Talk:Canaanite religion

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[edit] Phoenix vs. Pheonix

I didn't change the spelling of Pheonix to Phoenix because I wasn't sure it was the same word. Anyone know? Thanks! - Richfife 02:33, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Yes it is Phoenix, One thing, can users who edit the page significantly please post the reasons why here. John D. Croft 06:34, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Not an Etymology, rather a fundamentalist point of view

The statement inserted recently "The first and most obvious is that the area was populated by the descendants of Canaan. Canaan, along with Misraim, Phut, and Cush, was the son of Ham. This pattern of naming a location after the first settler after Noah's flood is found in Egypt, actually called Misr, after Misraim, Hadramaut in Yemen, after Hadoram, and many others."

This is not an etymology for the origins of the word Canaan. To say "most obvious" is a POV error, not allowed in Wikipedia. John D. Croft 02:58, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Differences from the Bible

A section on differences from the Bible is probably needed in this article. I suggest the following list from Bruce Lerro's book "Power in Eden: the emergence of Gender Hierarchies in the Ancient World" would be a good place to start.

  • Canaanites
  • Israelites


  • Polytheistic
  • Monotheistic


  • Pre-Axial Tradition
  • Post Axial Tradition*


  • Pre-exilic and remained in Judea after Babylonian invasion.
  • Post-exilic and returned from Babylonia after Persians allowed them to return.


  • Agricultural in culture.
  • Urban in culture


  • Peasantry based.
  • Merchant middle class based


  • Subsistence economy based.
  • Commercial economy based.


  • Largely barter economy
  • Monetarised economy


  • Tributary in nature of polity.
  • Taxation the nature of polity.


  • Nature is an interplay of forces.
  • No interplay of divine forces.


  • Gods may battle each other or join forces. Goddesses subordinate to Gods
  • No more divine battles. Both Gods and Goddesses vanish, their functions subsumed.


  • Sexuality is a part of the Divine Order. Sex makes people more like divinities
  • Sexuality is apart from the Divine Order. No sexuality to divine experience. Sexuality is part of human order.


  • Space and time integrate the sexual and the sacred.
  • Space and time separate the the sexual and the sacred


  • Gods are gendered & sexual.
  • God is not phallic, not imagined below the waist


  • Fusion of the divine with Humanity.........
  • Separation of the divine from Humanity


  • Nature is self determining
  • Human interaction determines natural conditions


  • Humans determine what Gods do through manipulating and appeasing them......
  • Humans determine God's actions through ethical or unethical actions


  • Focus on deities fluctuates depending on crisis.......
  • Focus on deity is a perpetual demand


  • Fertility rituals needed*. Ritual can facilitate the the union of natural forces to create fertility.
  • Fertility rituals are faithless Fertility lies in God's power over rain. Nature is already fertile. Land can be polluted by defying God's commands.


  • Deities provide humanity with culture. Stories about Gods and Goddesses exemplify relations between humans.
  • Humans develop their own culture. Stories about men and women teach lessons.


  • Soul most important. Imagination, intuition, dreams. emotions, fantasies, impulses. the sensual.
  • Spirit most important. Abstract reasoning, analysis, self reflection, consciousness and conscience, sensual denial


  • Sacred presences immanent. Contact through spells. Organic, symmetrical. Interdependent,
  • Sacred presence transcendent* Contact through faith and prayer. Contractual, asymmetrical, Independent


  • Respect: elder brother younger sister metaphor
  • Worship: father metaphor*


  • Cosmos is improvised
  • Cosmos is planned with a purpose


  • Animals included as part divine*.
  • Animals excluded from being part of the divine. Humans higher than animals.


  • Afterlife shadowy & limited.
  • Afterlife paradaisal for all.


  • External laws, obedience to the Gods.
  • Internal dictates, conscience, Morality.


  • Unity of king with priests.
  • Separation of rulers and priests.


