>Just as the fragmentation of a divine self occurs in Northwest Semitic religion, so too we can sense a tendency toward overlapping divine selves. Overlap among Canaanite deities becomes evident in the use of the terms שם (*shem* – “name”) and פנים (*panim* – literally, "face,” and hence also “presence”) in Ugaritic, Phoenician, and Punic texts. In the Canaanite languages, these terms can refer to a person’s self – that is, the person’s essence or bodily presence. Explaining the significance of the term *shem* in Hebrew, S. Dean McBride describes what he calls the “nominal realism” prevalent in ancient Near Eastern thinking. Nominal realism is the belief in > >>a concrete, ontological relationship . . . between words and the things and actions which the words describe. A name is consubstantial with the thing named . . . [or] a physical extension of the name bearer, an attribute which when uttered evokes the bearer’s life, essence, and power. > >Much the same can be said of the term *panim*. It can simply mean “oneself,” because the face is the most identifiable part of a person. Yet when used in relation to a Canaanite deity, both *panim* and *shem* come to indicate an aspect of the divine self that is also distinct from the divine self. I refer not only to the tendency of these terms to refer to a particular form or representation of the divine self (a tendency evident in biblical texts discussed in subsequent chapters more than in Canaanite ones) but also to the use of these terms to refer to a second deity altogether. The term פן בעל (“Baal’s face” or “the presence of Baal”) occurs in twelve Punic inscriptions (i.e., late first-millennium texts from the Phoenician diaspora in the central and western Mediterranean). In each case, it serves as an epithet of the goddess Tannit. Whenever Tannit is described as פן בעל, she is mentioned alongside Baal. The fact that this epithet occurs only alongside Baal suggests that Tannit is his consort, and it shows that as Baal’s presence she has little independent existence. Yet in other texts Tannit is mentioned without the פן בעל, and in these texts Baal himself is not mentioned either...[in these texts] Tannit acts and is addressed independently, yet she is somehow also a part of Baal, at least much of the time. Shmuel Achituv argues that Baal, as a high god, was too distant for worshippers to approach and that they approached his hypostasized and feminine presence instead of him (or rather, we should say, alongside him). Here, we see both the fragmentation of Baal’s self and also the overlap of two deities: Tannit is at once an independent goddess and a part of her husband. > >The same phenomenon occurs with the term *shem*. In a Phoenician inscription, we read that the king Eshmunazor built a temple for Baal of Sidon and a temple for עשתרת שם בעל (“Astarte, Name of Baal”)...She appears on her own, however, with some frequency in Ugaritic and Phoenician texts (as well as in Egyptian ones). Here again, a goddess who elsewhere has her own self appears as an aspect of Baal’s self. As in the more abundant Akkadian texts treated earlier, then, the selfhood of Canaanite deities was at times fluid: Gods could fragment and overlap, even though at the level of worship and mythology they usually were distinct from each other. (Sommer, *Bodies*, pg. 26-27).