Ashima, Nibhaz, Tartak, Succoth-benoth

The imported gods of the resettled north, each named once and never again. They stay as records because they are the dead ends, though DDD has more to say about each than "nothing is known." Ashima has a thin extra-biblical trail: a dedicatory inscription from the Arabian oasis of Teima invokes a god 'sym' alongside two others, and the name may turn up again at Elephantine in the compound Eshem-Bethel. DDD floats a possible pun in Amos 8:14, where "the guilt ('asmat) of Samaria" may play on Ashima's name, a reading others dispute. Nibhaz is tentatively traced to an Elamite god "Ibnahaza," equated with the Babylonian water and wisdom god Ea in a cuneiform god list, the best explanation available even though nothing else is known about that god either, and the LXX's garbled "eblazer" shows the translators had no idea who he was. Tartak has two identifications on the table, both weak by DDD's own account: an Elamite deity from the same god list, or a distorted form of the Syrian goddess Atargatis. DDD calls the theory tying Tartak to Amos 8:14's "way of Beersheba" groundless. Succoth-benoth is the best attested of the four. DDD reconstructs it as Akkadian Banitu, "the Creatress," an epithet of Ishtar or of Marduk's consort Zarpanitu whose cult is attested as far away as the Jewish community at Syene, and it reads "Succoth" as a common noun for "image" or "stela," so the phrase means "the image of Banitu."