Personennamen und Religion im alten Israel untersucht mit besonderer Berucksichtigung der Namen auf El und Ba'al.

• Author: Albertz, Rainer
• Position: Book review

Personennamen und Religion im alten Israel untersucht mit besonderer Berucksichtigung der Namen auf El und Ba'al. By STIG NORIN. Coniectanea Biblica. Old Testament series, vol. 60. Winona Lake, Ind.: EISENBRAUNS, 2013. Pp. xiv +336, illus. $49.50 (paper).

With his present book, the well-known author, now professor emeritus of Old Testament exegesis at the University of Uppsala, has supplemented and completed his older study, Sein Name ist allein hoch: Das Jhw-haltige Suffix althebraischer Personennamen untersucht mit besonderer Berucksichtigung der alttestamentlichen Redaktionsgeschichte (Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1986). He has not only widened the scope to include personal names containing El and Baal, but has also included more recently recovered epigraphic material from ancient Judah and Israel and the neighboring regions, comparing it with the biblical results. Presupposing that personal names reflect the beliefs of the name givers, the Swedish scholar aims at a diachronic description of the ancient Israelite religion from the beginning of the monarchy up to the Persian period (pp. 1-2). Therefore, he analyzes the frequency of the El- and Baal-compounds in relation to the YHWH-names, their regional distribution, and their social stratification.

In chapter 2 (pp. 12-76) Norm presents the epigraphic material. His sample consists of 488 El- and 159 Baal-compounds from the entire ancient Near East, Egypt, and the eastern Mediterranean. While personal names containing the element El used without and with suffixes are spread over the entire Fertile Crescent, those names that refer to Baal are locally concentrated in Phoenicia and the eastern Mediterranean. The considerable number of 134 El-compounds can be attributed to Palestine, while only 19 Baal-names have so far been found in this region. Most of these come from the Northern Kingdom of the eighth and seventh centuries (10 from Samaria, 1 from Beth Shean, and 1 from Tell Dan), the rest from the coastal plain from Acco to Gaza, dominated either by the Phoenicians or the Philistines. The latter may have brought their affiliation with Baal from their former home in Cyprus. Two or three additional Baal-names can located in Transjordan.

Supporting this result with the insight that only three Palestinian rulers mentioned in the Amarna correspondence of the fourteenth century B.C.E. bear Baal-names (from Megiddo, Gezer, and Lachish), Norm formulates the most important part of his thesis: "There is no...