Ba'al with raised arm, 14th-12th century BC, found at Ras Shamra (ancient
Ugarit),
Louvre
Baʿal (
Biblical Hebrew בעל,
pronounced [ˈbaʕal], usually spelled
Baal in English) is a
Northwest Semitic title and honorific meaning "master" or "lord"
[1] that is used for various gods who were patrons of cities in the
Levant and
Asia Minor, cognate to
Akkadian Bēlu. A
Baalist or
Baalite means a worshipper of Baal.
"Baʿal" can refer to any god and even to human officials. In some texts it is used for
Hadad, a god of the rain, thunder, fertility and agriculture, and the
lord of Heaven. Since only priests were allowed to utter his divine name, Hadad, Ba‛al was commonly used. Nevertheless, few if any
Biblical
uses of "Baʿal" refer to Hadad, the lord over the assembly of gods on
the holy mount of Heaven, but rather refer to any number of local
spirit-deities worshipped as
cult images, each called
baʿal and regarded in the
Hebrew Bible in that context as a "
false god".
Etymology
Baʿal (
bet-
ayin-
lamedh) is a
Semitic word signifying "The Lord, master, owner (male), keeper, husband". Cognates include
Standard Hebrew (
Bet-
Ayin-
Lamed);
בַּעַל / בָּעַל,
Báʿal,
Akkadian Bēl and
Arabic بعل. In
Hebrew,
the word ba'al means "husband" or "owner", and is related to a verb
meaning to take possession of, for a man, to consummate a marriage. The
word "ba'al" is also used in many
Hebrew
phrases, denoting both concrete ownership as well as possession of
different qualities in one's personality. The feminine form is
Baʿalah (Hebrew
בַּעֲלָה Baʕalah,
Arabic بعلـة baʿalah) signifying "lady, mistress, owner (female), wife".
The words themselves had no exclusively religious connotation, they
are honorific titles for heads of households or master craftsmen, but
not for royalty. The meaning of "lord" as a member of royalty or
nobility is more accurately translated as
Adon in Semitic.
In
Hebrew
the basic term for a homeowner is "ba'al ha-bayith", with the
connotation of a middle-class, bourgeois townsperson in traditional
Jewish texts and in the
Yiddish language (pronounced "baalabus" in Yiddish, pl. "baalei-batim"). A feminine version of the term in
Hebrew,
"ba'alat ha-bayith", means "the woman of the house", and traditionally
had the connotation of a strong, even dominant, woman, who maintains the
household in an effective and result-oriented manner, the Yiddish
version of the term being "baalabusta".
Baʿal ul bayt in modern
Levantine Arabic
is widely used to mean the head of the household, literally 'Master of
the House' and has a somewhat jocular, semi-mocking connotation.
[citation needed] In modern Levantine Arabic, the word
báʿal
serves as an adjective describing farming that relies only on rainwater
as a source of irrigation. Probably it is the last remnant of the sense
of Baal the god in the minds of the people of the region. In the
Amharic language, the Semitic word for "owner" or "husband, spouse" survives with the spelling
bal.
Deities called Baʿal and Baʿalath
Because more than one god bore the title "Baʿal" and more than one
goddess bore the title "Baʿalat" or "Ba`alah," only the context of a
text can indicate of which Baʿal 'lord' or Baʿalath 'Lady' a particular
inscription or text is speaking.
Hadad in Ugarit
In the Bronze Age,
Hadad (or Haddad or Adad) was especially likely to be called Baʿal; however, Hadad was far from the only god to have that title.
[dubious – discuss]
In the
Canaanite pantheon as attested in
Ugaritic sources, Hadad was the son of
El,
who had once been the primary god of the Canaanite pantheon. El and
Baʿal are often associated with the bull in Ugaritic texts, as a symbol
both of strength and fertility.
[2]
Baʿal of Tyre
Melqart is the son of
El in the Phoenician triad of worship.
[citation needed] He was the god of
Tyre and was often called the Baʿal of
Tyre.
[citation needed] 1 Kings 16:31 relates that
Ahab, king of
Israel, married
Jezebel, daughter of
Ethba’al, king of the
Sidonians, and then served
habba’al ('the Baʿal'.) The
cult of this god was prominent in Israel until the reign of
Jehu, who put an end to it.
[citation needed] "And they brought out the pillars (
massebahs) of the house of the Baʿal and burned them. And they pulled down the pillar (
massebah) of the Baʿal and pulled down the house of the Baʿal and turned it into a latrine until this day." (
2 Kings 10:26-27)
Some scholars
[who?] claim it is uncertain whether "Baʿal"
the Lord
in Kings 10:26 refers to Melqart. They point out that Hadad was also
worshipped in Tyre. This point of view ignores the possibility that
Hadad and Melqart are the same god with different names because of
different languages and cultures, Hadad being Canaanite and Melqart
being Phoenician. In favor of the latter interpretation, both Hadad and
Melqart are described as the son of
El, both carrying the same secondary position in the pantheons of each culture.
