The World of Nabatean Religion

CHAPTER SEVEN
THE WORLD OF NABATAEAN RELIGION
The task of summarizing and characterizing the Nabataean religious

world in Paden’s sense of the phrase (Chapter I) is well beyond the
potential of the evidence. In some areas of Nabataean religious life
there seems to be plenty of evidence. There is much more direct evi-
dence than there is, for example, for the more or less contemporary
religious world of Edessa in Mesopotamia, perhaps more than there is
for Palmyra.
But on close inspection the quantity of epigraphic material is
deceptive. Much of the very direct evidence provided by inscriptions
is enigmatic and insubstantial. From it we gain a fair impression of
religious structures, that there was, for example, a tradition of certain
types of dedication, but the epigraphy tells us next to nothing about
the characteristics of particular gods and, therefore, what the faithful
had in mind when they worshipped them. Only the broadest themes
of Nabataean religion emerge, and even then some aspects of our
interpretations have to be based on analogy with related and similar
religious worlds rather than on indisputable direct evidence. How-
ever, we can tentatively say something in conclusion!
As noted by Wenning and Merklein (1997, 107), the world of the
Nabataean gods was the result of a complex bringing together of
north Arabian, Edomite, Syrian and Egyptian traditions, within the
new context of the Hellenized East. Only Dushara, Obodas and the
divinized Bosra would be counted as genuinely Nabataean and
Dushara is to be seen as a local version of the near universal god of
heaven, elsewhere represented as Baalshamin. Dushara to some
extent turned the tables on Baalshamin through the Nabataeans’
political expansion, so that Baalshamin was imported into Nabataea
as a minor deity.
The Nabataeans appear to have worshipped few deities and it is pos-
sible to interpret the evidence as indicating really only two, what we
have called the Nabataean God and the Nabataean Goddess. There
can be no doubt that the Nabataean God is to be identified as Dushara,
though this is probably in origin a title of the deity rather than a proper
name. Attempts have been made to pin down the true name of
182  
Dushara. Starcky and many followers of his view claim that Dushara is
really a title of Ruda, but this is in our analysis far from sure. There are
doubts about the gender of Ruda, but even if these are convincingly set
aside, there remains the fact that Ruda never appears in a Nabataean
inscription and is never associated with the Nabataeans by any outside
source. What we do know of Dushara is that he was probably a local
god of southern Jordan and that certainly in the post-Nabataean period
and in contact with the world of Greco-Roman religion he was com-
fortably assimilated to Zeus and Dionysos. We have argued that there
indications of a solar aspect to Dushara, but we cannot pretend that
this is at all certain for the Nabataean period.
So far as the Nabataean Goddess is concerned, the probability is
that Allat and al-<Uzza, both clearly documented as major deities in
Nabataea, were treated as two manifestations of a single divine rea-
lity, the Supreme Goddess. Their cults appear to be distributed geo-
graphically in such a way as to suggest that the Supreme Goddess was
worshipped as al-<Uzza at Petra but as Allat at Iram, and both
acquired characteristics of other supreme goddesses of the Roman
world, especially Isis and Atargatis.
All other deities pale into insignificance beside these, but there was
undoubtedly worship of other, quite separate deities in particular
regions or in particular segments of society. Manotu and to a consid-
erably lesser extent Hubal seem to have had a certain role in northern
Arabia, while Baalshamin may have been brought into the
Nabataean sphere through the political, military and commercial
involvement of the Nabataeans in the Hawran, a region not easy to
integrate into the world of Nabataean religion. Of the various gods,
only Dushara, al-<Uzza, Allat and al-Kutba are truly multiregional
(Wenning and Merklein 1997, 107) and inscriptions often locate
deities in particular temples (at Gaia, Bosra, Salkhad, etc.).
As might be expected, protective deities (as we have called them) of
various kinds were cultivated. The evidence for the family god is
clear; that for the tribal god is slight but highly suggestive of similar
religious structures of protective deities operating also at a higher
level. On the level of city Tyches the evidence is again somewhat
clearer (though heavily dependent on iconographic interpretation).
And because of the nature of many of our inscriptions we are also
well informed on the notion of the main gods of the state being associ-
ated artificially, as part of a political claim, with the royal family: the
gods of our lord the king.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

THE WORLD OF NABATAEAN RELIGION

The task of summarizing and characterizing the Nabataean religious

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