One tool commonly used to measure Israel's polytheism is onomastics - the study of names. Both biblical and extrabiblical Israelite names are known to incorporate the names of gods - often YHWH (Yahweh), the name of the Israelite deity, but also the names of foreign gods. These names are called theophoric names, from the Greek for "bearing a god." Examples include Saul's son Eshbaal and grandson Merib-baal (1 Chronicles 8:33-34, 9:39-40), whose names incorporate the term baal...Names containing this term, scholars suggest, are evidence of Baal worship among early Israelites. But the evidence of onomastics, as we shall see, is not quite so clear. First, there are problems in assuming that every use of a theophoric name necessarily connotes worship of a particular god. Second, and even more significant, the appearance of non-Yahwistic theophoric names in the Bible is remarkably rare. The names that the Israelites gave their children do not support the case for widespread polytheism. <snip> Theophoric names...are more revealing religiously in that they are statements about the deity or about the worshiper's relationship to the deity. They consist of the name, title or epithet of the deity and a word referring to an act or quality of the deity or of the person who bears the name. <snip> The major difference between names in Israel and its neighbors is the deity mentioned in the theophoric names. The onomastica of other societies use the names of many deities. The overwhelming majority of theophoric names in Israel mention YHWH. According to one count, of some 521 biblical individuals bearing theophoric names from the patriarchal period through the fall of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E., 475 (91 percent) bear Yahwistic names (that is, they contain the name YHWH; these first appear in significant numbers in the period of the monarchy). Only 46 (9 percent) bear names that clearly, or at least plausibly, contain the names of other gods. <snip> Seven biblical Israelites...bear names that clearly contain the element Baal. But these references are not necessarily intended to invoke the Canaanite deity of that name. As noted above, Baal is a generic term that literally means "lord." Although it regularly refers to the Canaanite deity, it was sometimes used as a title for YHWH... Notably, other than Baal, the deities mentioned in these names are not the deities that the Bible says the Israelites worshiped...Further, although the books of Kings, Ezekiel and Amos say that the Israelites worshiped the sun, moon and stars...virtually no astral deities are included in Israelite names. The statistical picture is complicated, however, by evidence that some biblical names mentioning foreign gods were tampered with by ancient editors...There may have originally been more biblical names mentioning foreign gods that have now been expurgated. If so, this could be further evidence of Israelite polytheism that we have lost. One way to check whether this occurred is to study the Israelite names preserved not in the Bible but in inscriptions from the biblical period, since these have not been tampered with by later scribes. About twenty years ago, I collected all the Israelite personal names from the biblical period known from inscriptions up to that time. I expected to find numerous examples of pagan personal names - the kinds of names I suspected has been expurgated from the Bible by scrival revisions of the type just described. The results surprised me. Of the 1,200-plus individual names known from inscriptions, 671 contained a theophoric element...Only 36 seemed clearly or very plausibly to refer to deities other than YHWH. Thus, of the 593 inscriptional names with clearly identifiable deities, 94 percent were Yahwistic and only 6 percent mentioned other deities.