Josephus (
Antiquities 8.13.1) states clearly that
Jezebel "built a temple to the god of the Tyrians, which they call Belus" which certainly refers to the Baal of Tyre, or Melqart.
Ahab son of Omri did more evil in the eyes of the Lord than any of
those before him. He not only considered it trivial to commit the sins
of Jeroboam son of Nebat, but he also married Jezebel daughter of
Ethbaal king of the Sidonians, and began to serve Baal and worship him.
He set up an altar for Baal in the temple of Baal that he built in
Samaria. Ahab also made an Asherah (pole) and did more to provoke the Lord, the God of Israel, to anger than did all the kings of Israel before him.[3]
In any case, King Ahab, despite supporting the cult of this Baʿal, had a semblance of worship to
Yahweh (1 Kings 16-22). Ahab still consulted Yahweh's prophets and cherished Yahweh's protection when he named his sons
Ahaziah ("Yahweh holds") and Jehoram ("Yahweh is high.")
Baʿal of Carthage
The worship of
Baʿal Hammon flourished in the
Phoenician colony of
Carthage.
Baʿal Hammon was the supreme god of the Carthaginians, and is believed
that this supremacy dates back to the 5th century BC, apparently after a
breaking off of relationships between Carthage and Tyre at the time of
the
Punic defeat in Himera.
[4] He is generally identified by modern scholars either with the Northwest Semitic god
El or with
Dagon,
[5] and generally identified by the
Greeks, by
interpretatio Graeca with Greek
Cronus and similarly by the
Romans with
Saturn.
The meaning of
Hammon or
Hamon is unclear. In the 19th century when
Ernest Renan excavated the ruins of Hammon (
Ḥammon), the modern Umm
al-‘Awamid between
Tyre and
Acre, he found two Phoenician inscriptions dedicated to El-Hammon. Since El was normally identified with Cronus and
Ba‘al Hammon was also identified with Cronus, it seemed possible they could be equated. More often a connection with
Hebrew/
Phoenician ḥammān 'brazier' has been proposed, in the sense of "Baal (lord) of the brazier". He has been therefore identified with a solar deity.
[6] Frank Moore Cross argued for a connection to
Khamōn, the
Ugaritic and
Akkadian name for Mount Amanus, the great mountain separating
Syria from
Cilicia based on the occurrence of an Ugaritic description of El as the one of the Mountain Haman.
Classical sources
[which?] relate how the Carthaginians burned their children as offerings to Baʿal Hammon. See
Moloch
for a discussion of these traditions and conflicting thoughts on the
matter. From the attributes of his Roman form, African Saturn, it is
possible to conclude that Hammon was a fertility god.
[7]
Scholars
[who?]
tend to see Baʿal Hammon as more or less identical with the god El, who
was also generally identified with Cronus and Saturn. However,
Yigael Yadin thought him to be a moon god.
Edward Lipinski identifies him with the god
Dagon in his
Dictionnaire de la civilisation phenicienne et punique (1992:
ISBN 2-503-50033-1). Inscriptions about Punic deities tend to be rather uninformative.
In Carthage and North Africa Baʿal Hammon was especially associated
with the ram and was worshiped also as Baʿal Qarnaim ("Lord of Two
Horns") in an open-air sanctuary at Jebel Bu Kornein ("the two-horned
hill") across the bay from Carthage.
Baʿal Hammon's female cult partner was
Tanit.
[8] He was probably not ever identified with Baʿal
Melqart, although one finds this equation in older scholarship.
Ba`alat Gebal ("Lady of Byblos") appears to have been generally identified with
‘Ashtart, although
Sanchuniathon distinguishes the two.
Priests of Baʿal
The Priests of Baʿal are mentioned in the Hebrew Bible numerous times, including a confrontation with the Prophet Elijah (
1 Kings 18:21-40), the burning of incense symbolic of prayer (
2 Kings 23:5), and rituals followed by priests adorned in special vestments (
2 Kings 10:22)
offering sacrifices similar to those given to honor the Hebrew God. The
confrontation with the Prophet Elijah is also mentioned in the Qur'an (
37:123-125)
Baʿal as a divine title in Israel and Judah
-
- At first the name Baʿal was used by the Jews
for their God without discrimination, but as the struggle between the
two religions developed, the name Baʿal was given up in Judaism as a
thing of shame, and even names like Jerubbaʿal were changed to
Jerubbosheth: Hebrew bosheth means "shame".[9]
The sense of competition between the priestly forces of Yahweh and of
Baʿal in the ninth century is nowhere more directly attested than in
1 Kings 18, where,
Elijah
the prophet offering a sacrifice to Yahweh, Baʿal's followers did the
same. Baʿal in the Hebrew text did not light his followers' sacrifice,
but Yahweh sent heavenly fire to burn Elijah's sacrifice to ashes, even
after it had been soaked with water.
