Qos (deity)

[6][7] Outside the Bible, Qos is frequently invoked in names found on documents recovered from excavations in Elephantine, where a mixed population of Arabs, Jews and Idumeans lived under the protection of a Persian-Mesopotamian garrison.

[10] The worship of Qōs appears to originally have been located in the Ḥismā area of southern Jordan and north-western Arabia, where a mountain, Jabal al-Qaus, still bears that name.

M. Rose speculates that, prior to Qōs's advent, Edom may have worshipped Yahweh—early Egyptian records reference a place called yhw in the land of the Shasu[11]—and the former then overlaid the latter and assumed supremacy there when the Idumeans lost their autonomy under Persian rule, perhaps compensating for the destruction of national independence, a mechanism similar to that of the strengthening of Yahweh worship after the fall of the Jewish kingdom.

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.

[13] 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.

[16] Unlike the chief god of the Ammonites (Milcom) and the Moabites (Chemosh), the Tanakh refrains from explicitly naming the Edomite Qōs.

[22] Oded Balaban and Ernst Axel Knauf have claimed that certain names found on Ramesside topographical lists are theophoric and contain references to Qos, which if true would put the deity's earliest attestation more than 600 years before Yahweh's.