Horon

Summary

Horon is a Canaanite god whose house is in the depths of the earth, called upon against snakes, venom and harmful spirits, and called upon in curses as well. The Ugarit tablets write his name ḥrn; he appears in two spells against snakebite and in two curses, and not in the personal names of Ugarit's people. His name travelled far beyond Ugarit: to Egypt, where he was called Hauron, shown as a falcon gripping snakes, and identified with the Great Sphinx at Giza; to place names in Palestine and Moab such as Beth-Horon and Horonaim; to Phoenician amulets and Punic inscriptions in Sardinia; and to a Greek inscription on Delos.

His fullest story is KTU 1.100. A mare, mother of a foal, whom the text calls daughter of the spring, daughter of the stone, daughter of heaven and the deep, has a foal bitten by a snake. She calls to her mother Shapsh: Shapsh, my mother, carry my voice to El at the source of the rivers, at the meeting of the two deeps: a spell against the bite of a snake, against the venom of a snake that has shed its skin; let the charmer destroy the poison and cast it out. Then she gives her the same request for Baal on Saphon, Dagan in Tuttul, Anat and Athtart, Yarikh, Resheph, Milku in Athtarat, Kothar-wa-Khasis in Crete, Shahar and Shalim in heaven, and others, each in his city, and none of them drives the venom out. The twelfth is Horon in his fortress, and she turns her face to him, for she is about to lose her offspring. Horon goes to the city of the east, uproots the tamarisk from among the trees and "the tree of death" from among the shrubs, shakes the venom out with them and drives it away, and the venom weakens and flows off like water in a stream bed. Then the house of the spell is shut; Horon asks to come in, and the mare says: give me the snake as my dowry; and he answers: I give you the snake as your dowry.

In KTU 1.107 a man named Sirugazuz has handled snakes carelessly and is bitten; he falls weeping like a child, and Shapsh calls to him from heaven. The spell ends with the prayer "Let El and Horon gather the poison", followed by the gods in pairs; Rüterswörden notes that Horon stands at the head of the list. In the curse, King Kirta says to the son who demanded his throne: "May Horon smash, my son, may Horon smash your head, Athtart-name-of-Baal your skull", and Baal curses Yamm with the same words in the second tablet, in broken lines that editors restore with them.

The idea Horon's stories turn on is that he is lord of the depth and so reaches what goes down into the depth: venom entering the body, the snake living in its hole, the spirits that come up from under the earth. He is not called first in the spell; he is called after eleven others have failed, and he is the only one who acts. The power that draws out the venom is the same power a father calls down on his son's head: Horon heals and curses.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. The Canaanite essay reads Horon from ḥ-w-r and gives it the sense of cave, pit and dark places. In Lane ḥawr is the bottom of a well or the like. Albright compared the god's name with this very Arabic word, ḥaur, the bottom of a well and a broad depression, and made Horon "the deep one, the one who lives in the underworld". BDB explains Beth-Horon as "place of a hole or hollow", from Hebrew ḥōr, the word the essay itself cites. The final -ān is a suffix, which became -ōn in Canaanite. So Horon is "the lord of the bottom", and his house in the tablets is a fortress in the depth.

Linguistic Root

Horon and ḥawr

Ugaritic writes the name with three letters and does not write the w. The Egyptian spelling, the Moabite spelling on the Mesha stone and the long ô of Hebrew show a w after the ḥ: the name was first Ḥawrān, and the ā then became ō in Canaanite, as it does in many Canaanite words. So the root letters are ḥ-w-r, and -ān is a suffix that forms adjectives in the Semitic languages. Ugaritic ḥ answers Arabic ḥ, since Ugaritic writes kh with a different letter.

Among the senses of ḥ-w-r in Lane are ḥāra yaḥūru "he returned", ḥawr "the bottom of a well or the like", whence huwa baʿīd al-ḥawr, "he is deep", said of an intelligent man, and maḥāra, a round cavity. The Canaanite essay first reads the name from this root as "cave, pit, underworld", and cites Hebrew ḥôr, a hole. BDB agrees in explaining Beth-Horon as "place of a hole or hollow" and Horonaim as "two hollows, caves". In 1936 Albright compared the name with Arabic ḥaur, the bottom of a well, and said it is not impossible that the god's name is such an adjective, meaning "the deep one, the one inhabiting the underworld".

