Endnote 24 – What’s in a Name?

See Tigay, No Other Gods, chapter 2. Iconographic evidence must also be considered. I briefly reviewed the evidence as it appeared to me at the time in No Other Gods, Appendix F. Today such a review would have to take account of further evidence discussed in more recent works, such as Karel van der Toorn, ed., The Image and the Book (Leuven: Peeters, 1997); Otto Keel and Carl Uehlinger, Gods, Goddesses, and Images of God in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998); and Ziony Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel: A Synthesis of Parallactic Approaches (London and New York: Continuum, 2001), esp. chap. 4 (see also Zevit’s analysis of theophoric toponyms, pp. 592–609); Ephraim Stern, “Pagan Yahwism: The Folk Religion of Ancient Israel,” BAR May/June, 2001, pp. 20–29 (see also my comments on “syncretistic Yahwism,” in Tigay “The Significance of the End of Deuteronomy [Deuteronomy 34:10–12],” in Texts, Temples, and Traditions: A Tribute to Menahem Haran, ed. M.V. Fox et al. [Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbraun’s], pp. 137–143). As in the case of pagan names, an important question about polytheistic iconography is to determine what percentage of the Israelite population venerated the gods depicted. I continue to believe (cf. Tigay, No Other Gods, p. 92) that verbal (textual/inscriptional) evidence is more telling: In a population in which relatively few people invoked deities other than YHWH in names, blessings, votive inscriptions, prayers, oath formulas, religious graffiti, amulets, etc., the polytheism represented by the iconography was probably no more widespread.