Phoenician wine could be divine

Abstract

The unearthing of the tablets at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt showed that in Canann wine was not simply an important commodity. Indeed, these inscriptions revealed that during the second millennium B.C. the Canaanites were worshipping a god of wine called Tirsu. In letter 228 from the el-Amarna archive we read of a king of Hawr called Abdi-1irsi (Mercer 1939: 620-621), whose name literally means "The servant of Tirsu"; this shows that Tirsu was a god. As a common noun, the same word tirsu means wine; indeed, the divine name Tirsu stands for a divinity who 'may perhaps have been a kind of Bacchus from whose name the Israelites got the poetic word tiro's for "wine" ... (Dahood 1958: note 2, 79). In 1955 Albright noted that the name '.Abdi-ti-ir-si was found at Ugarit and that this confirmed the correctness of the el-Amarna transciption Abdi-Tirsi mentioned above; besides, since 'this name means "Servant of the God-(dess) Tirsu", it proves that a deity by this name was worshipped by the Canaanites' (Albright 1955: 18 and references therein).