Joshua Chapter 9 verse 10 Holy Bible

Pulpit Commentary

Pulpit CommentaryVerse 10. - Sihon, king of Heshbon, and Og, the king of Bashan (see Numbers 21:21, 35). Ashtaroth (see Joshua 12:4; Joshua 13:31; also Deuteronomy 1:4). In Numbers 21. Edrei only is mentioned. This is not the Ashtaroth-Karnaim of Genesis 14:5, which is so called from the worship of the horned Astarte, or crescent (see below), to distinguish it from this Ashtaroth. The two cities were close together. Eusebius and Jerome state that they were only nine miles apart. The site of this city has been identified with Tel Ashtereh, in a wide plain on the east of Jordan. It appears as Astaratu in the Karnak list of cities captured by Thothines III. The name has been identified with the Assyrian Ishtar, the Persian, Greek, and Latin aster and our star. So Gesenius, 'Thesaurus,' s.v. Whence Lucian seems to have been wrong in his idea that the worship of Astarte, like that of Artemis at Ephesus, was that of the moon. But Rawlinson, in his 'Ancient Monarchies,' decides against this identification. The last mention of this city in Jewish history is in the bold and successful expedition of Judas Maccabaeus into Gilead, in which he penetrated as far as this city (called Kar-naim), and brought the Jews residing there and in the neighbourhood to Jerusalem (1 Macc. 6.). Kuenen, in his 'History of the Religion of Israel,' makes a distinction between the worship of Ashtaroth and of Asherah. The former he regards as the worship of the moon, and a pure worship; the latter of Venus, and an impure one. But though Asherah and Ashtaroth, or Ashtoreth, are undoubtedly distinct, yet both worships may have been impure, as the worship of Artemis of the Ephesians (the Diana Multimamma, or the image of fecundity) unquestionably was. "It is probable," says Mr. G. Smith, "that the first intention in the mythology was only to represent love as heaven born, but in time a more sensual view prevailed, and the worship of Ishtar became one of the darkest features in Babylonian mythology." The Babylonian Mylitta, or Venus, was worshipped under a crescent form, as Babylonian sculptures prove. A Syrian altar with the crescent on it is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. It has a female figure on one side, with the crescent, and a male figure - of Baal, no doubt - on the other. Another is mentioned in a late able article in the Times, as having been found in Carehemish, the Hittite capital. The Chaldaean astronomers had, no doubt, discovered the use of telescopes (though in the translucent sky of Chaldaea perhaps the crescent Venus might be seen without them), for we find Saturn represented on their monuments with a ring (see Proctor, 'Saturn and his System,' p. 197). Consequently the worship of the crescent Venus involves no anachronism. Asherah, often wrongly translated "grove" in our version (see Judges 6:25), is probably the goddess Fortune, derived from אֶֶשר, happiness. Ashtaroth is spelt not with Aleph, but with Ain.

Ellicott's Commentary