in each locality the Baal adored there was the supreme god.  But the god resembled his worshipper who had been made in his image; he was the father and head of a family with a wife and son.  The wife, it is true, was but the colourless reflection of the god, often indeed but the feminine Baalah, whom the Semitic languages with their feminine gender required to exist by the side of the masculine Baal.  But this was only in accordance with the Semitic conception of woman as the lesser man, his servant rather than his companion, his shadow rather than his helpmeet.

The existence of an independent goddess, unmarried and possessing all the attributes of the god, was contrary to the fundamental conceptions of the Semitic mind.  Nevertheless we find in Canaan an Ashtoreth, whom the Greeks called Astarte, as well as a Baal.  The cuneiform inscriptions have given us an explanation of the fact.

Ashtoreth came from Babylonia.  There she was known as Istar, the evening star.  She had been one of those Sumerian goddesses who, in accordance with the Sumerian system, which placed the mother at the head of the family, were on an equal footing with the gods.  She lay outside the circle of Semitic theology with its divine family, over which the male Baal presided, and the position she occupied in later Babylonian religion was due to the fusion between the Sumerian and Semitic forms of faith, which took place when the Semites became the chief element in Babylonia.  But Sumerian influence and memories were too strong to allow of any transformation either in the name or in the attributes of the goddess.  She remained Istar, without any feminine suffix, and it was never forgotten that she was the evening-star.

It was otherwise in the West.  There Istar became Ashtoreth with the feminine termination, and passed eventually into a Moon-goddess “with crescent horns.”  Ashtoreth-Karnaim, “Ashtoreth with the two horns,” was already in existence in the age of Abraham.  In Babylonia the Moon-god of ancient Sumerian belief had never been dethroned; but there was no Moon-god in Canaan, and accordingly the transformation of the Babylonian goddess into “the queen of the night” was a matter of little difficulty.

Once domesticated in Palestine, with her name so changed as to declare her feminine character, Ashtoreth soon tended to lose her independence.  Just as there were Baalim or “Baals” by the side of Baal, so there were Astaroth or “Ashtoreths” by the side of Ashtoreth.

The Semites of Babylonia themselves had already begun the work of transformation.  They too spoke of Istarat or “Istars,” and used the word in the general sense of “goddesses.”  In Canaan, however, Ashtaroth had no such general meaning, but denoted simply the various Ashtoreths who were worshipped in different localities, and under different titles.  The individual Ashtoreth of Gebal was separate from the individual Ashtoreth of Bashan, although they alike represented the same divine personality.