For the 400 years leading up to this time, when Baal and Ashtaroth were still working together, they had already contributed significantly to the downfall of the Israelites.

Table 2 illustrates how by this time, Baal and Ashtaroth (1) inspired the Israelites to have kings and standing armies and then eventually disagree about kings, which divided them into 2 completely separate northern and southern kingdoms and (2) inspired the Assyrians to conquer and dissolve the northern kingdom of Israel, which made the southern kingdom of Judah the only remaining region of intact Israelite communities.

False Gods, Baal and Ashtaroth, are in the biblical scriptures: The false Gods, Baal and Ashtaroth, are mentioned many times in the Hebrew/Old Testament bibles. For example, the “Book of Judges” says that after the Israelites left Egypt, the succeeding generations “did not know the Lord or the work he had done for Israel”, so “they abandoned the Lord, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt”, and instead, served “the Baals and the Ashtaroth⁸“.

Later, Judges says that as a result of the Israelites’ continued worship of “the Baals and the Ashteroth, the gods of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the gods of Ammonites, and the gods of the Philistines⁹“, they “kindled the anger of the Lord”, so He “gave them over to plunderers, who plundered them. And he sold them into the hand of their surrounding enemies¹⁰“.

Regarding Baal’s and Ashtaroth’s inspiration of the Assyrians to conquer the Israelites’ northern kingdom, the overlay, What happened to the 10 tribes of the northing kingdom of Israel?

Over 27,000 Israelites were deported to Mesopotamia and are considered the “lost sheep of the House of Israel” or simply “Lost Tribes”¹¹, which is different than Oahspe’s Lost Tribes. Others are said to have migrated to the southern kingdom of Judah and for those that remained in the region, they are known today as “Samaritans” (some consider Samaritans “half-breeds” from the “House of Israel¹²“).

Interestingly, Samaritans consider Samaritanism the modern version of the “true religion of the ancient Israelites” and that although modern, mainstream Judaism is closely related, it is an “altered religion”. Ancient scholars call this ancient religion “Yahwism” and describe it as “polytheistic, with a pantheon of gods and goddesses” with the head of the pantheon being Yahweh. In Samaritan Yahwism, Yahweh is considered the “national god of the Israelite kingdoms of Israel and Judah, with his consort, the goddess Ashera (Ashtaroth), and second-tier gods and goddesses such as Baal, Shamash, Yarikh, …”¹³. Samaritans & the Lost Tribes, describes how today, many regard the Samaritans and the “Lost Tribes” as the only remnants of the northern kingdom of Israel.