  • Traditional ritual based
  • Scripturally textually based


Regards John D. Croft 08:11, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

I say go for it, definitely. This article bends too much the other way for my tastes. I wouldn't agree with all the above statements, though, so I'd watch exactly what you put down.---G.T.N. (talk) 02:59, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] What else is needed

  • Canaanite mythology: redirects to this page, but the article certainly needs a section on myth.
  • Etymology and history: needs far less etymology (this is not the article for discussing the origins of the name Canaan]]; there needs to be a discussion of the development of Canaanite religion over time, from the early stage reflected in the Ugarit texts to the Iron Age stage when it broke up into numerous kingdom-centred cults each with a separate national god (Chemosh, Yahweh, etc).
  • Similarites to/differeneces from Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Hittite and Greek religion (and Jewish if you want, but Jewish religion in the Iron Age was still part of general Canaanite religion (Yahweh as high god/royal god, plus worship of subsidiary gods, goddesses, etc) and to talk of "similarities" is rather misleading).
  • Bibliography: Where are the major works on Canaanite religion? There are plenty!

PiCo 10:17, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

I thought they were all written on papyrus which decomposed over the millenia, so there's almost nothing left of any of them now.HS7 (talk) 21:51, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
what about the rituals and practices? — Rickyrab | Talk 01:44, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
I added a small section on the modern rebuilding of this religion, since the main article for that is being deleted, but then I thought maybe I should have asked here first. I'm doing that now. Is it OK with you? I couldn't think of any reason why just a few lines on that wouldn't belong here. Also would it be possible to add a link to their site somewhere(http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Lofts/2938/), since that's relevent too, and provides a lot of information about the original religion.HS7 (talk) 21:51, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Merge rejection

I have deleted the merge between Canaanite and Ancient Semitic Religions because effectively they are different subjects. Whilst Ancient Semitic Religions is a general subject there are significant differences between the various areas which requires separate articles. We don't merge Mesopotamian or Babylonian religion under the topic of Ancient Semites. This view also is an ancient Ethnocentric view that underemphasises other cultural groups like the Hurrians and Sumerians which had a huge impact on Canaanite religious understandings. John D. Croft 05:39, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

the merger was purely pragmatic. If you want to expand this into a full article, too large to figure as a section in Ancient Semitic religion, it should of course be separate. It's still a sub-article of that on the larger topic. dab (𒁳) 12:23, 21 September 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Child sacrifice

This [1] is recent, as is this [2] although it isn't free to read (it does mention child sacrifice according to Google Scholar). --Doug Weller (talk) 21:26, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

I actually hadn't read every page on that other site. However, I'm not sure I see why a few pages there suggesting the possiblilty of things that differ from the commonly accepted facts means the majority of the site, which seems rather more sensible, can't be used as a source. The page I linked to provided the arguments of both sides set out clearly without making any similarly unsubstantiated claims as those you found elsewhere on the site. But since this isn't my encyclopedia, and I am quite new to this, I will accept that you know what you are doing and had good reason to do it.HS7 (talk) 18:48, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
Having read through some more of that site, I have discovered that it really isn't a reliable source, with some parts of it being rather inaccurate. So just ignore what I said above.HS7 (talk) 20:06, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Phoenician religion, Canaanite religion, and the 'pantheon'

I deleted the sentence about the pantheon, because the Phoenicians didn't have a pantheon or Elohim so far as I know.

Which led me to realise that there is a major problem here. The article assumes that the 'Canaanite religion' and the 'Phoencian religion' are the same thing. I don't think that can be taken for granted. Maria Eugenia Aubet [3] writes "With respect to the ancient Canaanite religion, the Phoenician religion of the Iron Age presupposes an ideological break..." please read [[4]] for the full context. Glenn Markoe on the other hand doesn't mention Canaanite religion, hardly touches the 2nd millennium BCE, but does also discuss Punic religion. I'm not sure how we should handle these issues/questions, but handle them I think we should. I'm not convinced that Phoenician religion should be a redirect. Maybe it should be the other way around?--Doug Weller (talk) 11:56, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

