Deber and Qeteb

Pestilence and Destruction. Psalm 91 lists four threats in a shape that reads like a catalogue of named powers, and Habakkuk marches Deber in front of Yahweh as an attendant beside Resheph, matching the Ugaritic pairing of the two as gods of war and destruction, though the Hebrew Bible consistently strips them of independent agency. DDD's Qeteb entry reads Psalm 91:5-6 as one unit: the terror of the night, the arrow that flies by day, Deber stalking in the darkness, and Qeteb laying waste at noon. Deber is apparently Resheph's nocturnal double and the arrow his daytime weapon, so the four may reduce to two gods working night and day shifts. Qeteb turns up a fourth time at Isaiah 28:2, where "a tempest of Qeteb" drives a hailstorm against Ephraim, another case of Yahweh's judgment arriving under a demoted Canaanite destroyer's name. The Septuagint translates Qeteb differently in each of its four occurrences, a sign that its translators no longer treated the word as a fixed divine name.