The Editor: Origin of the Date Pa 



LM 



507 



THE GODDESS ISHTAR AND PALM 



"There is hardly a more beautiful and elaborate Assyrian cylinder than one in 

 the British Museum which represents the armed Ishtar," says W. H. 

 Ward (The Seal Cylinders of Western Asia, p. 248). vShe is here shown as 

 the goddess of war, standing beside the palm. Originally, in the opinion 

 of many orientalists, Ishtar (Astarte) was the goddess of fertility, and 

 identified with the date palm, which at a very early time seems to have 

 received almost divine honors from the Semites — a condition of which 

 traces can be seen throughout the later Arab and Hebrew history. This 

 and the preceding design are from Jastrow, Bildermappe zur Religion 

 Babyloniens und Assyriens. (Fig. 10.) 



but in view of the sacredness of the date 

 palm in all times, it is by no means clear 

 that we should abandon the idea that 

 this myth represents a late out-cropping 

 of the palm-cult, rather than a borrowing 

 from Indian literature. 



All this is wandering far from the 

 culture of the palm, yet the sacred 

 character with which the early Semites 

 invested it is too striking to be ignored. 

 It is found in many sources. Tabari, 

 an early Arabian chronicler, for instance, 

 refers to a sacred date palm at Najran, 

 in southern Arabia, which v/as treated 

 in all respects as a god; the residence of 

 Al Uzza, one of the principal deities of 

 pre-Muhammadan Arabia, was in a 

 grove of palms at Nakhlah, a name 

 which itself means palm tree; while an 

 interesting light is thrown on the 

 Biblical story of the Garden of Eden, 

 and the accounts preserved for us of 

 the tree of life at Eridu, by a passage in 

 the oldest portion of the bock of Enoch, 

 in the version of the Ethiopians — a 

 people of vSemitic relationship. This 

 passage, which probably dates from the 

 second or third century before Christ, 



describes a visit of Enoch to Paradise, 

 and relates that he found there the 

 Tree of Life — and it was a date palm. 



BAAL, the palm GOD. 



In the heathen gods of whom we have 

 some Bibilical account, it is frequently 

 easy to see traces of the date palm cult. 

 Few of them are better known to us than 

 Baal; and the word baal even today, in 

 classical Arabic, means an unirrigated 

 palm tree. The connecting links between 

 this fact and the time when Baal was 

 looked upon as the god of unirrigated 

 land, in contrast to Ishtar or Astarte, 

 who was the primitive Semitic goddess 

 of the palm, of fertility and fecundity, 

 are traced with skill by Barton. No 

 wonder, with such unbroken traditions, 

 that the palm has always been looked 

 upon with veneration by fhe Arabs, the 

 purest of modern Semites; so that 

 Muhammad declared it to have been 

 created from the soil left over after the 

 creation of Adam; and no wonder that 

 the Arabicized Berber in remote Mo- 

 rocco even today mutters an Arabic 

 prayer as he performs the important 



