Shalim (Šalām, Shalem, ) is a god in
Canaanite religion, mentioned in inscriptions found in
Ugarit (now Ras Shamra,
Syria
Syria, officially the Syrian Arab Republic, is a country in West Asia located in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Levant. It borders the Mediterranean Sea to the west, Turkey to Syria–Turkey border, the north, Iraq to Iraq–Syria border, t ...
).
[Golan, 2003, p. 82. "The name of the Canaanite deity of the setting sun Salim, or Salem, ..The names Sahar and Salim">Shahar_(god).html" ;"title="f Shahar (god)">Sahar and Salimare rendered in modern scholarly texts as Shakhar and Shalim [...]"] William F. Albright identified Shalim as the god of the dusk and Shahar as the god of the dawn.[; cf. the Akkadian word for sunset, ''šalām šamši''.] In the '' Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible'', Venus
Venus is the second planet from the Sun. It is often called Earth's "twin" or "sister" planet for having almost the same size and mass, and the closest orbit to Earth's. While both are rocky planets, Venus has an atmosphere much thicker ...
is represented by Shalim as the Evening Star and Shahar as the Morning Star.[ His name derives from the triconsonantal ]Semitic root
The roots of verbs and most nouns in the Semitic languages are characterized as a sequence of consonants or " radicals" (hence the term consonantal root). Such abstract consonantal roots are used in the formation of actual words by adding the vowel ...
Š-L-M ("whole, safe, sound, peace").
Ugaritic inscriptions
An Ugaritic
Ugaritic () is an extinct Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language known through the Ugaritic texts discovered by French archaeology, archaeologists in 1928 at Ugarit, including several major literary texts, notably the Baal cycl ...
myth known as ''The Gracious and Most Beautiful Gods'' describes Shalim and his brother Shahar as offspring of El through two women he meets at the seashore. They are both nursed by "The Lady", likely Asherah, and have appetites as large as "(one) lip to the earth and (one) lip to the heaven." In other Ugaritic texts, the two are associated with the sun goddess.[van der Toorn et al., 1999]
pp. 755-6
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Another inscription is a sentence repeated three times in a para-mythological text, "Let me invoke the gracious gods, the voracious gods of ''ym''." ''Ym'' in most Semitic languages
The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. They include Arabic,
Amharic, Tigrinya language, Tigrinya, Aramaic, Hebrew language, Hebrew, Maltese language, Maltese, Modern South Arabian language ...
means "day," and Shalim and Shahar, twin deities of the dusk and dawn, were conceived of as its beginning and end.[van der Toorn et al., 1999, p. 222.]
Shalim is also mentioned separately in the Ugaritic god lists and forms of his name also appear in personal names, perhaps as a divine
Divinity (from Latin ) refers to the quality, presence, or nature of that which is divine—a term that, before the rise of monotheism, evoked a broad and dynamic field of sacred power. In the ancient world, divinity was not limited to a singl ...
name or epithet
An epithet (, ), also a byname, is a descriptive term (word or phrase) commonly accompanying or occurring in place of the name of a real or fictitious person, place, or thing. It is usually literally descriptive, as in Alfred the Great, Suleima ...
.[
Many scholars believe that the name of Shalim is preserved in the name of the city ]Jerusalem
Jerusalem is a city in the Southern Levant, on a plateau in the Judaean Mountains between the Mediterranean Sea, Mediterranean and the Dead Sea. It is one of the List of oldest continuously inhabited cities, oldest cities in the world, and ...
.[John Day, ''Yahweh and the gods and goddesses of Canaan'', Sheffield Academic Press 2002, p180] The god Shalim may have been associated with dusk and the evening star in the etymological senses of a "completion" of the day, "sunset" and "peace".
See also
* Shahar (god)
References
Bibliography
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Children of El (deity)
Night gods
Phoenician mythology
Stellar gods
Ugaritic deities
Venusian deities
West Semitic gods