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85-653: Known in ancient times as Aphaca ( Ancient Greek : Ἄφακα ), the word can be interpreted as "source", is located in the mountains of Lebanon , about 20 kilometres from the ancient city of Byblos , which still stands just east of the town of Qartaba . It is the site of one of the finest waterfalls in the mountains of the Middle East , which feeds into the Adonis River (known today as Abraham River or Nahr Ibrahim in Arabic ), and forms Lake Yammoune , with which it

170-543: A pitch accent . In Modern Greek, all vowels and consonants are short. Many vowels and diphthongs once pronounced distinctly are pronounced as /i/ ( iotacism ). Some of the stops and glides in diphthongs have become fricatives , and the pitch accent has changed to a stress accent . Many of the changes took place in the Koine Greek period. The writing system of Modern Greek, however, does not reflect all pronunciation changes. The examples below represent Attic Greek in

255-403: A "treaty partner" in covenants, where the clan is seen as the "kin" of the deity. Eventually, El's cult became central to the ethnogenesis of Iron Age Israelites but so far, scholars are unable to determine how much of the population were El worshippers. It is more likely that different locales held different views of El. The Egyptian god Ptah is given the title ḏū gitti 'Lord of Gath ' in

340-525: A fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence. Regarding the speech of the ancient Macedonians diverse theories have been put forward, but the epigraphic activity and the archaeological discoveries in the Greek region of Macedonia during the last decades has brought to light documents, among which the first texts written in Macedonian , such as

425-625: A large temple dedicated to Dagon and another to Hadad, there was no temple dedicated to El. El had a variety of epithets and forms. He is repeatedly referred to as ṯr il ("Bull El" or "the bull god") and 'il milk ("El the King"). He is bny bnwt ("Creator of creatures"), ' abū banī 'ili ("father of the gods"), and ab adm ("father of man"). The appellations of "eternal", "creator" and "eternal" or "ancient creator" are "characteristic designations of 'El in Canaanite myths and liturgies". He

510-596: A parasitic h, and ʾl may be an abbreviated form of ʾlh . In Ugaritic the plural form meaning "gods" is ʾilhm , equivalent to Hebrew ʾ lōhîm "powers". In the Hebrew texts this word is interpreted as being semantically singular for "god" by biblical commentators. However, according to the documentary hypothesis , at least four different authors – the Jahwist (J), Elohist (E), Deuteronomist (D), and Priestly (P) sources – were responsible for editing stories from

595-480: A period when Yahweh held a place in theology comparable to that of Hadad at Ugarit; or as late henotheistic /monotheistic applications to Yahweh of deeds more commonly attributed to Hadad; or simply as examples of eclectic application of the same motifs and imagery to various different gods. Similarly, it is argued inconclusively whether Ēl Shaddāi, Ēl 'Ôlām, Ēl 'Elyôn, and so forth, were originally understood as separate divinities. Albrecht Alt presented his theories on

680-419: A polytheistic religion into those of a monotheistic religion. These sources were joined together at various points in time by a series of editors or "redactors". Inconsistencies that arise between monotheism and polytheism in the texts are reflective of this hypothesis. The stem ʾl is found prominently in the earliest strata of east Semitic, northwest Semitic, and south Semitic groups. Personal names including

765-550: A prefix /e-/, called the augment . This was probably originally a separate word, meaning something like "then", added because tenses in PIE had primarily aspectual meaning. The augment is added to the indicative of the aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect, but not to any of the other forms of the aorist (no other forms of the imperfect and pluperfect exist). The two kinds of augment in Greek are syllabic and quantitative. The syllabic augment

850-580: A prism from Tel Lachish which has on its opposite face the name of Amenhotep II ( c.  1435  – c.  1420 BCE). The title ḏū gitti is also found in Serābitṭ text 353. Frank Moore Cross (1973, p. 19) points out that Ptah is often called the Lord (or one) of eternity and thinks it may be this identification of El with Ptah that lead to the epithet ' olam 'eternal' being applied to El so early and so consistently. Yet another connection

