Judges 2:13

And they forsook the LORD, and served Baal and Ashtaroth.

EXPOSITORY (ENGLISH BIBLE)

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers

(13) Baal and Ashtaroth.—Literally, “the Baals and the Ashtareths.”

Ashtaroth.—The plural of the feminine word Ash-tareth, or Astarte, “the goddess of the Sidonians” (1Kings 11:5), the Phœnician Venus—identified sometimes with the moon (e.g., in the name Ashtaroth Karnaim, “the city of the two-horned moon,” the name of Og’s capital, Deuteronomy 1:4), and sometimes with the planet Venus (2Kings 23:4; Cic. De Nat. Deor. 3:23; Euseb. Praep. Evang. i. 10). She is called the “queen of heaven,” in Jeremiah 7:10; Jeremiah 44:17, and was called Baalti (“my lady”) by the Phœnicians. The plural form may be, as Ewald thinks, the plural of excellence, or like Baalim an allusion to the different forms and attributes under which the goddess was worshipped. The worship of Baalim and Ashtaroth naturally went hand in hand. (See Judges 10:6; 1Samuel 7:4; 1Samuel 12:10.) Ashtaroth is not to be confused with the Asheroth (rendered “groves” in the E. V.) mentioned in Judges 3:7. The words resemble each other less in Hebrew, as Ashtaroth begins with ע, not with א. Mil. ton’s allusions to these deities are not only exquisitely beautiful but also very correct, as he derived his information from Selden’s learned Syntagma de Dis Syrüs:

“With these in troop

Came Ashtoreth, whom the Phoenicians call’d

Astarte, queen of heaven, with crescent horns,

To whose bright image nightly by the moon

Sidonian virgins paid their vows and songs;

In Zion also not unsung, where stood

Her temple.”

Par. Lost, i. 439.

The derivation of the word is very uncertain. It probably has no connection with the Greek Aster, or the Persian Esther.

Benson Commentary

Jdg 2:13. They served Baal and Ashtaroth — By Baal or lord here, it is probable, we are to understand the sun, and by Ashtaroth, the same, it seems, with Astarte, the moon, worshipped in different countries under the names Juno and Venus. So that they had he-gods and she-gods, and gods of all kinds, as many as a luxuriant fancy pleased to make and multiply them. It may not be improper to observe here, that “the reason why the Israelites so often lapsed into idolatry, may easily be deduced from the common notion of tutelary deities, which they had imbibed during their residence in Egypt, which was the fruitful parent of science and idolatry. One generally-received consequence of this opinion was, that the peculiar or tutelary deity of any country could not be neglected, even by the conquerors of that country, without impiety, and that their impiety would certainly meet with punishment from the deity whom they thus neglected. The Israelites, therefore, unwilling to expose themselves to the resentment which the tutelary deity was supposed to take on those who, inhabiting his land, yet slighted his worship; unwilling likewise to leave their paternal God, they incorporated the worship of both; and served not only the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but likewise the Baalim, or local tutelary deities of the countries wherein they were settled. In process of time this weakness increased to such a degree, that the rights of the tutelary deity of the country were acknowledged to be superior to those of the Gentilitial God of the conquerors. This might arise from the common opinion, that the favours of the local deity were particularly attached and confined to one certain spot; or from an apprehension of the strength of the inhabitants among whom they were settled, who would not have endured to have their god slighted, without vindicating his honour, and endeavouring to extirpate the offenders. This piece of complaisance and condescension the Israelites seem to have been guilty of, when they are said to have forsaken the Lord God of their fathers, and to have followed other gods, the gods of the people that were round about them. Their defection from the God of Israel did not, however, consist in rejecting him as a false god, or in renouncing the law of Moses as a false religion: but only in joining foreign worship and idolatrous ceremonies to the ritual of the true God.” Div. Leg., vol. 4. p. 44.

Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary

2:6-23 We have a general idea of the course of things in Israel, during the time of the Judges. The nation made themselves as mean and miserable by forsaking God, as they would have been great and happy if they had continued faithful to him. Their punishment answered to the evil they had done. They served the gods of the nations round about them, even the meanest, and God made them serve the princes of the nations round about them, even the meanest. Those who have found God true to his promises, may be sure that he will be as true to his threatenings. He might in justice have abandoned them, but he could not for pity do it. The Lord was with the judges when he raised them up, and so they became saviours. In the days of the greatest distress of the church, there shall be some whom God will find or make fit to help it. The Israelites were not thoroughly reformed; so mad were they upon their idols, and so obstinately bent to backslide. Thus those who have forsaken the good ways of God, which they have once known and professed, commonly grow most daring and desperate in sin, and have their hearts hardened. Their punishment was, that the Canaanites were spared, and so they were beaten with their own rod. Men cherish and indulge their corrupt appetites and passions; therefore God justly leaves them to themselves, under the power of their sins, which will be their ruin. God has told us how deceitful and desperately wicked our hearts are, but we are not willing to believe it, until by making bold with temptation we find it true by sad experience. We need to examine how matters stand with ourselves, and to pray without ceasing, that we may be rooted and grounded in love, and that Christ may dwell in our hearts by faith. Let us declare war against every sin, and follow after holiness all our days.

