The Splintered Divine: A Study of Istar, Baal, and Yahweh Divine Names and Divine Multiplicity in the Ancient Near East.

• Author: Knott, Elizabeth
• Position: Book review

The Splintered Divine: A Study of Istar, Baal, and Yahweh Divine Names and Divine Multiplicity in the Ancient Near East. By SPENCER L. ALLEN. Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records, vol. 5. Berlin: WALTER DE GRUYTER, 2015. Pp. xxi + 457. [euro]102.76.

Spencer Allen's The Splintered Divine analyzes the phenomenon in which ancient Near Eastern deities are identified by two-component names: what he calls the "first name," representing a common divine name like Istar, Baal, or Yahweh, and the "last name," providing a specifying, often geographically based, marker or epithet, such as Nineveh, Sapun, or Teman. Whereas previous scholarship has often understood gods and goddesses with geographic "last names" to be local manifestations of an overarching deity, this book argues that Istar and Baal figures with different "last names" were, in their respective Neo-Assyrian and Levantine worlds, treated as distinct deities. Additionally, Allen demonstrates that the biblical and inscriptional evidence provides less clear answers to the question of the individuality of Yahwehs in Israel. The nature of the divine has been the subject of numerous recent studies. Allen adds to this discussion a wide range of data that will be of interest to students and scholars alike.

The Splintered Divine is comprised of six chapters, an introduction and conclusion, and over eighty pages of annotated tables that reflect the author's 2011 dissertation research on god lists. An inadvertent publishing error led to the dropping of the phrase "witness list" from the text when the book was first published; Allen has helpfully supplied an errata list (available on de Gruyter's website) and corrected print and electronic copies have been released.

Allen opens the introduction by juxtaposing modern discussions of the seventh-century BCE cuneiform text, Assurbanipal's Hymn to the Istars of Nineveh and Arbela (SAA 3 3), with those of the late-ninth- / early-eighth-century alphabetic dedicatory inscriptions to Yahweh-of-Teman and Yahweh-of-Samaria found at Kuntillet 'Ajrud. Inspired by Barbara Porter's argument that the two Istars of the Neo-Assyrian hymn represent distinct deities (Porter 2004), Allen calls for a more comprehensive analysis of divine distinctiveness across the cultures of the ancient Near East (p. 3). For Allen, scribal naming practices offer an inroad into the question "What or who was a god?" (p. 7).

Chapter 1, "Considering Multiplicity and Defining Deity," serves...