Since
Baʿal simply means 'master', there is no obvious reason
for which it could not be applied to Yahweh as well as other gods. In
fact, Hebrews generally referred to Yahweh as
Adonai ('my lord') in prayer. The judge
Gideon was also called Jerubaʿal, a name which seems to mean 'Baʿal strives', though the Yahwists' explanation in
Judges 6:32 is that the
theophoric name
was given to mock the god Baʿal, whose shrine Gideon had destroyed, the
intention being to imply: "Let Baʿal strive as much as he can ... it
will come to nothing."
After Gideon's death, according to
Judges 8:33,
the Israelites went astray and started to worship the Baʿalîm (the
Baʿals) especially Baʿal Berith ("Lord of the Covenant.") A few verses
later (
Judges 9:4) the story turns to all the citizens of
Shechem — actually
kol-ba‘alê šəkem another case of normal use of
ba‘al not applied to a deity. These citizens of Shechem support
Abimelech's
attempt to become king by giving him 70 shekels from the House of Ba‘al
Berith. It is hard to dissociate this Lord of the Covenant who is
worshipped in Shechem from the covenant at Shechem described earlier in
Joshua 24:25, in which the people agree to worship Yahweh. It is especially hard to do so when
Judges 9:46 relates that all "the holders of the tower of Shechem" (
kol-ba‘alê midgal-šəkem) enter
bêt ’ēl bərît
'the House of El Berith', that is, 'the House of God of the Covenant'.
Either "Baʿal" was here a title for El, or the covenant of Shechem
perhaps originally did not involve El at all, but some other god who
bore the title Baʿal. Whether there were different viewpoints about
Yahweh, some seeing him as an aspect of Hadad, some as an aspect of El,
some with other perceptions cannot be unambiguously answered.
[citation needed]
Baʿal appears in
theophoric names. One also finds Eshbaʿal (one of
Saul's sons) and Beʿeliada (a son of
David). The last name also appears as
Eliada.
This might show that at some period Baʿal and El were used
interchangeably; even in the same name applied to the same person. More
likely a later hand has cleaned up the text. Editors did play around
with some names, sometimes substituting the form
bosheth 'abomination' for
ba‘al in names, whence the forms
Ishbosheth instead of
Eshbaʿal and
Mephibosheth which is rendered
Meribaʿal in
1 Chronicles 9:40.
1 Chronicles 12:5 mentions the name Beʿaliah (more accurately
be‘alyâ) meaning "Yahweh is Baʿal."
It is difficult to determine to what extent the 'false worship' which
the prophets stigmatize is the worship of Yahweh under a conception and
with
rites,
which treated him as a local nature god, or whether particular features
of gods more often given the title Ba‘al were consciously recognized to
be distinct from Yahwism from the first. Certainly some of the Ugaritic
texts and
Sanchuniathon
report hostility between El and Hadad, perhaps representing a cultic
and religious differences reflected in Hebrew tradition also, in which
Yahweh in the
Tanach
is firmly identified with El and might be expected to be somewhat
hostile to Baʿal/Hadad and the deities of his circle. But for
Jeremiah and the
Deuteronomist it also appears to be
monotheism against
polytheism (
Jeremiah 11:12):
Then shall the cities of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem
go and cry to the gods to whom they offer incense: but they shall not
save them at all in the time of their trouble. For according to the
number of your cities are your gods, O Judah; and according to the
number of the streets of Jerusalem you have set up altars to the
abominination, altars to burn incense to the Ba‘al.
Multiple Baʿals and ʿAshtarts
One finds in the
Tanakh the plural forms
bə'ālîm 'Baʿals' or 'Lords' and
aštārôt Ashtarts, though such plurals don't appear in Phoenician or Canaanite or independent Aramaic sources.
One theory is that the people of each territory or in each wandering
clan worshipped their own Baʿal, as the chief deity of each, the source
of all the gifts of nature, the mysterious god of their fathers. As the
god of
fertility
all the produce of the soil would be his, and his adherents would bring
to him their tribute of first-fruits. He would be the patron of all
growth and fertility, and, by the use of analogy characteristic of early
thought, this Baʿal would be the god of the productive element in its
widest sense. Originating perhaps in the observation of the fertilizing
effect of rains and streams upon the receptive and reproductive soil,
Baʿal worship became identical with nature-worship. Joined with the
Baʿals there would naturally be corresponding female figures which might
be called ʿAshtarts, embodiments of '
Ashtart. Baʿal Hadad is associated with the goddess "Virgin"
Anat, his sister and lover.
