It is true that even in the West Istar did not always become the feminine complement of Baal.  Here and there the old form of the name was preserved, without any feminine suffix.  But when this was the case, the necessary result was that the female character of the deity was forgotten.  Istar was conceived of as a god, and accordingly on the Moabite Stone Ashtar is identified with Chemosh, the patron-god of Mesha, just as in Southern Arabia also Atthar is a male divinity.

The worship of Ashtoreth absorbed that of the other goddesses of Canaan.  Among them there was one who had once occupied a very prominent place.  This was Asherah, the goddess of fertility, whose name is written Asirtu and Asratu in the tablets of Tel el-Amarna.  Asherah was symbolized by a stem stripped of its branches, or an upright cone of stone, fixed in the ground, and the symbol and the goddess were at times confounded together.  The symbol is mistranslated “grove” in the Authorized Version of the Old Testament, and it often stood by the side of the altar of Baal.  We find it thus represented on early seals.  In Palestine it was usually of wood; but in the great temple of Paphos in Cyprus there was an ancient and revered one of stone.  This, however, came to be appropriated to Ashtoreth in the days when the older Asherah was supplanted by the younger Ashtoreth.

We hear of other Canaanitish divinities from the monuments of Egypt.  The goddess Edom, the wife of Resheph, has already been referred to.  Her name is found in that of the Gittite, Obed-Edom, “the servant of Edom,” in whose house the ark was kept for three months (2 Sam. vi. 10).  Resheph, too, has been mentioned in an earlier page.  He was the god of fire and lightning, and on the Egyptian monuments he is represented as armed with spear and helmet, and bears the titles of “great god” and “lord of heaven.”  Along with him we find pictures of a goddess called Kedesh and Kesh.  She stands on the back of a lion, with flowers in her left hand and a serpent in her right, while on her head is the lunar disk between the horns of a cow.  She may be the goddess Edom, or perhaps the solar divinity who was entitled A in Babylonian, and whose name enters into that of an Edomite king A-rammu, who is mentioned by Sennacherib.

But, like Istar, a considerable number of the deities of Palestine were borrowed from Babylonia.  In the Tel el-Amarna tablets the god of Jerusalem is identified with the warlike Sun-god of Babylonia, Nin-ip, and there was a sanctuary of the same divinity further north, in Phoenicia.  Foremost among the deities whose first home was on the banks of the Euphrates were Arm and Anat, and Rimmon.  Anu, whose name is written Anah in Hebrew, was the god of the sky, and he stood at the head of the Babylonian pantheon.  His wife Anat was but a colourless reflection of himself, a grammatical creation of the Semitic languages.  But she shared in the honours that were paid to her consort, and the divinity that resided in him was reflected upon her.  Anat, like Ashtoreth, became multiplied under many forms, and the Anathoth or “Anat” signified little more than “goddesses.”  Between the Ashtaroth and the Anathoth the difference was but in name.