Baal Hammon: Recherches sur l'identite et l'histoire d'un dieu phenico-punique.

• Author: Pardee, Dennis

Xella's study of the deity Baal Hammon is the first of a planned series of monographs on Phoenician-Punic religion. That the well-known Italian scholar should present the first volume in French is explained in part by the fact that an important factor in the genesis of the manuscript was a series of lectures at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris in January of 1990. The author is to be congratulated for bringing the work to completion in so relatively short a time.

Though Baal Hammon is perhaps the best known of the Punic deities--this because of his frequent linkage with the tophet-institution, itself often linked with child sacrifice--little is known about the deity beyond the mention of the name in thousands of repetitive inscriptions. Xella attempts to break through this veil of banality by bringing together all of the relevant sources, both epigraphic and iconographic, and subjecting them to a thorough analysis. After a ten-page introduction, the second part of the book, about 110 pages long, is devoted to this overview of sources. In the third section, about twenty-five pages are devoted to previous explanations of the name Baal Hammon itself. The fourth section, entitled "Nouvelles voies de recherche: Baal 'Seigneur du Hammon'," is devoted to Xella's own interpretation of the name, particularly to a discussion of the element hmn/hmn in Ugaritic, later Aramaic (Palmyrene and Nabataean), and Biblical Hebrew. It does not give a totally new interpretation of the form of the divine name, reinterpreting primarily the second element of the widely accepted interpretation "Baal of the incense altar" (on the ambiguity in Xella's interpretation of the element bl, see below). A connection is made between the divine name and the fairly recent redefinition (by V. Fritz and H. J. W. Drijvers, in particular) of the cultic entity as a building of some sort, rather than as an incense altar. Because the Ugaritic form of this term is spelled hmn, rather than hmn, the old etymology (HMM, 'be hot') must be abandoned and with it the etymological explanation based on burning. Xella's etymological explanation involves a basic root HM, attested in both Ugaritic and in Arabic as denoting a tent-dwelling of some kind.

There is no doubt in my mind that the Fritz-Drijvers-Xella reinterpretation of the cultic entity is basically correct and that Xella's link with the Ugaritic cultic term and the entailed conclusions regarding etymology are on the mark. The...