Barnes' Notes on the Bible

Provoked the Lord to anger - A frequent expression in connection with idolatry, especially in Deuteronomy, in the Books of the Kings, and in Jeremiah.

Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary

13. Ashtaroth—Also a plural word, denoting all the female divinities, whose rites were celebrated by the most gross and revolting impurities.

Matthew Poole's Commentary

i.e. The sun and the moon, whom many heathens worshipped, though under divers names; and so they ran into that error which God had so expressly warned them against, Deu 4:19.

Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible

And they forsook the Lord,.... The worship of the Lord, as the Targum; this is repeated to observe the heinous sin they were guilty of, and how displeasing it was to God:

and served Baal and Ashtaroth; two images, as the Arabic version adds; Baal, from whence Baalim, may signify the he deities of the Gentiles, as Jupiter, Hercules, &c. and Ashtaroth their female deities, as Juno, Venus, Diana, &c. the word is plural, and used for flocks of sheep, so called because they make the owners of them rich; and Kimchi and Ben Melech say these were images in the form of female sheep. Perhaps, as Baal may signify the sun, so Ashtaroth the moon, and the stars like flocks of sheep about her. Ashtaroth was the goddess of the Zidonians, 1 Kings 11:5; the same with Astarte, the wife of Cronus or Ham, said to be the Phoenician or Syrian Venus. So Lucian says (r) there was a temple in Phoenicia, belonging to the Sidonians, which they say is the temple of Astarte; and, says he, I think that Astarte is the moon; and Astarte is both by the Phoenicians (s) and Grecians (t) said to be Venus, and was worshipped by the Syrians also, as Minutius Felix (u) and Tertullian (w) affirm; the same with Eostre, or Aestar, the Saxon goddess; hence to this day we call the passover Easter (x), being in Eoster-month; and with Andraste, a goddess of the ancient Britains (y). There were four of them, and therefore the Septuagint here uses the plural number Astartes; so called either from Asher, being reckoned "blessed" ones, or from Asheroth, the groves they were worshipped in; or from "Ash", and "Tor", the constellation Taurus or the bull; so Astarte by Sanchoniatho is said to put upon her head the head of a bull, as the token of her sovereignty; See Gill on Genesis 14:5.

(r) De Dea Syria. (s) Sanchoniatho apud Euseb. Evangel. Praepar. l. 1. p. 38. (t) Suidas in voce (u) In Octavio, p. 6. (w) Apolog. c. 24. (x) Vid. Owen. Theologoumen, l. 3. c. 4. p. 192. (y) lb. c. 11. p. 244.

Geneva Study Bible

And they forsook the LORD, and served Baal and {f} Ashtaroth.

(f) These were idols, which had the form of a ewe or sheep among the Sidonians.

EXEGETICAL (ORIGINAL LANGUAGES)

Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

13. This verse repeats the substance of Jdg 2:12; it continues Jdg 2:10 and leads on to Jdg 2:20. The repetition is explained if the verse belongs to E; for the expression forsook the Lord in E cf. Joshua 24:20, Deuteronomy 31:16.

served Baal and the Ashtaroth] Once settled in Canaan, the Israelites could not resist the temptation to adopt the worship of the native deities, on whom the prosperity of flocks and fields was supposed to depend. The God of Israel came from the desert; in the early days of the settlement His home was believed to be in Sinai rather than in Canaan (Jdg 5:4 f.); hence the popular religion, without ceasing to regard Jehovah as the God of Israel, felt it necessary to pay homage at the same time to the gods of the country. No doubt also the popular mind tended to identify Jehovah with the local Baals and Astartes, whose sanctuaries were scattered over the land. Such confusions gravely imperilled the distinctive character of Israel’s religion; they produced a degradation of faith and morals which led the prophets, and writers of the schools of E and D, stirred by the painful evidence of a later age, to charge Israel with having fallen into Baal-worship from the very day they entered into Canaan; the popular religion could only be described as a ‘forsaking’ of Jehovah.

