Resheph

“Before him went pestilence [deber], and plague [resheph] followed at his heels.” — Habakkuk 3:5

Lore: Resheph is the god of plague, and his name is one of the most remarkable survivals of Canaanite theology inside the biblical text. Habakkuk 3:5 places resheph in a passage describing YHWH’s theophany: “Before him went pestilence, and resheph followed at his heels.” (Habakkuk 3:5) Most English translations render resheph as “plague” or “burning fever” — not wrong, because by the time of the biblical authors resheph had become a common Hebrew noun for “pestilence” or “flame.” But it was originally a god’s name. Deuteronomy 32:24 uses the plural reshaphim (“burning fevers/plagues”); Psalm 78:48 has God sending reshaphim against Egypt. The divine name was demoted to a common noun. The god was absorbed into the vocabulary.

In his original Canaanite context, Resheph was a warrior-plague deity carrying shield and weapon, often with a gazelle horn on his helmet. He was widely worshipped across the Levant and into Egypt, syncretized with local war gods. He guards the boundary between life and death — a liminal figure who sends disease from the underworld into the land of the living (KTU 1.14, 1.82).

Parallel: Resheph maps onto the “plague-archer” archetype: Apollo (Greek — who sends plague with his arrows in the Iliad, Book 1), Nergal (Mesopotamian plague and war god), Rudra (Vedic — the howler who sends disease). The connection to Apollo is particularly strong: both are plague gods who also have solar/flame associations, both send pestilence as divine punishment, and both are depicted as archers.