Ba'al

בעל


The principal Phoenician god, whose cultic centre was in Tsur (Tyre) and whose wife - in some versions of the myth his mother - was Astarte, though in Beit Anatot (Bethany) she was named Anat, which links back to the Beney Chet (Hittites) of Anatolia. Ba'al means "lord", "master", "possessor" or "owner", and came to mean "husband"; like the word Adon, Adonis or Adonai, it is a way of addressing the deity.

There are innumerable references to Ba'al in the Tanach, amongst which Judges 2:11; 3:7; 6:25; 8:33; 10:10; 1 Samuel 7:4; 12:10; 1 Kings 16:32; 1 Kings 18:22; 2 Kings 10:18.

Phoenician proper names reflect their god, e.g. Yeruv-Va'al (ירבעל - see my note to Judges 6:32), who is also known as Gid'on (Gideon), Et-Ba'al (אתבעל), and the famous Hannibal Barca, Carthaginian general in the Punic wars (הנבעל). The Aramaean equivalent was named Bel (בל), who the Romans called Belus and who re-appears in various similar name-forms in Celtic mythology, particularly as Beli.

In Tsur (Tyre) his full name seems to have Malkeret Ba'al Tsur (מלקרת בעל צד) = "king of the city of Tyre". The Greeks took him over and attached him to their own equivalent god, likewise son of the moon-goddess, Hercules (properly Hera-Kles, "the glory of Hera"). He was first known in Greece either as Herakles Tyrius or Herakles Melkarth(מלקרת), but the Tyrius was later dropped. Scholars have argued about Ba'al's planetary association, though it seems more probable that the Jupiter proponents are correct and the sun proponents incorrect. The Phoenicians worshiped the stone idol Chaman (חמן, sometimes pronounced Chamon) as the sun, and later associated the two under the combined name of Ba'al-Chaman (the same Chaman/Haman who asks to be worshipped as a stone idol in the Purim story).

The legends of Herakles are reflected both in the Celtic myths of Cúchullain and Ar-Thur and, more relevantly, in those of the Danite (Phoenician) sun-hero Shimshon (Samson).

His major appearance in the Septateuch (the first seven books of the Tanach) is as Ba'al Berit (בעל ברית), "the Lord of Covenants", for it is undoubtedly this deity who has been expurgated from the covenant accounts of Av-Raham, Yitschak and Ya'akov. Judges 8:33 and 9:4 both place the worship of this particular epiphany at Shechem, which is precisely where key covenants with the patriarchs were formulated (see AV-RAHAM).

Ba'al-Zvuv (בעל זבוב) is Beelzebub, "the Lord of the Flies"; he was also known as Ba'al Zvul (בעל זבול), and was the same Ugaritic or Phoenician deity in the form in which he was worshiped at Ekron. King Achaz-Yah insulted him in 2 Kings 1:2 ff. The Galileans later accused Jesus of worshipping him as the Prince of Demons (Matthew 12). His "wife" (presumably) was Jezebel (איזבל), properly Iy-Zevel, the daughter of the Et-Ba'al (אתבעל) king of Tsur (Tyre) mentioned above, who married Ach-Av (Ahab) and supported both Ba'al and Asherah worship in Yisra-El until Eli-Yahu (Elijah) swept it away. (1 Kings 16:31; 18:4; 21:5; 2 Kings 9:7).

The Beney Mo-Av (Moabites) worshiped him as Ba'al Pe'or (בעל פער); cf Numbers 23:28, Deuteronomy 3:29, Joshua 22:17 et al.

Many place names also reflect his worship, and naming a place for a god usually indicates the presence there of a shrine. One particularly interesting place is Ba'al Gad at the foot of Mount Chermon. Gad means "fortune", and is of course also the name of one of the twelve tribes. I believe we have here an indication of the nature of the Beney Gad, that they were distinguished from other Yisra-Elite tribes precisely by their honouring of Ba'al above other deities, in the same way that Asher was distinguished through its worship of either Osher (Osiris) or Asherah, and Yisaschar through its worship of either Yah-Shachur, the "Black Madonna", or Yah Shachar, the daen-star,d epending on how you prefer to read each of their names. I would suggest Gad was originally the Beney Ba'al Gad, and that all the tribes are associated with a particular member of the polytheon, as they were with each of the constellations (click here for more on this).

Ba'al-Hamon (בעל המון) should not be confused with Ba'al Chamon (see above), the latter with a Chet (ח), this with a Hey (ה). It is probably a misreading of Ba'al Ammon (בעל אמון) where Shelomoh (Solomon) had a vineyard, according to Songs 8:11; it was sacred to Amonite Jupiter.

