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Updated: June 6, 2025
Not only was he entitled "the deviser of law, the deviser of prosperity," but it was told of him how his father had died while he was still unborn, how his mother had fled to the mountains, and there left him, like a second Moses, to the care of the river in an ark of reeds and bitumen; and how he was saved by Accir, "the water-drawer," who brought him up as his own son, until the time came when, under the protection of Istar, his rank was discovered, and he took his seat on the throne of his forefathers.
In this character she attracted in Babylonia a worship noted for impurity, which under the name of Ashtoreth is found also in Phenicia and in Syria. There is also, however, a warlike Istar, a strict goddess served by Amazons, and capable of identification with the Greek Artemis, as the Istar of love is identified with Aphrodite.
The individual Ashtoreth of Gebal was separate from the individual Ashtoreth of Bashan, although they alike represented the same divine personality. It is true that even in the West Istar did not always become the feminine complement of Baal. Here and there the old form of the name was preserved, without any feminine suffix.
But when this was the case, the necessary result was that the female character of the deity was forgotten. Istar was conceived of as a god, and accordingly on the Moabite Stone Ashtar is identified with Chemosh, the patron-god of Mesha, just as in Southern Arabia also Atthar is a male divinity. The worship of Ashtoreth absorbed that of the other goddesses of Canaan.
So entirely, in fact, had the conception of a goddess vanished from the mind of the Moabite, that, as we learn from the Moabite Stone, the Babylonian Istar, the Ashtoreth of Canaan, had been transformed into a male deity, and identified with Chemosh. It was to Ashtar-Chemosh, Mesha tells us, and not to Ashtoreth, that he devoted the captive women of Israel.
They halted for half an hour in the upper park while she called the squirrels to her and fed them from her own hands those wonderful hands that had so often lured with jewels and threatened with steel. No one seeing this refined, sweet woman in tasteful furs would have related her with the Gismonda and Istar, but Douglass thrilled with sudden accession of confidence.
In each wall there is a single door, which is fastened by a bolt as soon as a new comer has entered. Each door is kept by an incorruptible guardian. We cannot quote the whole of the story; we give, however, a few lines in which the chief features of the Assyrian conception is most clearly shown. Istar speaks:
He, as he declares in various inscriptions, 'paved the causeway with limestone flags for the procession of the Great Lord Marduk. He made the Istar Gate 'with glazed brick and placed on its threshold colossal bronze bulls and ferocious serpent dragons'. Along the street thus built the statue of Marduk was borne in solemn march on the Babylonian New Year's Day, when the king paid yearly worship to the god of his country.
I imagine, though I do not presume to be sure, that any endeavour to save the intellectual and moral credit of Chaldaean religion, by suggesting the application to it of that universal solvent of absurdities, the allegorical method, would be scouted; I will not even suggest that any ingenuity can be equal to the discovery of the antitypes of the personifications effected by the religious imagination of later ages, in the triad Anu, Ea, and Bel, still less in Istar.
There she was known as Istar, the evening star. She had been one of those Sumerian goddesses who, in accordance with the Sumerian system, which placed the mother at the head of the family, were on an equal footing with the gods.
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