Alphabetical Ba'al

Rosanne

Contemplating upon the ancient Sinatic script found in el-hol (Phoenician tagging on a wadi wall) I wondered how each sign got to be a consonant and why a particular order? A sign is a picture of an object, and the first letter of the word for this object becomes the sound the sign represents.
I made 22 wire shapes of the Phoenician Alphabet and placed them on the table to see if I could get a unified pictogram of something. Unfolding before my amazed eyes was a Cartouche of Ba'al the storm God. The Greeks called Ba'al 'Zeus Demarous Kai Adodos'. EL was his father(the Serpent) and El had dominion over creation, but Ba'al controlled the earthly realm and he petioned his father to build his temple/house/ark where his consort Ba'alat the Moon would live.
Looking at depictions of Ba'al you see all of the separate letters. Horned headdress(aleph), the House he sits on (Beth) ,The throwing stick Lightening(gimel), Pointed fish tail beard (Daleth), left hand raised in blessing (He), His torso (waw) the Weapon/thunderstick(Zayin), The fenced dias (heth) that the incense orb or wheel of seasons(teth) sits on; His right arm (yod) the receiving palm of right hand (kaph). The Ox goad in his belt (lamed), the water underneath his seat (mem). The snake depicting his father (nun), The fish scales on his back(samekh)The eye (ayin) on his head in profile (resh)The mouth that spews lightening (pe) The Papyrus wand (tsadhe). I am thinking that qoph means an eclipse, but is thought to mean Monkey. His Bow (shin). Now taw is not present on the cartouche but I think it is the mark of the Planets? The Exaltation maybe??
To finish off here is a prayer to Ba'al whose cult followers used when they became followers of Yahweh.

Yea, also Ba'al will make fertile with his rain
with water he will indeed make fertile harrowed land
He will put his voice in the clouds
He will flash his lightening to the earth. (Water/Earth/fire/air)
Interesting eh! Brickbats and bouquets are welcome ~Rosanne
 

Fulgour

Time after time I find that the 'Greeks' learned
from the Phoenicians... astrology, mathmatics,
and with that, easily so much more. Some fun!
 

Fulgour

Rosanne said:
Contemplating upon the ancient Sinatic script found in el-hol (Phoenician tagging on a wadi wall) I wondered how each sign got to be a consonant and why a particular order?
Also please, do you have a "link" or reference name?
Maybe I could websearch there and take a look too.
 

Rosanne

I have been searching without luck, the internet for a sample of the image/picture I have in My 'Mythology of the Middle East' by Rachel Storm. In the book's pictue it is called a cylinder seal or scarab of Baal/Melkart. It is from Sidon in the 14th century BC. The nearest/closest image I have been able to find is in :-
http://www.bibleorigins.net/YahwehsBovineFormsImages.html

By the 14th Cent.BC Ba'al had become Ruler of the Universe. He became Satan of the Bible due to the abhorence of his Cult practices of Prostitution and sacrifice of children. His names are numerous Ba'al/Hadad/adad/Ea /Enki
but I am concerned with Ba'al Hammon/Melkart The Storm God predesesor to Yahweh.
On my book's picture all the letters are on the seal except taw and I am not sure whether Daleth is the pointy beard or the triangular base to the incense burner. I am pretty certain samekh is the fishtailed stem of the incense burner and Nun is the smoke coming from the incense ball/wheel of seasons at the top. The letter zayin I have attributed to the bull tail coming from the back of the seat/throne because in some images that throne is a spinx shaped seat like a chariot base.
I have absolutely no idea whether I have anything 'historically true' in my thoughts on this image-but I am amazed that all the components of the Phoenician/proto Sinaitic Alphabet have come together in one image of a important Deity. The time line is accurate as well. As to why there is no Taw? Well maybe I am Taw :D
~Rosanne
 

Rosanne

...and why do I think it is important? Well these letters are the basis for some of our thoughts on the cards especially from the Hebrew and astrological connections. It also made me laugh to think maybe these letters that formed our written words in the Bible and the Qaballah and Harry Potter for example are based on a Deity's image who was later to become Satan!! ~Rosanne
 

venicebard

Baal to Rosanne, Baal to Rosanne

Have you noted that Ba’al worship is probably related to ogham order (BLFSN), not Hebrew (BGD etc.)? Which came first, Baal or ogham? I would ‘guess’ that the name Ba’al arose from the letter-calendar and perhaps personified it (but then I take letters as having been around, in various oral and written manifestations, since the old civilization ended in destruction). Perhaps the Semitic letter-order came from Ba’al’s method of shaving: Ba’al sitting on his house throws his boomerang which then recoils and shops off his pointed fish tail beard, whereupon he raises his hand in blessing so people don’t think he himself was hurt by it... (and so on). (Yes, I’m being facetious.)

