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The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
Anat
A violent warrior goddess, prominent among Israel's neighbors and never once named in the Bible.
Judges 3:31, in every translation this tool compares.
A violent warrior goddess, everywhere in the texts of Israel's neighbors, and never once named as a goddess in the Hebrew Bible. She survives only inside place names and one personal name. Her absence from the prophets is the strange part, given how large she looms at Ugarit.
Never named as a goddess in the Hebrew Bible, but she survives in place names and a personal name, and she is missing from the prophetic polemic despite how prominent she is at Ugarit. DDD reviews the proposed hidden references to her (Exodus 32:18, Hosea 14:9, Job 31:1, and the Beth Shan armor temple of 1 Samuel 31:10) and finds none convincing, since the Masoretic Text makes good sense without her in every case.
The violent warrior goddess of the Baal Cycle, who recovers Baal's body and destroys Mot. She uses bow and sword against human and divine enemies alike, backs Baal's campaign for a palace and kingship, and threatens El himself, a destroyer carrying traits usually assigned to male gods. DDD says the popular picture of Anat as Baal's sexual partner and the mother of his offspring rests on mistranslation and reconstructed gaps more than on clear text. The heifer Baal mates with in KTU 1.5 is explicitly not Anat, who searches for the pair afterward, and recent epigraphic work has removed the one tablet (KTU 1.96) once used to argue she was pregnant. She is better described as a perpetually adolescent huntress who refuses marriage and childbearing in order to stay in the male domains of war and the hunt, and in the epic of Aqhat she kills the hero for refusing to give her his bow.
- Judges 3:31 (Shamgar ben Anath)
- Joshua 15:59 (Beth-anoth)
- Jeremiah 1:1 (Anathoth)
- Joshua 19:38
- Judges 1:33 (Beth-anath in Naphtali)
- Peggy L. Day, "Anat," Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, 59
- Samuel Hildebrandt, "Anat," Lexham Bible Dictionary
- DDD s.v. "Anat," 36-43
