Reshef
The West Semitic god of plague and war, the archer whose arrows bring pestilence; equated by the Greeks with Apollo (Reshef-Mikal = Apollo Amyklos at Idalion, Cyprus, 388 BCE). Shares origin with the eastern Phoenician Reshef (corpus id phoenician_resheph); authored here as the inherited god of the wider Phoenician-Punic sphere. IMPORTANT CAVEAT: per Xella there is NO secure evidence for a Reshef cult in the Punic cities themselves — older claims of a 'Punic Reshef' rest on misreadings (of ʿrš 'Eresh' and of rš 'Baal of the cape'); his firm Phoenician-Punic-world attestation is eastern/Cypriot (Kition, Idalion). He is included as a real, citable figure but his Carthaginian presence is NOT over-claimed. SOLITARY: no Punic kinship attested. The Apollo interpretatio is recorded here, not wired as a relation (counterpart not in this batch). On the literature: the first monograph is Fulco (1976); the dedicated Lipiński study is Resheph (2009); Xella's treatment is the DDD entry (1999); the current standard overall is Münnich (2013).
Domains
- plague
- war
Powers
- Looses arrows of plague and war
Epithets
- ršp ḥṣ ('Reshef of the arrow')
- ršp gn ('Reshef of the Garden')
Sources
- Phoenician inscriptions of Cyprus (ršp ḥṣ, KAI 32 = CIS I 10, Kition; the Idalion bilingual, 388 BCE, ršp mkl = Apollo Amyklos)
- William J. Fulco, The Canaanite God Rēšep (American Oriental Society, 1976); E. Lipiński, Resheph: A Syro-Canaanite Deity (Studia Phoenicia XIX = OLA 181; Peeters, 2009); P. Xella, 'Resheph', in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (2nd ed., Brill, 1999), 700–703