I start with reaction to the wikipedia articles referenced. At this address— http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Bronze_Agewikipedia states: “No written language existed in the nordic countries during the Bronze Age.” Are they kidding? This statement is absurd: it ignores the epigraphic evidence completely. (Disappointing.) They had two written forms, evidently, tifinag (survives only amongst Berbers of N.Africa) and ogam consaine (consonants-only ogham). What is with the ‘educated classes’ that they have such huge blinders and areas of shadow, while on other issues they shed much light with such careful scholarship? It is a recurrent source of disappointment and bafflement to me.

And at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Bronze_Age_alphabets it says: “...the Semitic alphabet is not derived from the Egyptian alphabet, but rather from the full set of hieratic hieroglyphs.” This is stated as fact yet completely ignores all scholarship on the subject before Alan Gardiner roiled the waters and destroyed the clear image that was emerging on the reflective surface of the water. (From context, it is apparent they are not merely referring to the few two-sound signs, used in transcribing foreign words, incorporated into the alef-bet.) Again, disappointing.

However, to its credit the same article states: “Note that all proposals for Egyptian prototypes of the alphabet remain controversial. For example, a Proto-Sinaitic glyph that resembles the hieroglyph djet (snake) is identified with the letter נ Ν here, and has been ever since Gardiner, because the name of the corresponding Ethiopic letter is naħaš (snake). However, Peter Daniels states, it seems very likely that the modern Ethiopic letter names date no further back than the sixteenth century C.E., and so are irrelevant to the investigation of Proto-Sinaitic.” Bless their hearts, as this puts the Proto-Sinaitic theory of origin completely out of business once the much more complete (and soundly constructed, with broad agreement) theory of the 19th-century scholars is taken into account (which it evidently almost never is).

The “Colless reconstruction” (at (Colless reconstruction) ) does not have much to recommend it, obviously: most of the shapes bear no relation whatever to the Semitic letters. And in “the Albright identification of the Egyptian prototypes,” at (Albright identification), digg "fish" bears no relation to dalet, obviously, whereas haw / hll "jubilation" relates in shape to S.Semitic and has a meaning that actually could be stretched to fit the heh I know, though how it relates to Hebrew ‘the’ (letter heh) or the oft-assumed meaning ‘window’ (from the square-Hebrew shape) I know not. I don’t ‘get’ zen /ziqq "manacle" for two horizontal parallel lines, and neither yad "arm" nor kap "hand" bear any relation in shape to Phoenician that I can see, and naḥš "snake", piʾt "corner", and ṣad "plant" (for tzaddi) bear no relation in shape or meaning, apparently. I also don’t get reysh, shape-wise.

Rosanne, I make a heartfelt appeal to your objectivity: I know little is to be found online concerning 19th-century scholarship on the alphabet, but you really need to study this, as it is a much more plausible theory even with its gaps (and I have filled those). Both 19th-century and modern scholars, to be sure, bore (bear) the disadvantage of studying the artifact in a symbolic vacuum, whereas I have benefit of some notion of the evolution of the symbolism related to each sound, since I look at the overall development of writing (including New World inscriptions) as if there might actually be rampant interconnexion. In other words, I do not think all scholars dufuses, only too narrow in their vision (and perhaps lacking some in imagination, an important tool academics tend to shun).

[The problem of S.Semitic (S.Arabian) writing is an interesting but complicated one: I think many of the letters are shifts in sound, judging by the shapes, and it was a later development than Phoenician (circa 5th century B.C.E.). But there is an interesting shape for s that looks exactly like the later (Northumbrian) runic Ng, and indeed Ng’s counterpart in Phoenician is samekh. The interesting thing about this is that this character and the later rune are closer than Phoenician to the original hieroglyph (whose hieratic form led to samekh), Gardiner’s ‘wick of twisted flax’. The only ‘explanation’ I can come up with for this is the connexion Graves insists on between British bardic tradition and the Ethiopian Enoch (etc.)... but this is inadequate.]

Once again: even given a century of trying to get their act together (I presume), the proto-Sinaitic theorists still cannot make a convincing case! If they had true scholarly humility (a necessary quality in finding truth), they would at least begin again to consider the sound work done in the 19th century. After all, the 19th-century theory derives Semitic letters from already existing (and much used) forms, Egyptian hieratic (priestly writing), and these forms resemble their descendents both in shape and in sound, a claim that cannot even begin to be made for these more modern musings. (I blame Gardiner, fine scholar that he was, for starting this ridiculous trend.) Study, Rosanne, study, as I know you want to know.

