Endnote 16 – Eroticism and Infanticide at Ashkelon

It is the same type of epithet as Astarte’s sûem ba‘al, or “Name of Ba‘al,” attested at Ugarit in the Late Bronze Age and at Sidon in the fifth century B.C. These epithets represent a phenomenon in Canaanite Phoenician and Israelite religion that Professor Frank Moore Cross characterizes as “hypostases of deity,” in which aspects of transcendence become personified and activated in the cultic world (Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic [Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973], p. 30).