935-587: A role as father of the gods, of creation, or both. However, because the word el sometimes refers to a god other than the great god El, it is frequently ambiguous as to whether El followed by another name means the great god El with a particular epithet applied or refers to another god entirely. For example, in the Ugaritic texts , ʾil mlk is understood to mean "El the King" but ʾil hd as "the god Hadad ". The Semitic root ʾlh ( Arabic ʾilāh , Aramaic ʾAlāh , ʾElāh , Hebrew ʾelōah ) may be ʾl with

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1020-542: A strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect, as exemplified in the poems of the Boeotian poet Pindar who wrote in Doric with a small Aeolic admixture. Thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to a lesser degree. Pamphylian Greek , spoken in a small area on the southwestern coast of Anatolia and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either

1105-510: A vowel or /n s r/ ; final stops were lost, as in γάλα "milk", compared with γάλακτος "of milk" (genitive). Ancient Greek of the classical period also differed in both the inventory and distribution of original PIE phonemes due to numerous sound changes, notably the following: The pronunciation of Ancient Greek was very different from that of Modern Greek . Ancient Greek had long and short vowels ; many diphthongs ; double and single consonants; voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops ; and

1190-595: Is ḥātikuka ("your patriarch"). El is the grey-bearded ancient one, full of wisdom, malku ("King"), ab šnm ("Father of years"), ' El gibbōr ("El the warrior"). He is also called lṭpn ʾil d pʾid ("the Gracious One, the Benevolent God") and lṭpn wqdš ("the Gracious and Holy One"). "El" (Father of Heaven / Saturn) and his major son: "Hadad" (Father of Earth / Jupiter), are symbolized both by

1275-510: Is Yahweh who is prophesied to one day battle Leviathan the serpent, and slay the dragon in the sea in Isaiah 27:1 . The slaying of the serpent in myth is a deed attributed to both Ba'al Hadad and ' Anat in the Ugaritic texts, but not to El. But some scholars argue that "El Shadday" reflects a conception of El as a storm god. Such mythological motifs are variously seen as late survivals from

1360-527: Is a Northwest Semitic word meaning 'god' or ' deity ', or referring (as a proper name) to any one of multiple major ancient Near Eastern deities. A rarer form, ' ila , represents the predicate form in the Old Akkadian and Amorite languages. The word is derived from the Proto-Semitic *ʔil- . Specific deities known as ' El , ' Al or ' Il include the supreme god of

1445-598: Is a generic word for god that could be used for any god, including Hadad , Moloch , or Yahweh . In the Tanakh , ' lōhîm is the normal word for a god or the great God (or gods, given that the 'im' suffix makes a word plural in Hebrew). But the form ' El also appears, mostly in poetic passages and in the patriarchal narratives attributed to the Priestly source of the documentary hypothesis . It occurs 217 times in

1530-418: Is added to stems beginning with consonants, and simply prefixes e (stems beginning with r , however, add er ). The quantitative augment is added to stems beginning with vowels, and involves lengthening the vowel: Some verbs augment irregularly; the most common variation is e → ei . The irregularity can be explained diachronically by the loss of s between vowels, or that of the letter w , which affected

1615-559: Is also associated by legend. In Greek mythology , Adonis was born and died at the foot of the falls in Afqa. The ruins of the celebrated temple of Aphrodite Aphakitis — the Aphrodite particular to this site— are located there. Sir Richard Francis Burton and Sir James Frazer further attribute the temple at Afqa to the honouring of Astarte or Ishtar ( Ashtaroth ). Afqa is aligned centrally between Baalbek and Byblos , pointing to

1700-545: Is attested to in approximately 1350 BCE in one of the Amarna Letters EA333, found in Tell-el-Hesi from the ruler of Lachish to 'The Great One' A Phoenician inscribed amulet of the seventh century BCE from Arslan Tash may refer to El. The text was translated by Rosenthal (1969, p. 658) as follows: An eternal bond has been established for us. Ashshur has established (it) for us, and all

1785-587: Is called ' il brt and ' il dn , which Cross (p. 39) takes as 'El of the covenant' and 'El the judge' respectively. For the Canaanites and the ancient Levantine region as a whole, ʼĒl or ʼIl was the supreme god, the father of mankind and all creatures. He also fathered many gods, most importantly Baal , Yam , and Mot , each sharing similar attributes to the Greco-Roman gods: Zeus , Poseidon , and Hades respectively. As recorded on