Other readings in the essay

The expanded section of the essay gives a second reading and ranks it above the first: ḥāra yaḥāru, to be perplexed and lose one's way, so that Horon is "the one lost in the underworld", "the wanderer in the depths". In Lane this verb belongs to ḥ-y-r: one's sight is dazzled by a thing so that one turns one's eyes away, and then one is perplexed and cannot see one's course. Its middle letter is y, while the w is written in the Egyptian and Moabite spellings, so the first reading fits the letters better. The sense of losing one's way remains an image of the underworld where no road can be found, not an explanation of the name. The essay also lists jawwara, with ḥ changed to j, and ḥarr, burning; the first needs a substitution the spellings do not show, the second drops the w.

Shifts used: Ugaritic ḥ is Arabic ḥ; w unwritten in Ugaritic and written in Egyptian and Moabite; ā of the suffix -ān becomes ō in Canaanite.

Key Mythic Narratives

Horon in Egypt

Horon was worshipped in Egypt from the time of Amenhotep II. In texts from the Theban West Bank he was identified with the god Shed, and he was shown as a falcon gripping snakes in its talons, because he was identified with Horus. In the Delta he was worshipped as a desert god protecting against enemies coming from the desert, and at Giza he was identified with Harmakhis, the Great Sphinx. A spell against a wolf in the magical Papyrus Harris says: "Horon makes your fangs impotent, your foreleg is cut off", and another: "O Horon, drive the beasts from the field", where he is called a shepherd.

Horon on the coast and beyond

A Phoenician amulet from Arslan Tash, of the seventh century BCE, reads: "with an alliance of Horon whose command is perfect, and of his seven concubines, the eight wives of the holy Lord". A Punic inscription from Antas in Sardinia names him with Sid, and a Greek inscription from Delos names him with Heracles as a god of the people of Jamnia in Palestine, ending: "everything may be sacrificed except goat". Another Ugaritic incantation, KTU 1.82, names "the creatures of Horon", harmful spirits from the underworld, so he is chief of the harmful spirits and is also called on against them.

Beth-Horon

In the book of Joshua, Joshua pursues the Amorites "in the direction of the Beth-horon ascent", and as they flee down the descent from Beth-horon God hurls huge stones on them from the sky all the way to Azekah, so that more die of the hailstones than by the sword; then Joshua says: "Stand still, O sun, at Gibeon, O moon, in the Valley of Aijalon!" Chronicles says that a woman named Sheerah built Lower and Upper Beth-horon.

Symbolic Reading

The Canaanite essay makes Horon the god of caves and dark places, linked with the underworld and death, who protects travellers from the dangers of caves, stands for hidden and mysterious places, and is tied to magic and hidden powers.

The snake lives in a hole and comes out of it, so the one who owns the holes owns what comes out of them. Horon drives out the venom with two trees he pulls up by the roots, and then the venom runs off like water in a stream bed, down into the ground. Wyatt suggests that the snake the mare takes as her dowry is the same snake made harmless, and that keeping an image of the very danger as a talisman against it is entirely plausible; he points to the copper serpent Moses made in Numbers, at which anyone bitten by a snake would look and recover.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In Egypt Horon was identified with Horus, and so shown as a falcon, and with the Sphinx at Giza. The falcon gripping snakes joins the bird that rises high with the snake that lives in the ground.

The Canaanite essay compares Horon with Babylonian Nergal, lord of the underworld, with Greek Hades and with Canaanite Mot.

Wyatt notes, after Wilfred Watson, that the order of the spell, in which the gods are called one after another and only the last answers, resembles the story of Kirta, where El asks the gods seven times which of them will remove the sickness and none answers. The mare's spell ends in the language of a wedding, dowry and gift; Wyatt infers that the foal was then born before the wedding, as Yarikh and Nikkal came together before theirs, so it belongs with the sacred marriage. Wyatt, pp. 378 and 387, note 52.