I would have thought that the Phoenician and later the Punic religions would have been slight variations on the overall Canaanite religion, if there was any difference at all, probably emerging from them gradually and retaining many similarities. Of course I may be totally wrong here, but have yet to see any proof contrary to this. Also I'm quite sure the Phoenicians were one group of the Canaanites, all of which are covered by this page, which therefore is an article on Canaanite religion, rather than just Phoenician. Maybe if you have enough information on Phoenician beliefs which differs from the information here you could create your own article on it.HS7 (talk) 16:13, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
What is your source for any of the above? And what is the 'overall Canaanite religion', given the large changes that took place at the beginning of the first millennium BCE?--Doug Weller (talk) 17:29, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
I don't actually have a specific source that I can direct you to right now, mostly it's just an assumpiton based on my understanding of the topic from all of my combined research. I know, that's not good enough here, but i just don't think it's too good an idea to jump in without looking at the other side first. I also may have said things a bit differently than I should have. I had been hoping to get back here and change that before you noticed, but it seems I missed that chance. I've been thinking about this and I've come to the conclusion that I'm not entirely sure what it is that you're trying to say. is it that you think their religious beliefs changed so much around that time that there should be two articles on it, because that's what it seems like to me now when I reread it. the way I see it is that even if there was such a change it seems unlikely that over a short period they would suddenly go from one religion to another, totally different, and that instead there would have been changes within the religion whilst other parts of it remained the same or similar. If this is what you are saying, I definitely think you should just go and add information about it to the article, the history section really needs to be totally rewritten, but I'm not sure what you mean about changing the redirects of the article. I think what I'll do is I'll read back through your sources again to see if they have any evidence that shows I am wrong, and then maybe look around the internet myself and see what I can find. Or you could just ignore me and get on with rewriting the article.HS7 (talk) 18:27, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
If they didn't have a pantheon, who are the people in their myths? Or is it just the later Phoenicians that didn't have the pantheon, because I'm not so familiar with their mythology.HS7 (talk) 18:29, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
A pantheon is a system of gods. They had local pantheons, not an all-embracing one. These were once thought to be a family triad but now are seen to be a dual system of a supreme male and female god. By the way, you shouldn't make changes per se, you should strike out what you no longer wish to say and then (in a separate post) say what you now want to say.
Take a look at the article. It says at the moment "Thus while Phoenician and Canaanite refer to the same culture, archaeologists and historians commonly refer to the Bronze Age, pre-1200 BCE Levantines as Canaanites and their Iron Age descendants, particularly those living on the coast as Phoenicians. More recently, the term Canaanite has been used for the secondary Iron Age states of the interior, that were not ruled by Aramaean peoples, a separate and closely related ethnic group, a group which included the Philistines and the states of Israel and Judah [2]."
Glenn Markoe doesn't make the time differentiation the article does, and I'm not sure how you differentiate between the religion of the Canaanites in the interior and the Phoenicians (except of course when Judaism develops). I do think we need to show which gods were attested in which millennium. The list at the moment is pretty bad (not from an academic source I'd wager), where are Amen, Bes, Bastet, Osiris, Isis and Horus for instance? I'll try to work something up out of Markoe.--Doug Weller (talk) 20:29, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
They seemingly started with a single pantheon, but that then broke apart into the local worship of between one and three gods in each area. Focussing on a small number of gods out of the entire bunch was very common back then, and might well have also happened in the earlier Canaanite pantheon as well. Rather annoyingly my book on the history of the region has disappeared, so I'll have to find it before I can check any details. The whole article needs to be reorganised, and maybe completely rewritten. It's not all that great at the moment. Aren't those all Egyptian gods though? Although, they may well have borrowed them. Maybe if you're going to add them to the list you might want to mention that somewhere? it might be possible to add the region and time that each god was worshipped to that list, but it might look a bit crowded then. Maybe writing a few lines on each god, in seperate sections, might work better?HS7 (talk) 21:43, 27 May 2008 (UTC)