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1870-448: Is considered by some linguists to have been closely related to Greek . Among Indo-European branches with living descendants, Greek is often argued to have the closest genetic ties with Armenian (see also Graeco-Armenian ) and Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ). Ancient Greek differs from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and other Indo-European languages in certain ways. In phonotactics , ancient Greek words could end only in

1955-598: Is located here, where the goddess Aphrodite was worshipped. Eusebius, the biographer of emperor Constantine I , wrote that the emperor ordered to demolish the Temple. Frazer attributes its construction to the legendary forebear of King Cinyras, who was said to have founded a sanctuary for Aphrodite (i.e. Astarte). Reconstructed on a grander scale in Hellenistic times, then destroyed by the Emperor Constantine

2040-634: Is seen with the Mandaean angel Ptahil , whose name combines both the terms Ptah and Il. Wyatt, however, notes that in Ugaritic texts, Ptah is seemingly identified with the craftsman god Kothar-wa-Khasis, not El. In an inscription in the Proto-Sinaitic script , William F. Albright transcribed the phrase ʾL Ḏ ʿLM , which he translated as the appellation "El, (god) of eternity". The name Raphael or Rapha-El, meaning 'God has healed' in Ugarit,

2125-456: Is something delicious, almost intoxicating, in the freshness of these tumbling waters, in the sweetness and purity of the mountain air, in the vivid green of the vegetation. Marvin H. Pope (Yale University) identified the home of El in the Ugaritic texts of ca. 1200 BCE, described as "at the source[s] of the [two] rivers, amid the fountains of the [two] deeps", with this famous source of the river Adonis and Yammoune , an intermittent lake on

2210-576: Is that in much of the Hebrew Bible the name El is an alternative name for Yahweh, but in the Elohist and Priestly traditions it is considered an earlier name than Yahweh. Mark Smith has argued that Yahweh and El were originally separate, but were considered synonymous from very early on. The name Yahweh is used in Genesis 2:4 , while Genesis 4:26 says that at that time, people began to "call upon

2295-574: Is the source for the River Adonis and is located on a 600-foot (180 m) bluff that forms an immense natural amphitheater. The river emerges from a large limestone cave in the cliff wall which stores and channels water from the melted snow of the mountains before releasing it into springs and streams below. At Afqa, several watery threads flow from the cave to form numerous cataracts, a scene of great beauty. The cave has over two miles (three km) of known passageways inside. A great and ancient temple

2380-724: Is unquestioned, but sometimes exacted through threat or roundly mocked. He is "both comical and pathetic" in a "role of impotence." But this is arguably a misinterpretation since El had complementary relationships with other deities. Any "differences" they had pertained to function. For example, El and Baal were divine kings but El was the executive whilst Baal was the sustainer of the cosmos. The Hebrew form ( אל ) appears in Latin letters in Standard Hebrew transcription as El and in Tiberian Hebrew transcription as ʾĒl. ʼel

2465-679: The Archaic or Epic period ( c.  800–500 BC ), and the Classical period ( c.  500–300 BC ). Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers . It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance . This article primarily contains information about

2550-606: The Epic and Classical periods of the language, which are the best-attested periods and considered most typical of Ancient Greek. From the Hellenistic period ( c.  300 BC ), Ancient Greek was followed by Koine Greek , which is regarded as a separate historical stage, though its earliest form closely resembles Attic Greek , and its latest form approaches Medieval Greek . There were several regional dialects of Ancient Greek; Attic Greek developed into Koine. Ancient Greek

2635-629: The Masoretic Text : seventy-three times in the Psalms and fifty-five times in the Book of Job , and otherwise mostly in poetic passages or passages written in elevated prose. It occasionally appears with the definite article as hā'Ēl 'the god' (for example in 2 Samuel 22:31,33–48 ). The theological position of the Tanakh is that the names ʼĒl and ' Ĕlōhîm , when used in the singular to mean