Through analogy and through the belief that one can control or aid the powers of nature by the practice of
magic, particularly
sympathetic magic,
sexuality might characterize part of the cult of the Baʿals and
ʿAshtarts. Post-Exilic allusions to the cult of Baʿal Pe'or suggest that
orgies prevailed. On the summits of hills and mountains flourished the
cult of the givers of increase, and "under every green tree" was
practised the licentiousness which was held to secure abundance of
crops.
Human sacrifice, the burning of
incense, violent and ecstatic exercises, ceremonial acts of bowing and kissing, the preparing of sacred cakes (see also
Asherah),
appear among the offences denounced by the post-Exilic prophets; and
show that the cult of Baʿal (and ʿAshtart) included characteristic
features of worship which recur in various parts of the Semitic (and
non-Semitic) world, although attached to other names. But it is also
possible that such rites were performed to a local Baʿal
Lord and
a local ʿAshtart without much concern as to whether they were the same
as that of a nearby community or how they fitted into the national
theology of Yahweh who had become a ruling high god of the heavens,
increasingly disassociated from such things, at least in the minds of
some worshippers.
Another theory is that the references to Baʿals and ʿAshtarts (and
Asherahs) are to images or other standard symbols of these deities,
statues, and icons of Baʿal Hadad, ʿAshtart, and Asherah set-up in
various high places as well as those of other gods, the author listing
the most prominent as types for all.
A reminiscence of Baʿal as a title of a local fertility god (or
referring to a particular god of subterraneous water) may occur in the
Talmudic Hebrew phrases
field of the Baʿal and
place of the Baʿal and
Arabic ba'l used of land fertilised by subterraneous waters rather than by rain.
The identification of Baʿal as a sun-god in historical scholarship
came to be abandoned by the end of the 19th century as it became clear
that Baʿal was the title of numerous local gods and not necessarily a
single deity in origin. It also became clear that the "
astralizing"
(association or identification with heavenly bodies) of Ancient Near
Eastern deities was a late (Iron Age) development in no way connected
with the
origin of religion as theorized by some 19th-century schools of thought.
[10]
Milton and Christian demonology
In 17th Century Grimoire the
Goetia there appears
a demon called Baal
John Milton in his
epic poem Paradise Lost of 1667 describes
Satan's "Legions, Angel Forms" immediately after the
fall from heaven
collecting themselves and gathering around their "Great Sultan"
(Satan). Milton names and describes the most prominent of these whose
names in heaven had been "blotted out and ras'd", but who would acquire
new names "wandring ore the Earth", being worshipped by man ("Devils to
adore for Deities"). In the following section, Milton refers to the
plural forms of Baʿal and
Astarte [Book 1, lines 419-423]:
With these came they, who from the bordring flood
Of old Euphrates to the Brook that parts
Egypt from Syrian ground, had general Names
Of Baalim and Ashtaroth, those male,
These Feminine.
In Islam
The word Baʿal appears in the
Quran. The Quran (37:125) mentions that
Elias (
Elijah) a prophet of God was sent to his people to tell them not to worship Baʿal and worship one true God.
"And Elias was most surely of the messengers, he
asked his people: 'do you not fear (Allah)?, will ye call upon Baʿal and
forsake the best of creators, Allah is your Lord and the Lord of your
fathers, the ancients.but they rejected him, and they will certainly be
called up (for punishment),except the sincere and devoted servants of
Allah (among them),and we left (this blessing) for him among generations
(to come) in later times, peace be upon Elias."
—Qur'an, Sura 37, Ayat 123-130
Baʿal Zebûb
Ba‘al Zəbûb is variously understood to mean "lord of flies",
[11][12][13][14] or "lord of the (heavenly) dwelling".
[15][16][17] Originally the name of a
Philistine god,
[18] Beelzebub is also identified in the
New Testament as Satan, the "prince of the demons".
[19][20] In
Arabic the name is retained as
Ba‘al dhubaab / zubaab (بعل الذباب), literally "Lord of the Flies". Biblical scholar
Thomas Kelly Cheyne suggested that it might be a derogatory corruption of
Ba‘al Zəbûl, "Lord of the High Place" (i.e., Heaven) or "High Lord".
[21]
The word Beelzebub in rabbinical texts is a mockery of the Ba'al
religion, which ancient Hebrews considered to be idol (or, false God)
worship.
[22] Ba'al, meaning "Lord" in
Ugaritic, was used in conjunction with a descriptive name of a specific God.
Jewish
scholars have interpreted the title of "Lord of Flies" as the Hebrew
way of calling Ba'al a pile of dung, and comparing Ba'al followers to
flies.
[23][24] The
Septuagint renders the name as
Baalzebub (βααλζεβούβ) and as
Baal muian (βααλ μυιαν, "Baal of flies"), but
Symmachus the Ebionite may have reflected a tradition of its offensive ancient name when he rendered it as
Beelzeboul.
[25]
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