CHAMOS, or Chemosh, the Idol or God of the Moabites. The name of Chamos comes כמוש Chamos.from a Root, which in Arabic signifies to make haste: For which reason many believe Chamos to be the Sun, whose precipitate course might well procure it the name of swift, or speedy. Others have confounded Chamos with the God Hammon; adored not only in Libya and Egypt, but also in Arabia, Ethiopia and the Indies1. Macrobius shews that Hammon was the Sun,2 and the Horns xxv. 1, 2, 3, &c.with which he was represented, denoted his Rays. We are of opinion, that the God Hamanus, and Apollo Chomeus, mentioned by Strabo3 and Ammianus Marcellinus4, was the very same as Chamos or the Sun. These Deities were worshipped in many of the eastern Provinces. Some who go upon the resemblance of the Hebrew term Chamos, with the Greek Comos, have believed Chamos to signify the God Bacchus, the God of Drunkenness, according to the signification of the Greek Comos5. S. Jerom v, and with him most Interpreters take Chamos and Peor for the same Divinity. But we have made it appear, that Baal Peor was the same as Tammuz or Adonis; so that Chamos must be the God whom the Heathens call the Sun.
כמס Chamos occultarit. חמוזThemus.They who derive this word from the Hebrew Camos with a Caph, Mem, and Samech, pretend that it signifies the hidden God, or Pluto, whose abode is in Hell; in this sense it will be the same as Tammuz, which signifies the same thing, and is taken for Adonis, because this God was adored as one that had been conceal’d and buried in a Coffin, then rais’d from the dead, and appearing alive again. But the God Chamos is never written in Scripture after the manner we have been speaking of, so as to signify the hidden God.
These are particulars which may be seen more at length in our Dissertation on Baal- Peor and Chamos prefixed to our Comment on the Book of Numbers.
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