Biblical Archaeology Review

See “Elagabalus,” in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. N.G.L. Hammond and H.H. Scullard (Oxford: Clarendon, 2nd ed., 1970), p. 377.

It is the same type of epithet as Astarte’s sûem ba‘al, or “Name of Ba‘al,” attested at Ugarit in the Late Bronze Age and at Sidon in the fifth century B.C. These epithets represent a phenomenon in Canaanite Phoenician and Israelite religion that Professor Frank Moore Cross characterizes as “hypostases of deity,” in which aspects of transcendence become personified and activated in the cultic world (Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic [Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973], p. 30).

Professor Benjamin Mazar, personal communication.

Cornelius Vermenle, “Askalon,” in M News (Boston: Museum of the Fine Arts, 1991), pp. 85–89, Vermeule and Kristin Anderson, “Greek and Roman Sculpture in the Holy Land,” in Burlington Magazine, 1981, pp. 7–20. Vermeule believes the sculpture excavated from the Severan basilica represents the “most splendid Roman imperial architectural sculpture to be found east of Ephesus and Corinth,” p. 15.

Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage, p. 93, n. 55, Citing Eustathius, De Engastrimytho 21 (ed. E. Klostermann, Kleine Texte 83 [1912]).