Judges 2:13

And they forsook the Lord,.... The worship of the Lord, as the Targum; this is repeated to observe the heinous sin they were guilty of, and how displeasing it was to God: and served Baal and

And they forsook the LORD, and served Baal and Ashtaroth. Ashtaroth - also a plural word, denoting all the female divinities, especially Astarte, the Syrian Venus, whose rites were celebrated by the

i.e. The sun and the moon, whom many heathens worshipped, though under divers names; and so they ran into that error which God had so expressly warned them against, .

Judges 2:13 And they forsook the LORD, and served Baal and Ashtaroth.Ver. 13. And served Baal and Ashtaroth,] i.e., He-gods and she-gods of all sorts, closing up their orisons with, Diique, deaque, omnes, as Servius telleth us. From this word Ashtaroth seemeth to come the Greek word áóôçñ, and the Latin astrum, a star: as Saturn, Jupiter, Luna, Pallas, &c., came from the Hebrew. In Georg, lib. i.

(13) Baal and Ashtaroth.—Literally, “the Baals and the Ashtareths.” Ashtaroth.—The plural of the feminine word Ash-tareth, or Astarte, “the goddess of the Sidonians” (1 Kings 11:5), the Phœnician Venus—identified sometimes with the moon (e.g., in the name Ashtaroth Karnaim, “the city of the two-horned moon,” the name of Og’s capital, Deuteronomy 1:4), and sometimes with the planet Venus (2 Kings 23:4; Cic. De Nat. Deor. 3:23; Euseb. Praep. Evang. i. 10). She is called the “queen of heaven,” in Jeremiah 7:10; Jeremiah 44:17, and was called Baalti (“my lady”) by the Phœnicians. The plural form may be, as Ewald thinks, the plural of excellence, or like Baalim an allusion to the different forms and attributes under which the goddess was worshipped. The worship of Baalim and Ashtaroth naturally went hand in hand. (See Judges 10:6; 1 Samuel 7:4; 1 Samuel 12:10.) Ashtaroth is not to be confused with the Asheroth (rendered “groves” in the E. V.) mentioned in Judges 3:7. The words resemble each other less in Hebrew, as Ashtaroth begins with ò, not with à. Mil. ton’s allusions to these deities are not only exquisitely beautiful but also very correct, as he derived his information from Selden’s learned Syntagma de Dis Syrüs: “With these in troop Came Ashtoreth, whom the Phoenicians call’d Astarte, queen of heaven, with crescent horns, To whose bright image nightly by the moon Sidonian virgins paid their vows and songs; In Zion also not unsung, where stood Her temple.” Par. Lost, i. 439. The derivation of the word is very uncertain. It probably has no connection with the Greek Aster, or the Persian Esther.

Verse 13. Served Baal and Ashtaroth.] In a general way, probably, Baal and Ashtaroth mean the sun and moon; but in many cases Ashtaroth seems to have been the same among the Canaanites as Venus was among the Greeks and Romans, and to have been worshipped with the same obscene rites.

13. This verse repeats the substance of Jdg 2:12; it continues Judges 2:10 and leads on to Judges 2:20. The repetition is explained if the verse belongs to E; for the expression forsook the Lord in E cf. Joshua 24:20, Deuteronomy 31:16. served Baal and the Ashtaroth] Once settled in Canaan, the Israelites could not resist the temptation to adopt the worship of the native deities, on whom the prosperity of flocks and fields was supposed to depend. The God of Israel came from the desert; in the early days of the settlement His home was believed to be in Sinai rather than in Canaan (Judges 5:4 f.); hence the popular religion, without ceasing to regard Jehovah as the God of Israel, felt it necessary to pay homage at the same time to the gods of the country. No doubt also the popular mind tended to identify Jehovah with the local Baals and Astartes, whose sanctuaries were scattered over the land. Such confusions gravely imperilled the distinctive character of Israel’s religion; they produced a degradation of faith and morals which led the prophets, and writers of the schools of E and D, stirred by the painful evidence of a later age, to charge Israel with having fallen into Baal-worship from the very day they entered into Canaan; the popular religion could only be described as a ‘forsaking’ of Jehovah. Baal] means lit. owner, possessor, e.g. of a house Judges 19:22, of a town (‘citizens’) Judges 9:2, of a wife (‘husband’) Exodus 21:3 etc.; applied to divine beings it is a title conveying the idea of ownership, or, less probably, of domination. There was no one god called Baal; each considerable town or district had its deity, the lord of that particular place. Hence the O.T. speaks of Baal (sing.) in a collective sense, as here and Hosea 13:1, Jeremiah 11:13 etc., or of Baβlim (plur.) Judges 2:11, Judges 3:7, Judges 8:33 etc., meaning the aggregate of local or special Baals. The local Baal is often designated by the name of his town or sanctuary, e.g. B. of Hermon Judges 3:3, B. of Tamar Judges 20:33, B. of Meon Numbers 32:38 and Moab. Stone ll. 9, 30; or of some special aspect under which he was worshipped, e.g. B. of the covenant Judges 8:33, Judges 9:4, B. of flies 2 Kings 1:2 ff.; at Baal-Gad under Mt Hermon he was worshipped as Gad, the god of fortune. These usages are abundantly illustrated by the Phoenician and Aramaic inscriptions; e.g. we hear of the B. of Zidon, of Tyre, of Lebanon, of Tarsus; occasionally the actual name of the Baal is known—the B. of Tyre was Melḳ ?arth, the Baalath (fem.) of Gebal was ‘Ashtart, the B. of Ḥ ?arran was Sin; we meet with Baal under various aspects, e.g. ‘glowing’ (?ḥ ?ammβn), ‘healing’ (marpη), ‘dancing’ (marḳ ?τd), ‘of the heavens’ (shβmηm).

13. Ashtaroth — This is the plural form of Ashtoreth, the Venus of Syria, whose rites were more filthy and abominable than even those of the Grecian Venus, whose temple, with its thousand female