The two words for THE YOUNG OF CATTLE AND FLOCKS — and one of them is, letter for letter, the name of a goddess. Ashtarot is the plural of ASHTORETH, the Canaanite deity Israel is repeatedly condemned for serving (Judges 2:13, 1 Samuel 7:3-4, 1 Kings 11:5, none yet on these pages) and the name of the city where Og of Bashan lived (Deuteronomy 1:4, already on these pages). Checked across the archived Hebrew Bible, the consonants stand in twenty-one verses, of which exactly FOUR are livestock: Deuteronomy 7:13 and 28:4, 28:18, 28:51, always paired with shegar and never elsewhere. Shegar itself occurs five times — those four, plus Exodus 13:12 (already on these pages), where every firstling sheger of an animal belongs to Jehovah. ⚠ Outside the Bible the same name is attested as a deity paired with Ashtar in this cattle-and-flocks role; that identification is reported by the scholarship and not verified from this project’s own sources. ⭐ The likeliest reading is that the phrase had gone dead — a fossil, like ‘Thursday’ — but it is a fossil of exactly what Deuteronomy 7 is arguing against, sitting inside the blessing that chapter offers as the alternative. Not one of the thirteen versions on either shelf flags it. → first discussed at Deut 7:13