Baal] means lit. owner, possessor, e.g. of a house Jdg 19:22, of a town (‘citizens’) Jdg 9:2, of a wife (‘husband’) Exodus 21:3 etc.; applied to divine beings it is a title conveying the idea of ownership, or, less probably, of domination. There was no one god called Baal; each considerable town or district had its deity, the lord of that particular place. Hence the O.T. speaks of Baal (sing.) in a collective sense, as here and Hosea 13:1, Jeremiah 11:13 etc., or of Baâlim (plur.) Jdg 2:11, Jdg 3:7, Jdg 8:33 etc., meaning the aggregate of local or special Baals. The local Baal is often designated by the name of his town or sanctuary, e.g. B. of Hermon Jdg 3:3, B. of Tamar Jdg 20:33, B. of Meon Numbers 32:38 and Moab. Stone ll. 9, 30; or of some special aspect under which he was worshipped, e.g. B. of the covenant Jdg 8:33, Jdg 9:4, B. of flies 2 Kings 1:2 ff.; at Baal-Gad under Mt Hermon he was worshipped as Gad, the god of fortune. These usages are abundantly illustrated by the Phoenician and Aramaic inscriptions; e.g. we hear of the B. of Zidon, of Tyre, of Lebanon, of Tarsus; occasionally the actual name of the Baal is known—the B. of Tyre was Melḳarth, the Baalath (fem.) of Gebal was ‘Ashtart, the B. of Ḥarran was Sin; we meet with Baal under various aspects, e.g. ‘glowing’ (?ḥammân), ‘healing’ (marpç), ‘dancing’ (marḳôd), ‘of the heavens’ (shâmçm). Baal was a title of the deity who owned the land, the god of the cultivated field and its produce (see Hosea 2:5), of fertilizing warmth, perhaps, but not a sun-god. As denoting owner, lord, the title could be applied in a harmless sense to Jehovah Himself; this is seen in the proper names Jerubbaal Jdg 6:32 (note) Baal-yah 1 Chronicles 12:5, one of David’s mighty men, and, in the families of Saul and David, Esh-baal, Merib-baal, Beel-yada, 1 Chronicles 8:33-34; 1 Chronicles 14:7, altered to Ish-bosheth, Mephi-bosheth, El-yada in 2 Samuel 2:8; 2 Samuel 4:4; 2 Samuel 5:16. But the associations of the name were felt to be dangerous, as appears from the substitution of bôsheth ‘shame’ in the latter names; and the time arrived when Baal could no longer be used safely of the God of Israel, Hosea 2:16 ff.

Ashtaroth] plur. of ‘Ashtôreth, i.e. ‘Ashtart (LXX Ἀστάρτη) pronounced with the vowels of bôsheth—the goddess worshipped throughout the Semitic world, not only by the Phoenicians (1 Kings 11:5; 1 Kings 11:33), but all over Palestine and on the E. of the Jordan, by the Philistines (1 Samuel 31:10), by the Moabites (Moab. St. l. 17 Ashtar), in Bashan (Deuteronomy 1:4) etc. In Babylonia and Assyria she was called Ishtar, in Syria ‘Attar, in S. Arabia ‘Athtar (a male deity); by the Greeks she was identified with Aphrodite. The meaning of the name is obscure; with regard to the form it will be noticed that the fem. ending in t is distinctively Canaanite. ‘Ashtart was the goddess of fertility and generation. In the O.T. Baal and ‘Ashtôreth together stand for the false gods and goddesses native to Palestine; and as Hebrew has no word for goddess, ‘Ashtôreth is practically used instead. Here the combination of Baal (sing.) with ‘Ashtârôth (plur., i.e. the many local forms of the goddess) is unusual, and we should probably read (‘Ashtôreth, the sing., in a collective sense.

Pulpit Commentary

Verse 13. - Baal and Ashtaroth. Ashtaroth is the plural of Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Zidonians (1 Kings 11:5, 33), just as Baalim (ver. 11) is the plural of Baal. The many images of Baal and Ashtoreth are, in the opinion of some, indicated by the plural; but others think that different modifications or impersonations of the god and goddess are indicated. Thus we read of Baal-berith, the god who presides over covenants; Baal-zebul, or Zebub, the god who presides over flies, who could either send or remove a plague of flies, and so on. "Baal (lord or master) was the supreme male divinity of the Phoenician and Canaanitish nations, as Ashtoreth (perhaps the star, the planet Venus) was their supreme female divinity. Baal and Ashtoreth are frequently coupled together. Many Phoenician names - Hannibal, Asdrubal, Adherbal, Belus, etc. - are derived from Baal."

