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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.
Chemosh
The god of Moab, and the one foreign god a battle in Scripture is read as going to.
Numbers 21:29, in every translation this tool compares.
Moab's god, and the one foreign god the Bible lets win a battle. A Moabite king sacrifices his own son on the city wall, fury comes against Israel, and Israel withdraws. Jephthah argues territory with the Ammonites on the same terms: you keep what Chemosh gives you, we keep what Yahweh gives us.
The god of Moab. Jephthah argues with the Ammonites from territorial allotment, you keep what Chemosh gives you and we keep what Yahweh gives us, which is the Deuteronomy 32 worldview spoken aloud by a judge. In 2 Kings 3:27, when Mesha sacrifices his own son on the city wall in the middle of a siege, "great wrath" falls on Israel and the coalition withdraws. Nowhere else in the Old Testament is a foreign god's power against Israel conceded without qualification instead of mocked.
H3645, 8 occ
On the Mesha Stele the Moabite king credits Chemosh in language built the same way as Israel's language about Yahweh, including a herem. Mesha puts Nebo's people under the ban with the same root (khrm) as Joshua 6, blames his setbacks on Chemosh's anger the way Israel reads its fortunes through Yahweh's, and executes the population "as a spectacle for Chemosh and for Moab." No single Old Testament herem matches Mesha's circumstances, but the word and the practice are the same, and both sides practice functional monolatry. DDD also notes a double name on the stele, Ashtar-Chemosh ('str.kmš), pairing Chemosh with Ashtar, who appears in the Ugaritic Baal Cycle as a deposed and faintly ridiculous figure (KTU 1.6 i) but seems to have kept real standing on Moab's religious margins; DDD reads the pairing as strengthening Chemosh's credentials as a war god.
- Numbers 21:29
- Judges 11:24
- 1 Kings 11:7,33
- 2 Kings 23:13
- Jeremiah 48:7,13,46
- 2 Kings 3:27
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- DDD s.v. "Chemosh," 186-189
- H.-P. Müller, "Chemosh," DDD, 186-189
- Satterthwaite & McConville, *Exploring the Old Testament: The Histories*, 159
- Mesha Stele
