I have a new article up on the meaning of the verb qny in the divine epithet qny ʾrṣ, variously translated “Creator,” “Begetter,” or “Owner of the earth.” I argue that the verb never means “to create” in West Semitic and that all attested usages can be explained on the assumption that they derive from a single root with the basic meaning “to acquire, come into possession.” The correct translation of Hebrew qnh šmym wʾrṣ in Gen 14: 19, 22 is “Owner of heaven and earth.”
The cult of the god Gad in ancient Israel is at first glance obscure. As a god identified with good fortune (the word gad means “fortune, happiness”), the divine name is attested sporadically in the Bible as well as in personal names and inscriptions from the larger Syro-Palestinian region. The laconic quality of personal names provides few hints about his character and identity, while the single literary text in which the divine name occurs is highly polemical and of limited use (Isa 65:11). Further complicating matters is that not only was there a god in the southern Levant known as Gad, but the noun gad was also commonly used in personal names in its appellative sense to identify a particular god as a source of good fortune. During the first millennium it seems a variety of gods could be described as a source of gad, as reflected in the personal names gdmlqrt (“Melqart is fortune”), gdʿštrt (“Astarte is fortune”), gdnbw (“Nabu is fortune”), gdyhw (“Yahu is my fortune”), gdyʾl (“El is my fortune”), mlkmgd (“Milkom is fortune”), ṣlmgd (“Ṣlm is fortune”). Eventually the name gad was generalized and came to be used as a title for patron deities of cities, tribes, and localities in the Graeco-Roman Near East (Höfner 1965: 438-39; Lipiński 1995: 62-64; Kaizer 1997; Ribichini 1999: 340).
The discovery of two late Iron Age seals from Jerusalem has been announced, and though we await more detailed discussion of the seals in an official scholarly publication, Christopher Rollston has provided a valuable provisional analysis clarifying aspects of the reading of the inscriptions and their script, language, and date based on examination of the available photos, as well as a discussion on the use of seals more generally in the ancient Near East and the exceptional nature of a woman owning a seal.
For myself, what is most interesting is the content of the various names found on the seals. I have elsewhere discussed the significance of personal names as a window into the family and national religion of the peoples of the southern Levant (cf. Albertz 2012, Burnett 2009). As many names contain both a theophoric element (YHW, El, Baal, Kemosh, Milcom, Qos) and a predicative statement articulating some belief about the named deity, they tell us something about how these individual deities were conceptualized at both a familial and societal level.