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2720-501: The Pella curse tablet , as Hatzopoulos and other scholars note. Based on the conclusions drawn by several studies and findings such as Pella curse tablet , Emilio Crespo and other scholars suggest that ancient Macedonian was a Northwest Doric dialect , which shares isoglosses with its neighboring Thessalian dialects spoken in northeastern Thessaly . Some have also suggested an Aeolic Greek classification. The Lesbian dialect

2805-519: The Sayyidat al-Kabirah or "the Great Lady". In the early 20th century, strips of white cloth were still being attached to the ancient fig that shadows the source, and Metawalis and Christians alike were bringing the sick to be cured at "the abode of Sa’īdat Afkā, i.e. a feminine spirit of the same name as the place. Her husband built this temple. He was killed by a wild beast, and she searched among

2890-532: The Semitic languages . They include Ugaritic ʾilu , pl. ʾlm ; Phoenician ʾl pl. ʾlm ; Hebrew ʾēl , pl. ʾēlîm ; Aramaic ʾl ; Akkadian ilu , pl. ilānu . In northwest Semitic use, ʼel was a generic word for any god as well as the special name or title of a particular god who was distinguished from other gods as being "the god". El is listed at the head of many pantheons. In some Canaanite and Ugaritic sources, El played

2975-427: The clay tablets of Ugarit , El is the husband of the goddess Asherah . Three pantheon lists found at Ugarit (modern Ras Shamrā — Arabic : رأس شمرا , Syria ) begin with the four gods ' il-'ib (which according to Cross; is the name of a generic kind of deity, perhaps the divine ancestor of the people), El, Dagnu (that is Dagon ), and Ba'l Ṣapān (that is the god Haddu or Hadad ). Though Ugarit had

3060-603: The epic poems , the Iliad and the Odyssey , and in later poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic and other Classical-era dialects. The origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of a lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between

3145-501: The present , future , and imperfect are imperfective in aspect; the aorist , present perfect , pluperfect and future perfect are perfective in aspect. Most tenses display all four moods and three voices, although there is no future subjunctive or imperative. Also, there is no imperfect subjunctive, optative or imperative. The infinitives and participles correspond to the finite combinations of tense, aspect, and voice. The indicative of past tenses adds (conceptually, at least)

3230-620: The summer solstice sunset over the Mediterranean . It is from Byblos that the myth was told of a mystical ark that came ashore containing the bones of Osiris . The ark became stuck in a swamp until Isis found it and carried it back to Ancient Egypt . Ottoman tax records, which did not differentiate different Muslim groups from each other, indicate Afqa, or "Ifqi", had 20 Muslim households and six bachelors in 1523, 38 Muslim households and five bachelors in 1530, and 25 Muslim households and 15 bachelors in 1543. The waterfall at Afqa

3315-1031: The 5th century BC. Ancient pronunciation cannot be reconstructed with certainty, but Greek from the period is well documented, and there is little disagreement among linguists as to the general nature of the sounds that the letters represent. /oː/ raised to [uː] , probably by the 4th century BC. Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages , is highly inflected. It is highly archaic in its preservation of Proto-Indo-European forms. In ancient Greek, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases ( nominative , genitive , dative , accusative , and vocative ), three genders ( masculine , feminine , and neuter ), and three numbers (singular, dual , and plural ). Verbs have four moods ( indicative , imperative , subjunctive , and optative ) and three voices (active, middle, and passive ), as well as three persons (first, second, and third) and various other forms. Verbs are conjugated through seven combinations of tenses and aspect (generally simply called "tenses"):

3400-556: The Afqa bridge that connects Mount Lebanon with the Beqaa valley was one of five bridges destroyed by Israeli jets. Ancient Greek language Ancient Greek ( Ἑλληνῐκή , Hellēnikḗ ; [hellɛːnikɛ́ː] ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek ( c.  1400–1200 BC ), Dark Ages ( c.  1200–800 BC ),

3485-495: The Archaic period of ancient Greek (see Homeric Greek for more details): Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί' Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε' ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ' ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι· Διὸς δ' ἐτελείετο βουλή· ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. The beginning of Apology by Plato exemplifies Attic Greek from

