Dagon, again, was another god who had his first home in Babylonia.  The name is of Sumerian origin, and he was associated with Ami, the god of the sky.  Like Sin, he appears to have been worshipped at Harran; at all events, Sargon states that he inscribed the laws of that city “according to the wish of Anu and Dagon.”  Along with Arm he would have been brought to Canaan, and though we first meet with his name in the Old Testament in connection with the Philistines, it is certain that he was already one of the deities of the country whom the Philistine invaders adopted.  One of the Canaanitish governors in the Tel el-Amarna correspondence bears the Assyrian name of Dagon-takala, “we trust in Dagon.”  The Phoenicians made him the god of corn in consequence of the resemblance of his name to the word which signifies “corn”; primarily, however, he would have been a god of the earth.  The idea that he was a fish-god is of post-Biblical date, and due to a false etymology, which derived his name from the Hebrew dag, “a fish.”  The fish-god of Babylonia, however, whose image is sometimes engraved on seals, was a form of Ea, the god of the deep, and had no connection with Dagon.  Doubtless there were other divinities besides these whom the peoples of Canaan owed to the Babylonians.  Mr. Tomkins is probably right in seeing in the name of Beth-lehem a reminiscence of the Babylonian god Lakhmu, who took part in the creation of the world, and whom a later philosophizing generation identified with Anu.  But the theology of early Canaan is still but little known, and its pantheon is still in great measure a sealed book.  Now and again we meet with a solitary passage in some papyrus or inscription on stone, which reveals to us for the first time the name of an otherwise unknown deity.  Who, for instance, is the goddess ’Ashiti-Khaur, who is addressed, along with Kedesh, on an Egyptian monument now at Vienna, as “the mistress of heaven” and “ruler of all the gods”?  The votive altars of Carthage make repeated mention of the goddess Tanit, the Peni or “Face” of Baal, whom the Greeks identified with Artemis.  She must have been known in the mother-land of Phoenicia, and yet no trace of her worship there has as yet been found.  There were “gods many and lords many” in primitive Palestine, and though a comprehensive faith summed them up as its Baalim and Ashtaroth they yet had individual names and titles, as well as altars and priests.

But though altars were numerous, temples were not plentiful.  The chief seats of religious worship were “the high-places,” level spots on the summits of hills or mountains, where altars were erected, and the worshipper was believed to be nearer the dwelling-place of the gods than he would have been in the plain below.  The altar was frequently some natural boulder of rock, consecrated by holy oil, and regarded as the habitation of a god.  These sacred stones were termed beth-els, baetyli as the Greeks wrote the word, and they form a distinguishing characteristic of Semitic faith.  In later times many of them were imagined to have “come down from heaven.”  So deeply enrooted was this worship of stones in the Semitic nature, that even Mohammed, in spite of his iconoclastic zeal, was obliged to accommodate his creed to the worship of the Black Stone at Mekka, and the Kaaba is still one of the most venerated objects of the Mohammedan faith.