Permutations of 'Aštarte: Introduction

Abstract

For the 2012 meeting held at the University of Amsterdam, the Expressions of Religion in Israel program unit (ERI) elicited papers treating the permu tations and avatars of'Astarte in Mediterranean Religions of the second and first millennia BCE.1 A northwest Semitic goddess, 'Astarte is widely attested in the Mediterranean Levant, beginning in the third millennium BCE in Syr ian texts (Ebla and arguably Early Dynastic Mari). References are more plen tiful in the second millennium, for example at Emar and Ugarit (mentioned dozens of times in texts from the latter). By the first millennium and there after one looks to the Phoenicians for the spread of her cult in the mainland coastal cities of Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos, and in Sicily, Malta, Cyprus, Italy, Spain, Greece, and in North Africa, especially Carthage. In the Hebrew Bible she appears as 'astorcet and mostly in the plural {'astarot). Masoretic vocal ization imputes the vowels of the word shame (Hebr. boscet), often in con junction with the male god Baal or Baals in categorical condemnations of foreign gods (e.g., Judg 2:13; 10:6; 1 Sam 7:4; 12:10). References to the god dess in the Deuteronomistic Histories are generally restricted to categorical polemics against foreign cults blamed for the apostasy of Israel and Judah. In studying the roles and functions of 'Astarte, scholars wrestle with the problem that the goddess appears in a wide temporal and geograph ical range: from the Late Bronze Age to the Roman Period and through out the whole Mediterranean she has undergone numerous permutations. On another front, the thorny problem of disparate and inconsistent sources presents itself: mythological texts from the LBA, in particular from Ugarit and Egypt, epigraphical texts in Phoenician and Greek, as well as the notori ously polemic Biblical accounts all require detailed comparative evaluation. On yet another front, the history of research has left modern scholarship a burden to carry from the past, namely, the reduction of the multifaceted 'Astarte to a fertility goddess or sex goddess. The latter problem is taken in hand by Schmitt, who instead finds continuity in 'Astarte's role as violent goddess of war and as a political deity closely associated with kingship. Although surely a prominent deity in Phoenicia throughout the first mil lenium, the lack of artifactual evidence impedes 'Astarte's research. In view of the fact that Phoenician kings perform priestly functions for the goddess, her importance in cities seems certain. Ackerman's paper focuses on the sit