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3570-721: The Classical period of ancient Greek. (The second line is the IPA , the third is transliterated into the Latin alphabet using a modern version of the Erasmian scheme .) Ὅτι [hóti Hóti μὲν men mèn ὑμεῖς, hyːmêːs hūmeîs,   El (god) (Ugarit religions) El ( / ɛ l / EL ; also ' Il , Ugaritic : 𐎛𐎍 ʾīlu ; Phoenician : 𐤀𐤋 ʾīl ; Hebrew : אֵל ʾēl ; Syriac : ܐܺܝܠ ʾīyl ; Arabic : إل ʾil or إله ʾilāh ; cognate to Akkadian : 𒀭 , romanized:  ilu )

3655-545: The Dorians. The Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people – Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians (including Athenians), each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, and Cypriot, far from the center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation. One standard formulation for

3740-500: The English expression [by] God awful ). It is possible also that the expression ' ēlîm in both places descends from an archaic stock phrase in which ' lm was a singular form with the m -enclitic and therefore to be translated as 'sons of El'. The m -enclitic appears elsewhere in the Tanakh and in other Semitic languages. Its meaning is unknown, possibly simply emphasis. It appears in similar contexts in Ugaritic texts where

3825-514: The God of Gods ( ' El 'Elîm ) he will speak outrageous things, and will prosper until the indignation is accomplished: for that which is decided will be done. There are a few cases in the Tanakh where some think ' El is not equated with Yahweh. One example is found in Ezekiel 28:2 , in the taunt against a man who claims to be divine, in this instance, the leader of Tyre : Son of man, say to

3910-592: The God of the Jews evolved gradually from the Canaanite El, who was in all likelihood the "God of Abraham" ... If El was the high God of Abraham—Elohim, the prototype of Yahveh—Asherah was his wife, and there are archaeological indications that she was perceived as such before she was in effect "divorced" in the context of emerging Judaism of the 7th century BCE. (See 2 Kings 23:15 .) The apparent plural form ' Ēlîm or ' Ēlim "gods" occurs only four times in

3995-602: The Great in the fourth century, it was partially rebuilt by the later fourth-century emperor, Julian the Apostate . The site was finally abandoned during the reign of Theodosius I Massive hewn blocks and a fine column of Syenite granite still mark the site, on a terrace facing the source of the river. The remains of a Roman aqueduct that carried the waters of the River Adonis to the inhabitants of ancient Byblos are also located here. Edward Robinson and Eli Smith camped at

4080-464: The Libanus: now this Libanus abounds in the red earth. The violent winds which blow regularly on those days bring down into the river a quantity of earth resembling vermilion. It is this earth that turns the river to red. And thus the change in the river's colour is due, not to blood as they affirm, but to the nature of the soil.' This was the story of the man of Byblos . But even assuming that he spoke

4165-505: The Tanakh. Psalm 29 , understood as an enthronement psalm, begins: A Psalm of David. Ascribe to Yahweh, sons of Gods ( b nê 'Ēlîm ), Ascribe to Yahweh, glory and strength Psalm 89 :6 (verse 7 in Hebrew) has: For who in the skies compares to Yahweh, who can be likened to Yahweh among the sons of Gods ( b nê 'Ēlîm ). Traditionally b nê 'ēlîm has been interpreted as 'sons of the mighty', 'mighty ones', for ' El can mean 'mighty', though such use may be metaphorical (compare

4250-621: The ancient Canaanite religion and the supreme god of East Semitic speakers in Early Dynastic Period of Mesopotamia . Among the Hittites , El was known as Elkunirsa ( Hittite : 𒂖𒆪𒉌𒅕𒊭 Elkunīrša ). Although El gained different appearances and meanings in different languages over time, it continues to exist as -il or -el in compound proper noun phrases such as Ishmael, Israel, Samuel, Daniel, Raphael, Michael, and Gabriel. Cognate forms of El are found throughout

4335-550: The aorist. Following Homer 's practice, the augment is sometimes not made in poetry , especially epic poetry. The augment sometimes substitutes for reduplication; see below. Almost all forms of the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect reduplicate the initial syllable of the verb stem. (A few irregular forms of perfect do not reduplicate, whereas a handful of irregular aorists reduplicate.) The three types of reduplication are: Irregular duplication can be understood diachronically. For example, lambanō (root lab ) has

