Religious Rite or Population Control?" Biblical Archaeology Review (1984); Josephine Crawley Quinn, In Search of the Phoenicians (2018).