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” (1 Kings 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 (2 Kings 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; 1 Samuel 7:4; 1 Samuel 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.