The scholarship of the elder generation would no doubt have enumerated first among these gods the familiar names of Baal and Molech. At present, such an enumeration is scarcely possible. We can no longer see in the Baal of the existing Hebrew scriptures a single great god. We must regard the word rather as a common substantive,--“the lord” or “the master,”--descriptive of the relation of each distinct god to the place he inhabited. The Baalim, in other words, seem to have been the local deities or deified chiefs of the Semitic region; doubtless the dead kings or founders of families, as opposed to the lesser gods of each particular household. It is not improbable, therefore, that they were really identified with the sacred stones we have just been considering, and with the wooden _ashera_. The Baal is usually spoken of indefinitely, without a proper name, much as at Delos men spoke of “the God,” at Athens of “the Goddess,” and now at Padua of “il Santo,”--meaning respectively Apollo, Athene, St. Antony. Melcarth is thus the Baal of Tyre, Astarte the Baalath of Byblos; there was a Baal of Lebanon, of Mount {189}Hermon, of Mount Peor, and so forth. A few specific Baalim have their names preserved for us in the nomenclature of towns; such are Baal-tamar, the lord of the palm-tree; with Baal-gad, Baal-Berith, Baal-meon, and Baal-zephon. But in the Hebrew scriptures, as a rule, every effort has been made to blot out the very memory of these “false gods,” and to represent Jahweh alone as from the earliest period the one true prince and ruler in Israel. As for Molech, that title merely means “the king”; and it may have been applied to more than one distinct deity. Dr. Robertson Smith does not hesitate to hold that the particular Molech to whom human sacrifices of children were offered by the Jews before the captivity was Jahweh himself; it was to the national god, he believes, that these fiery rites were performed at the Tophet or pyre in the ravine just below the temple. We are thus reduced to the most nebulous details about these great gods of the Hebrews, other than Jahweh, in the period preceding the Babylonian captivity. All that is certain appears to be that a considerable number of local gods were worshipped here and there at special sanctuaries, each of which seems to have consisted of an altar or stone image, standing under a sacred tree or sacred grove, and combined with an _ashera_. While the names of Chemosh, the god of Moab, and of Dagon, the god of the Philistines, have come down to us with perfect frankness and clearness, no local Hebrew god save Jahweh has left a name that can now be discerned with any approach to certainty. It should be added that the worship of many of the gods of surrounding Semitic tribes undoubtedly extended from the earliest times into Israel also.