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4420-419: The augment when it was word-initial. In verbs with a preposition as a prefix, the augment is placed not at the start of the word, but between the preposition and the original verb. For example, προσ(-)βάλλω (I attack) goes to προσ έ βαλoν in the aorist. However compound verbs consisting of a prefix that is not a preposition retain the augment at the start of the word: αὐτο(-)μολῶ goes to ηὐ τομόλησα in

4505-472: The beginning of the account mention the goddess Athirat , who is otherwise El's chief wife and the goddess Raḥmayyu ("the one of the womb"). In the Ugaritic Ba'al cycle , El is introduced having an assembly of gods on Mount Lel (Lel possibly meaning "Night"), and dwelling on (or in) the fountains of the two rivers at the spring of the two deeps. He dwells in a tent according to some interpretations of

4590-401: The bull, and both wear bull horns on their headdresses. The mysterious Ugaritic text Shachar and Shalim tells how (perhaps near the beginning of all things) El came to shores of the sea and saw two women who bobbed up and down. El was sexually aroused and took the two with him, killed a bird by throwing a staff at it, and roasted it over a fire. He asked the women to tell him when the bird

4675-563: The dialect of Sparta ), and Northern Peloponnesus Doric (including Corinthian ). All the groups were represented by colonies beyond Greece proper as well, and these colonies generally developed local characteristics, often under the influence of settlers or neighbors speaking different Greek dialects. After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BC, a new international dialect known as Koine or Common Greek developed, largely based on Attic Greek , but with influence from other dialects. This dialect slowly replaced most of

4760-530: The dialects is: West vs. non-West Greek is the strongest-marked and earliest division, with non-West in subsets of Ionic-Attic (or Attic-Ionic) and Aeolic vs. Arcadocypriot, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot vs. Ionic-Attic. Often non-West is called 'East Greek'. Arcadocypriot apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age. Boeotian Greek had come under

4845-510: The divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period. They have the same general outline but differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean Greek , but its relationship to the historical dialects and the historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups already existed in some form. Scholars assume that major Ancient Greek period dialect groups developed not later than 1120 BC, at

4930-490: The divine beings and the majority of the group of all the holy ones, through the bond of heaven and earth for ever , ... However, Cross (1973, p. 17) translated the text as follows: The Eternal One ('Olam) has made a covenant oath with us, Asherah has made (a pact) with us. And all the sons of El, And the great council of all the Holy Ones. With oaths of Heaven and Ancient Earth. In some inscriptions,

5015-684: The expression bn 'il alternates with bn 'ilm , but both must mean 'sons of El'. That phrase with m -enclitic also appears in Phoenician inscriptions as late as the fifth century BCE. One of the other two occurrences in the Tanakh is in the " Song of Moses ", Exodus 15:11a : Who is like you among the Gods ( ' ēlim ), Yahweh? The final occurrence is in Daniel 11:36 : And the king will do according to his pleasure; and he will exalt himself and magnify himself over every god ( ' ēl ), and against

5100-504: The fertile valley surrounding the river, millions of scarlet anemones bloom. Known as Adonis' flowers, according to legend, they spring from his blood, spilled as he lay dying beneath the trees at Afqa, and return each year in remembrance. In his "Terminal Essay" in the 1885 translation of The Arabian Nights , Burton describes the temple at Afqa as a place of pilgrimage for the Metawali sect of Shia Islam , where vows are addressed to

5185-401: The gods ( ' ilm ) in general or at least a large portion of them. The only sons of El named individually in the Ugaritic texts are Yamm ("Sea"), Mot ("Death"), and Ashtar , who may be the chief and leader of most of the sons of El. Ba'al Hadad is a few times called El's son rather than the son of Dagan as he is normally called, possibly because El is in the position of a clan-father to all

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5270-406: The gods. The fragmentary text R.S. 24.258 describes a Marzēaḥ banquet to which El invites the other gods and then disgraces himself by becoming outrageously drunk and passing out after confronting an otherwise unknown Hubbay, "he with the horns and tail". The text ends with an incantation for the cure for a hangover . El's characterization in Ugarit texts is not always favorable. His authority