CHAPTER 2:14-23 Judges 2:13

Keil and Delitzsch Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament

Thus they forsook Jehovah, and served Baal and the Asthartes. In this case the singular Baal is connected with the plural Ashtaroth, because the male deities of all the Canaanitish nations, and those that bordered upon Canaan, were in their nature one and the same deity, viz., Baal, a sun-god, and as such the vehicle and source of physical life, and of the generative and reproductive power of nature, which was regarded as an effluence from its own being (see Movers, Relig. der Phnizier, pp. 184ff., and J. G. Mller in Herzog's Cyclopaedia). "Ashtaroth, from the singular Ashtoreth, which only occurs again in 1 Kings 11:5, 1 Kings 11:33, and 2 Kings 23:13, in connection with the Sidonian Astharte, was the general name used to denote the leading female deity of the Canaanitish tribes, a moon-goddess, who was worshipped as the feminine principle of nature embodied in the pure moon-light, and its influence upon terrestrial life. It corresponded to the Greek Aphrodite, whose celebrated temple at Askalon is described in Herod. i. 105. In Judges 3:7, Asheroth is used as equivalent to Ashtaroth, which is used here, Judges 10:6; 1 Samuel 7:4; 1 Samuel 12:10. The name Asheroth

(Note: Rendered groves in the English version. - Tr.)

was transferred to the deity itself from the idols of this goddess, which generally consisted of wooden columns, and are called Asherim in Exodus 34:13; Deuteronomy 7:5; Deuteronomy 12:3; Deuteronomy 16:21. On the other hand, the word Ashtoreth is without any traceable etymology in the Semitic dialects, and was probably derived from Upper Asia, being connected with a Persian word signifying a star, and synonymous with Ἀστροάρχη, the star-queen of Sabaeism (see Ges. Thes. pp. 1083-4; Movers, p. 606; and Mller, ut sup.).

With regard to the nature of the Baal and Astharte worship, into which the Israelites fell not long after the death of Joshua, and in which they continued henceforth to sink deeper and deeper, it is evident form the more precise allusions contained in the history of Gideon, that it did not consist of direct opposition to the worship of Jehovah, or involve any formal rejection of Jehovah, but that it was simply an admixture of the worship of Jehovah with the heathen or Canaanitish nature-worship. Not only was the ephod which Gideon caused to be made in his native town of Ophrah, and after which all Israel went a whoring (Judges 8:27), an imitation of the high priest's ephod in the worship of Jehovah; but the worship of Baal-berith at Shechem, after which the Israelites went a whoring again when Gideon was dead (Judges 8:33), was simply a corruption of the worship of Jehovah, in which Baal was put in the place of Jehovah and worshipped in a similar way, as we may clearly see from Judges 9:27. The worship of Jehovah could even be outwardly continued in connection with this idolatrous worship. Just as in the case of these nations in the midst of which the Israelites lived, the mutual recognition of their different deities and religions was manifested in the fact that they all called their supreme deity by the same name, Baal, and simply adopted some other epithet by which to define the distinctive peculiarities of each; so the Israelites also imagined that they could worship the Baals of the powerful nations round about them along with Jehovah their covenant God, especially if they worshipped them in the same manner as their covenant God. This will serve to explain the rapid and constantly repeated falling away of the Israelites from Jehovah into Baal-worship, at the very time when the worship of Jehovah was stedfastly continued at the tabernacle in accordance with the commands of the law. The Israelites simply followed the lead and example of their heathen neighbours. Just as the heathen were tolerant with regard to the recognition of the deities of other nations, and did not refuse to extend this recognition even to Jehovah the God of Israel, so the Israelites were also tolerant towards the Baals of the neighbouring nations, whose sensuous nature-worship was more grateful to the corrupt heart of man than the spiritual Jehovah-religion, with its solemn demands for sanctification of life. But this syncretism, which was not only reconcilable with polytheism, but actually rooted in its very nature, was altogether irreconcilable with the nature of true religion. For if Jehovah is the only true God, and there are no other gods besides or beside Him, then the purity and holiness of His nature is not only disturbed, but altogether distorted, by any admixture of His worship with the worship of idols or of the objects of nature, the true God being turned into an idol, and Jehovah degraded into Baal. Looking closely into the matter, therefore, the mixture of the Canaanitish worship of Baal with the worship of Jehovah was actually forsaking Jehovah and serving other gods, as the prophetic author of this book pronounces it. It was just the same with the worship of Baal in the kingdom of the ten tribes, which was condemned by the prophets Hosea and Amos (see Hengstenberg, Christology, i. pp. 168ff., Eng. trans.).