(The following is my reaction to your “The Literary Life of Deity” site, though I skipped the Christian stuff.)

(It says, about a third of the way through, “...his divine name Yah was unspeakable,” which is surely false: this was the male part of the Name and thus could be ‘pronounced’, it being the full Name, YHWH, that was ineffable.)

I take the demiurge to be the desire, in man, that duality (distinction one from another) not be included in unity. This is the source of whatever ‘symmetry-breaking’ is at the root of things, according to the bardo-Qabbalistic paradigm.

You could say it was man’s own high self (knower-and-thinker) that withdrew most of the Light (read “kicked us out of gan eden”) when desire’s attention was drawn (by feeling) to the outer horizon exclusively. But as can easily be seen from this, this was not revenge but rather ‘retribution’ in the Buddhist sense: only possible result from disharmony of seeing only one horizon, the outer. For it is the inner horizon that is the source of the Light.

[This makes the inner horizon east, which in teepees is the direction the sun always shines from (its opening)... which makes the outer horizon west (limitation). In other words (and I’m only working this out as we speak), whatever is out (without or outer) will end up west (being temporal), and only inner inspiration—the mere spark (yod) that’s left of the Light (faith in the existence of an inner horizon?)—remains, as when something ‘dawns’ on one. For inner is out of reach of the (outer, temporal) change that causes outer to decay, to ‘end up west’.

Thanx. I needed that. (Them Ba’al war-shippers was some’m, huh.)]

By the way, though the northern Elhim (god as the sexes) ended up in Yahweh country and this mixing affected Judaism, it should be pointed out that the reason the Name ‘YHWH’ itself couldn’t be pronounced was that it took two, a man and a woman, to ‘pronounce’ it... for it is the creative power we lack as individuals but invoke in the form of procreative force when we mate for that purpose. The ‘W’ (vav) is the root of the female half of the Name, and if you look at the various Phoenician-era forms, you’ll realize that whether it derives as the expert-textperts say from proto-Sinaitic ‘nail’, or as I (and 19th-century scholars) say from hieratic for ‘horned viper’ (f), its shape is most definitely a breast pouring forth milk, however crudely this may be scratched into rock at times. Yod, the root of the male half, is two arms drawing a line in the dirt with a stick, in imitation of the plow (get it?)... this whether its source is academia’s ‘hand’, or my ‘two reeds’.

I leave you with an interesting quote from that website (roughly 2/5 in) which reinforces my ‘poetic-tradition’ model: “One point which can never be repeated too often in this context is that the visionary tradition soars in poetic allegory and dives to earth like the smoking firebrands of Shaar Yishuv (Isa 7:13) when appreciation for poetic allegory transforms into literalistic fundamentalism. While the prophetic tradition lives on the such poetic writings as Isaiah, the editors who have shamelessly concatenated the works of many centuries under the authorship of one prophetic ancient inject hypocr[is]y into the very tradition they espouse.”

PS. In the second article there, it says, “"For I hate divorce...” (God speaking): boy, does he! For example, I blame the ‘God’ of the Baptists for my mother’s death at 57 from cancer, she having forsaken him to marry an atheist (my dad). By the way (to correct the author’s misinterpretation), it does not necessarily indicate any “uniformly subordinate and disparaged character of women in ancient Israelite society” to merely lament the sad state of affairs that can ensue when women rule: just look at the inner city in America, ‘ruled’ by welfare workers and by single moms whose gangster sons can therefore do as they please (the family having been destroyed by welfare to moms being dependent on them not naming or marrying the father)... And how Abimelech’s attitude towards women is at all relevant escapes me, as he is the worst villain IN the Old Testament practically. As for a goddess being included in the Hebrew god, I can say with some authority that YHWH, in his most powerful form, is neither sex and is divided into a male part and female part only by man’s transgression, the degeneration of the original, sexless Adam Qadmon into the sexes and the conversion of creative power into the procreative: the El linked to Asherah is a mere aspect of God, according to Kabbalah. And association of Asherah with trees reinforces Graves’s idea of broader influence of tree-letters than just Britain and Ireland. (And I concur that Islam is little more than a mechanism for the enslavement of women, the ‘little more’ being an encouragement of sobriety, but I do not agree “that matrimony is the immortal condition,” the article’s concluding words.)