5355-406: The lyn. A little way off the river rushes from a cavern at the foot of a mighty amphitheater of towering cliffs to plunge in a series of cascades into the awful depths of the glen. The deeper it descends, the ranker and denser grows the vegetation, which, sprouting from the crannies and fissures of the rocks, spreads a green veil over the roaring or murmuring stream in the tremendous chasm below. There

5440-416: The mountains until she found his mangled body. This is evidently a modified view of the ancient myth of Astarte and Adonis," Lewis Bayles Paton reported in 1919, with a photograph of the cloth-hung fig tree. W. F. Albright noted this survival of this "female saint" as the most remarkable among "very few direct reflections of paganism in the names and legends of modern welis ." During the 2006 Lebanon War ,

5525-564: The name ' Ēl qōne 'arṣ ( Punic : 𐤀𐤋 𐤒𐤍 𐤀𐤓𐤑 ʾl qn ʾrṣ ) meaning "El creator of Earth" appears, even including a late inscription at Leptis Magna in Tripolitania dating to the second century. In Hittite texts, the expression becomes the single name Ilkunirsa , this Ilkunirsa appearing as the husband of Asherdu ( Asherah ) and father of 77 or 88 sons. In a Hurrian hymn to El (published in Ugaritica V , text RS 24.278), he

5610-582: The name of the LORD". El's title of " El Shadday ", which envisions him as the "god of the steppe", may also derive from the cultural beliefs of Upper Mesopotamian (i.e. Amurru ) immigrants, who were ancestors of the Israelites. In some places, especially in Psalm 29 , Yahweh is clearly envisioned as a storm god , something not true of El so far as scholars know (although true of his son, Ba'al Haddad). It

5695-508: The older dialects, although the Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language , which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek . By about the 6th century AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosed into Medieval Greek . Phrygian is an extinct Indo-European language of West and Central Anatolia , which

5780-618: The original differences of such gods in Der Gott der Väter in 1929. But others have argued that from patriarchal times, these different names were generally understood to refer to the same single great god, El. This is the position of Frank Moore Cross (1973). What is certain is that the form 'El does appear in Israelite names from every period including the name Yiśrā'ēl ("Israel"), meaning "El strives". According to The Oxford Companion to World Mythology , It seems almost certain that

5865-412: The other side of the mountain, which Pope asserted was closely associated with it in legend. In classical Greek mythology, Afqa is associated with the cult of Aphrodite and Adonis . According to the myth, Cinyras , the King of Cyprus seduced his daughter Myrrha who was transformed into a tree that bears her name (see: Myrrh ). After several months, the tree split open and the child Adonis emerged. He

5950-487: The perfect stem eilēpha (not * lelēpha ) because it was originally slambanō , with perfect seslēpha , becoming eilēpha through compensatory lengthening. Reduplication is also visible in the present tense stems of certain verbs. These stems add a syllable consisting of the root's initial consonant followed by i . A nasal stop appears after the reduplication in some verbs. The earliest extant examples of ancient Greek writing ( c.  1450 BC ) are in

6035-409: The rites, annually performed, that involved the beating of breasts and wailing, and the "perform[ing] [of] their secret ritual amid signs of mourning through the whole countryside. When they have finished their mourning and wailing, they sacrifice in the first place to Adonis, as to one who has departed this life: after this they allege that he is alive again, and exhibit his effigy to the sky." Also in

6120-481: The river, bringing a reddish mud into the stream from the steep mountain slopes. The red stain can be seen feeding into the river and far out to the Mediterranean Sea . Legend held this to be the blood of Adonis, renewed each year, at the time of his death. Lucian of Samosata , a Syrian by birth, describes how a local man of Byblos debunked the legend: "'This river, my friend and guest, passes through

6205-534: The same as the manbaa al-nahrayn ("Source of the Two Rivers"), the abode of El in the Ugaritic Baal Cycle discovered in the 1920s and a separate serpent incantation. In the episode of the "Palace of Ba'al", the god Ba'al Hadad invites the "seventy sons of Athirat" to a feast in his new palace. Presumably these sons have been fathered on Athirat by El; in following passages they seem to be

