The Phœnician origin of Britons, Scots & Anglo-Saxons : discovered by Phœnician & Sumerian inscriptions in Britain, by preroman Briton coins & a mass of new history : with over one hundred illustrations and maps
276 PHGNICIAN ORIGIN OF BRITONS & SCOTS
The Solomon temple had for its porch the characteristic Phoenician pillars of the Bel Sun-temple, it was consecrated by “ Fire from Heaven,’”’? it contained images of the Sun,? and of Sun-horses,* and it and its court continued to be used, more or less, for Sun and Bel worship down to the period of its destruction about 580 B.c.
(Solomon worshipped “ Baal’’4as well as Iahvh—and “ Baal ”’ is used in the Old Testament occasionally as a title of Iahvh or Jehovah.* He set in the porch the two colossal pillars of the Phceenician Bel temples under their Phoenician names, and supposed to represent the Phoenician deity. About this time “the Children of Israel served Baal;”? and fifty years later a successor, Ahab, “served Baal and worshipped him,’’* so that there were only “ seven thousand in Israel, all the knees of which have not bowed unto Baal.”® Twenty years later Ahaz, with his high-priest Urijah, placed an altar of Baal of Phoenician pattern in the temple and erected “ Baal altars in every corner of Jerusalem.”?° Two centuries later, Manasseh placed Baal altars and vessels for Baal worship inside the temple ;! and Bel and Sun-worship still were practised in the temple and its courts about the time of its destruction by Nebuchadnezzar, about 580 B.c., as recorded by Ezekiel.]
The Sun-worship in the temple, as described by Ezekiel, is especially significant. “He refers to a non-Judaist image at “‘ the door of the gate of the inner court where was the seat of the image which provoketh to jealousy,’!? and he calls it by the name used by the later Phcenicians for their image of Melqart and Resef (Tasia).1* He further says: “Tn the inner court of the Lord’s house, at the door of the temple of the Lord, between the porch and the altar, were about five and twenty men with their backs to the temple of the Lord and their faces towards the East, and they worshipped
1 2 Chron. vii, I. +2 Chron. xiv, 5; xxxiv, 4 and 7, Revised Version.
32 Kings xxiii, 11. 47 Kings xi, 5. ° Hosea,ii, 16; Jer. xxxi, Xxxii.
® 1 ings vii, 21. These two pillars are described by Herodotus, ii, 44. They bore the Phoenician names of ‘“ Buz-Iakin” (Boaz-Jachia). Cp. Encycl, Biblica, 4933.
7 Judges ii, 11-13. § 1 [Xings, xvi, 31. § Jb. xix, 18.
102 Chron. xxviii, 24; 2 Kings xvi.
112 Chron. xxxili, 3; 2 Kings xxi, 3; xxiii, 4.
12 Ezek. vill, 3, etc:
C.LS.T., 88, 2, 3, 7; and 91, 1. This “ Salmu,” properly Sumerian “ Salam,” is especially applied to Sun-god. M.D., 879.