Endnote 16 – Deities and Dogs—Their Sacred Rites

CIS I.10. In Job 6:4, Job laments that the “arrows of the Almighty” are in him and that he “drinks their poison.” Just before, Resheph appears in rather thin disguise—when Job’s friend Eliphaz says, “Man is born to trouble as surely as the ‘sons of Resheph’ [usually translated ‘sparks’ or ‘birds’] fly upward,’ (Job 5:7). That firebrands were meant seems likely from Psalm 76:4 (English 76:3), where God “breaks the burning arrows (risûpeqesûet), the shield, the sword and the weapons of war.” And in Habakkuk 3:5, Yahweh the Divine Warrior marches forth with two angels of death in his vanguard: “Before him Pestilence (Deber) marched. Plague (Resheph) went forth at his feet.” See William F. Albright, Yahweh and the Gods, p. 186; Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 102–103.