6290-463: The site in 1852, merely remarking on its "shapeless ruins" and the difficulty of transport of two massive columns of Syenite granite. Frazer describes the village at Afqa in his 1922 book, The Golden Bough as: "...the miserable village which still bears the name of Afqa at the head of the wild, romantic, wooded gorge of the Adonis. The hamlet stands among groves of noble walnut trees on the brink of

6375-835: The stem ʾl are found with similar patterns in both the Amorite and Sabaic languages. There is evidence that the Canaanite/Phoenician and Aramaic conception of El is essentially the same as the Amorite conception of El, which was popularized in the 18th century BCE but has origins in the Pre- Sargonic period . Any "changes" in El's status can be explained by the randomness of available data. Tribal organizations in West Semitic culture also influenced El's portrayal as

6460-458: The supreme god, refer to Yahweh, beside whom other gods are supposed to be either nonexistent or insignificant. Whether this was a long-standing belief or a relatively new one has long been the subject of inconclusive scholarly debate about the prehistory of the sources of the Tanakh and about the prehistory of Israelite religion. In the P strand, Exodus 6:3 may be translated: I revealed myself to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El Shaddai , but

6545-517: The syllabic script Linear B . Beginning in the 8th century BC, however, the Greek alphabet became standard, albeit with some variation among dialects. Early texts are written in boustrophedon style, but left-to-right became standard during the classic period. Modern editions of ancient Greek texts are usually written with accents and breathing marks , interword spacing , modern punctuation , and sometimes mixed case , but these were all introduced later. The beginning of Homer 's Iliad exemplifies

6630-544: The text which may explain why he had no temple in Ugarit. As to the rivers and the spring of the two deeps, these might refer to real streams, or to the mythological sources of the salt water ocean and the fresh water sources under the earth, or to the waters above the heavens and the waters beneath the earth. A few miles from the swamp from which the Litani (the classical Leontes) and the Asi (the upper Orontes ) flow, Baalbek may be

6715-467: The time of the Dorian invasions —and that their first appearances as precise alphabetic writing began in the 8th century BC. The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to the historical Dorians . The invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with

6800-508: The truth, yet there certainly seems to me something supernatural in the regular coincidence of the wind and the colouring of the river." Lucian also describes practices by the Byblians of worship which some told him centered not on Adonis, but Osiris . He writes that he mastered the secret rites of Adonis at the temple at Afqa and that the locals there asserted that the legend about Adonis was true and occurred in their country. Lucian describes

6885-480: Was Aeolic. For example, fragments of the works of the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos are in Aeolian. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or to an island. Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric (including Cretan Doric ), Southern Peloponnesus Doric (including Laconian ,

6970-452: Was a pluricentric language , divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic , Aeolic , Arcadocypriot , and Doric , many of them with several subdivisions. Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms in literature , while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are also several historical forms. Homeric Greek is a literary form of Archaic Greek (derived primarily from Ionic and Aeolic) used in

7055-459: Was fully cooked, and to then address him either as husband or as father, for he would thenceforward behave to them as they called him. They saluted him as husband. He then lay with them, and they gave birth to Shachar ("Dawn") and Shalim ("Dusk"). Again El lay with his wives and the wives gave birth to "the gracious gods", "cleavers of the sea", "children of the sea". The names of these wives are not explicitly provided, but some confusing rubrics at

7140-405: Was not known to them by my name, YHWH . However, it is said in Genesis 14:18–20 that Abraham accepted the blessing of El, when Melchizedek , the king of Salem and high priest of its deity El Elyon blessed him. One scholarly position is that the identification of Yahweh with El is late, that Yahweh was earlier thought of as only one of many gods, and not normally identified with El. Another

7225-415: Was reared by Aphrodite, who became enamored of him, causing her lover Ares to grow jealous. Ares sent a vicious boar to kill Adonis. At the pool at the foot of the falls of Afqa, Adonis bled to death from a deep wound in the groin. Aphrodite despaired at his death and out of pity for her the gods allowed Adonis to ascend from Hades for a short period each year. Each spring at Afqa, the melting snows flood

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