eventually tried to prise the kingdom from Herod's Judea. In order to garner local support for his defection, he revived the old cult of Qōs, perhaps to get Idumea's rural population, still attached to its traditional gods, to back him. The name recurs in the Nabataean language in an inscription at Khirbet et-Tannur, where he is syncretized with the deity Dushara, who is represented flanked by bulls, seated on a throne while wielding in his left hand a multi-pronged thunderbolt, suggestive of a function as a weather god. He is also on an altar in Idumean Mamre. The deity's name was used as the theophoric element in many Idumean names, including the names of the Edomite kings Qōs-malaku, a tributary of Tiglath-Pileser III and Qōs-gabar a tributary of Esarhaddon. Qos and Yahweh Unlike the chief god of the Ammonites (Milcom) and the Moabites (Chemosh), the Tanakh refrains from explicitly naming the Edomite Qōs. The omission may be explained, according to some scholars, by assuming there were close similarities between Yahweh with Qōs, that would have made rejection of the latter difficult. Multiple poetic refrains in the Hebrew Bible claim that Yahweh embarked, in some form, from Se'ir in the region of Edom. Recently, the view has been advanced that Yahweh was originally a Kenite god whose cult spread north of Midian to the Israelites. According to this approach, Qōs might possibly have been a title for Yahweh, rather than a name. A further point connecting Yahweh with Qōs, aside from their common origin in that territory, is that the Edomite cult of the latter shared characteristics of the former. Thus, we find that Doeg the Edomite has no problem in worshiping Yahweh, he is shown to be at home in Jewish sanctuaries. Circumcision, an essential Jewish rite, was practiced in Edom. Additionally, supplication of Yahweh is not uncommon where mentions of Qos are lacking: a pottery sherd from the late 9th/early 8th centuries BCE at Kuntillet Ajrud blesses its recipient by "Yahweh of Teman", which some have taken as implying that, at least from an Israelite perspective, Qos and Yahweh were considered identical, though it by no means necessarily proves it. On the other hand, there are some discrepancies which make a direct association between the two difficult. The identification of names in the Egyptian list of Shasu clans in Se'ir creates a continuity problem, since Qos names only emerge