LOCAL CULTS AND NATIONAL GODS: DIVINE IDENTITY IN IRON AGE LEVANTINE RELIGION

The religious perceptions of divine identity in Iron Age Levantine polities supply a discrete body of evidence for the historical study of religion within the ancient Near East. The dataset of divine naming practices from this milieu presents distinctive features and problems for the interpretation of divine names, stemming from trends of “pantheon reduction” and, especially in the southern Levant, a cluster of singular primary “national” gods. In this study, I examine specific complex aspects of the ways in which divine names and titles encoded perceptions of divine identity in texts from this context. I focus on the semiotic process of encoding shared perceptions of divine identity in divine names, and the fundamental questions of what components of identity these names communicated. I argue for substantial ancient awareness of and conscious engagement with the complexities and changing significances of divine names in these processes. Introducing new terminology for the issues in focus, I highlight the specific complex elements in divine naming of divine polyonymy, synonymy between divine names, and compound divine names of various formats. Case studies examine the presence of and key interpretive problems associated with these types of complex divine identification in Northern Levantine kingdoms (Chapter 2), Transjordanian polities and city-states of coastal Phoenicia (Chapter 3), and ancient Israelite religion (Chapter 4). Attention to the possibilities for ancient perceptions of divine polyonymy and understandings of synonymy between divine names, not always adequately accounted for in scholarship, is demonstrated to be essential to understanding of divine names in these case studies. Compound divine names, explained in various ways in past scholarship, are here evaluated with attentiveness to what each component of the name communicated about the perceived divine persona they identified, and the context in which such compound divine names are differentiated from related simple and compound names. In the most extensively documented and previously discussed example considered here, the primary divine names associated with ancient Israelite religion, the consolidation of divine identity amidst such complex forms of identification and relationships between divine names is placed more robustly in the context of these regionally prevalent features of divine identification