but not significative.  Here is material for the perverted imagination to work upon.  A separate being is imagined answering to each of the names; and so the nomina become numina.[1112] Many gods are substituted for one; and the idea of God is instantly lowered.  The gods have different spheres.  No god is infinite; none is omnipotent, none omnipresent; therefore none omniscient.  The aweful, terrible nature of God is got rid of, and a company of angelic beings takes its place, none of them very alarming to the conscience.

In its second stage the religion of Phoenicia was a polytheism, less multitudinous than most others, and one in which the several divinities were not distinguished from one another by very marked or striking features.  At the head of the Pantheon stood a god and a goddess—­Baal and Ashtoreth.  Baal, “the Lord,” or Baal-samin,[1113] “the Lord of Heaven,” was compared by the Greeks to their Zeus, and by the Romans to their Jupiter.  Mythologically, he was only one among many gods, but practically he stood alone; he was the chief of the gods, the main object of worship, and the great ruler and protector of the Phoenician people.  Sometimes, but not always, he had a solar character, and was represented with his head encircled by rays.[1114] Baalbek, which was dedicated to him, was properly “the city of the Sun,” and was called by the Greeks Heliopolis.  The solar character of Baal is, however, far from predominant, and as early as the time of Josiah we find the Sun worshipped separately from him,[1115] no doubt under a different name.  Baal is, to a considerable extent, a city god.  Tyre especially was dedicated to him; and we hear of the “Baal of Tyre"[1116] and again of the “Baal of Tarsus."[1117] Essentially, he was the embodiment of the generative principle in nature—­“the god of the creative power, bringing all things to life everywhere."[1118] Hence, “his statue rode upon bulls, for the bull was the symbol of generative power; and he was also represented with bunches of grapes and pomegranates in his hand,"[1119] emblems of productivity.  The sacred conical stones and pillars dedicated in his temples[1120] may have had their origin in a similar symbolism.  As polytheistic systems had always a tendency to enlarge themselves, Baal had no sooner become a separate god, distinct from El, and Rimmon, and Molech, and Adonai, than he proceeded to multiply himself, and from Baal became Baalim,[1121] either because the local Baals—­Baal-Tzur, Baal-Sidon, Baal-Tars, Baal-Libnan, Baal-Hermon—­were conceived of as separate deities, or because the aspects of Baal—­Baal as Sun-God, Baal as Lord of Heaven, Baal as lord of flies,[1122], &c.—­were so viewed, and grew to be distinct objects of worship.  In later times he was identified with the Egyptian Ammon, and worshipped as Baal-Hammon.