________________
LECTURE III.
117
that ominous name she became known to Greeks and Romans. She may have been a moon-goddess, as Kuenen supposes ("Religion of Israel,' vol. i. p. 90), and she was originally a numen virgirtale before her service degenerated into wild excesses. When Jeremiah speaks of the Queen of Heaven?, this is probably meant for Astarte, or Baaltis. Even in Southern Arabia there are traces of the worship of this ancient goddess. For in Sanâ, the ancient capital of the Himyaritic kingdom, there was a magnificent palace and temple dedicated to Venus (Bait Ghumdân), and the name of Athtar has been read in the Himyaritic inscriptions: nay, it is preceded in one place by the verb in the masculine gender?
Another word meaninger originally king, which must have been fixed upon as a name of the Deity in pre-historic times, is the Hebrew Melech. We find it in Moloch, who was worshipped, not only in Carthage, in the Islands of Crete and Rhodes, but likewise in the valley of Hinnom. We find the same word in Milcom, the god of the Ammonites, who had a sanctuary in Mount Olivet 3; and the gods Adrammelech and Anammelech, to whom the Sepharvites burnt their children in the fire 4, seem again but local varieties of the same ancient Semitic idol.
1 Jer. vii. 18, Dieno non.
2 Osiander, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft.' vii. p. 472; Gildemeister, "Zeitsch. der D. M. G. vol. xxiv. pp. 180, 181; Lenormant, Comptes-rendus des séances de l'Acad. des Inscriptions et Belles lettres de l'année 1867;' Levy, Zeitschrift der D. M. G.' vol. xxiv. p. 189.
3 2 Kings xxiii. 13.
* 2 Kings xvii. 31. There was also an Assyrian god Adar, see Schrader, Z. d. D. M. G. xxvi. pp. 140, 149, and another god Anu, see Schrader, 1. c. p. 141.