(My apologies in advance for all in this post that may offend, though I will probably not take any of it back.)
 

Rosanne

Aleph,Bravo,Charlie,Delta etc etc etc

Thank you VeniceBard for your reply. Firstly I take no offence (ever!) to any ones thoughts, regardless of my own personal belief. That is how I learn.
I do not Know,which came first, the chicken or the egg, regarding Ba'al and Ogham. Yes- for what knowledge I have of Ogham I can see where you are coming from- and I do try to be objective. It seems to me that you have not understood me or I have not made myself clear, to be understood.
I was amazed that when I looked at the 22 Phoenician letter images- I saw they were within a depiction of a God in a literal way. Just take two Letters Lamed and Aleph. Ba'al had Ox horns on his head and a oxgoad in his belt. Maybe you are right-Ba'al is a formation God from sounds/letters, I can totally accept that. Maybe those sounds are leftover language and meaning from an earlier destroyed civilisation- that too, I totally accept. After all the mouth can only make a certain range of sounds and most are covered by the Alphabet. Clicks of Africa maybe not-back of throat Eastern sounds-maybe not, but most that I make for speech are covered by the Alphabet. So when I meet a person from Samoa who does not speak English-we are both using the same sound formations to make words but in different orders. We both make the same sounds when we laugh and giggle!! hehe haha hoho and hold our bellies in Mirth. You cannot blow out your mouth-saying the sound El.
So it seems to me that sounds have always expressed ideas- and hence we have the Ogham also. Take a God I am familiar with-Tane pronounced Tar-nay. Ta means an action-strike,whip,smash,paint carve cut-all outward and upward movements. Ne means emphasis to that movement. So it means big strike!! Now I can see myself saying with exertion when I cast a line "Taaa !" Now this God means big strike- it means adams apple as well. Would it surprise you to learn that Tane fished the North Island out of the sea from his boat the South Island-that is a big strike!! So the action creates the sound creates the idea of Tane -and then the name.
So I do not know if the Phoenician war shippers (very clever VeniceBard) had the sounds first and created a God that expressed those ideas- or it was the other way around. What I am fascinated about was I have not been able to find anything in History books(or the web) that tells me that all 22 letters are on one article(a seal/scarab). They did -in my view, and I am amazed.
Was it left over knowledge?-maybe, was it an amalgamation? -also, maybe.
You have spent a long time learning and questioning to come to your beliefs.
I have spent less than a year, since I first read Fulgours Poem and started my tentative journey. I am a curious person and I plod from idea to idea-this is where my plodding has landed me thus far. A lot of your dissertations I cannot grasp-maybe one day I will. it is true I have been unable to find19th/20th centuary discussion on Language to read, and whatismore, what I do find- is in 'academia speak' which confuses me.
So lets take 'samekh' the S the so called fish(when it looks like a snake) Well how about a sea snake? Eels are called fish down here. The Maori word is Tuna believe it or not representing the sound of sharp wiggle from side to side in water(try it with your hand in the Bath) :D . Anyway a snake goes SSSSS and so does a brazier(shaped like a TV aerial) when an incense ball hits it after heating or the sssizzle when a fish hits the frypan or the sucking sound an 8 day old male baby makes when circumcision happens- bet you never heard a baby say Taaa very much for that, that was a good strike!!
To finish I will say that it is unlikely that the castastrophy that overtook the world probally did not just leave the 'intelligensia' to pass on great knowledge in obscure signs, symbols and sounds. It was Joe Average left behind to throw his Gimel and knock his enemy on his Resh to prevent him looting his beth and stealing his qoph. Qoph probally meant beer(sounds again!!) as that is such a male thing to protect. ~Rosanne
 

Fulgour

Phrom Phoenicia

There are twelve lunar months which begin at a new moon.
Their names are Nisan, Iyar, Sivan, Tammuz, Av, Ellul, Tishri,
Cheshvan, Kislev, Tevet, Shevat and Adar. (from: SWESRS)

*

Copyright © 1996-2005 Creative Marketeam Canada Ltd.,
writes:

The Gezer Calendar is kept in the Syria/Palestine Collection,
Archaeological Museum Istanbul, Turkey. Here is what the
calendar shows us about how those ancient farmers used
their time. I have added the modern northern hemisphere
months:

Two months of harvest: October & November
Two months of planting: December & January
Two months of late planting: February & March
One month of hoeing up flax: April

One month of barley harvest: May
One month of harvest and festivity: June
Two months of vine dressing: July & August
One month of gathering summer fruit: September