Ba'al-Chatsor (בעל חצור) is mentioned in 2 Samuel 13:23 as a village near the tribe of Ephrayim, and another of the same name in Nehemiah 11:33, this one in the tribe of Bin-Yamin.

Ba'al-Chermon (בעל הרמן) is mentioned in 1 Chronicles 5:23 and Judges 3:3 as lying at the foot of Mount Chermon, and may well be an alternate name for Ba'al-Gad.

Ba'al-Tsephon (בעל צפון) appears in Exodus 14:2 and Numbers 33:7, both of which site this shrine to Typhon in the wilderness between the Nile and the Red Sea - appropriately enough, for Typhon was the demon-god of uninhabitable places. The naming is nonetheless slightly surprising, because there is Typhon, but the name here is Tsaphon, and Tsaphon, or Tsaphan, Sapan, Zaphan, even Jebel Aqraa, "Bald Mountain" Mount Casius and many more, all of them the names by which various people at various times knew Ba'al's sacred mountain, his Olympus or Valhalla.

Ba'al-Shalisha (בעל שלשה) in 2 Kings 4:42 is a town in the mountains of Ephrayim.

Ba'al-Tamar (בעל תמר) is mentioned but not described in Judges 20:33. The link of the Phoenician Ba'al with the date-goddess Tamar is surprising, and I wonder if this is not a misreading for Be'er-Tamar, which would be an oasis-shrine - Be'er meaning "well" as in "water-hole". Geographically it is located very close to other, similar shrines, such as the famous Be'er Lechi Ro'i in the story of Hagar (Genesis 16:14).

Ba'aley Yehudah (בעלי יהודה) in 2 Samuel 6:2 is likewise too preposterous to be plausible - or is it? These are surely not "the pagan idols of the tribe of Yehudah", though such a translation would be theoretically valid? And yet...1 Chronicles 13:6 tells us that King David, in order to take the Ark to Yeru-Shala'im, which he had just conquered and was about to make his capital, "went up, and all Yisra-El, to Ba'alah, that is to Kiryat Ye'arim, to bring up thence the ark of ..." (the following phrase then adds confusion, because it attributes the ark to Ha-Elohim, which supports the pantheism of Ba'al worship, but then corrects the god-name to "Adonai yoshev ha-keruvim - my Lord who is seated on the keruvim", יְהוָה יוֹשֵׁב הַכְּרוּבִים, which both is and is not the YHVH with whom we are familiar). Let us take this slowly:

Ba'alah (בעלה) means either "mistress" or "city". King David's Ba'alah is also mentioned in Joshua 15:9, where it is said to be at the foot of Mount Ye'arim, hence its alternate nomenclature. But 15:11 goes on to mention a Mount Ba'alah, from which 15:60 states, and 18:14 confirms, that there is a third name for the town, namely Kiryat Ba'al. So Ba'alah is Kiryat Ba'al (Kiryat - קרית- simply means "village") is Kiryat Ye'arim; and Ye'arim (יערים) means "a thicket of trees" - in other words, once again, we are at a shrine of the twin gods Ba'al and, in this case, Astarte Nemorensis, to use Frazer's phrase. What, we may well wonder, was the Ark of the Covenant, the Mosaic Tablets of Law, doing in such a pagan place for all that time? The answer, it seems to me, is entirely plain: the Beney Yisra-El were worshippers of Ba'al and Astarte, or Ba'al and Anat, or Av-Ram and Sarai, or Av-Raham and Sarah, or El and Chavah, or Yah and YHVH, or quite likely several other variations of the same sun-god moon-goddess relationship, right up until the time of King David, and quite possibly for a long while afterwards; and no notion of monotheism yet existed, or would, for another five hundred more years.

Which leaves only one other unanswered question: for what purpose precisely was David removing the Ark from Kiryat Ye'arim? The obvious answer is: to bring it to Yeru-Shala'im, where he was planning to build a Temple and his political capital, and there to centralise the political and religious confederacy. But none of that required the Ark, which could have been left where it was for ever, and not had any negative impact on his aspirations. The answer to the question lies, I would suggest, in the ancient superstition called "The Tablets of Destiny", or sometimes "The Tablet of Destinies", of which the first of the two links here suggests a precursor to the Genesis Creation tales themselves. For that is what the Ark really contained, made manifest in a set of commandments. It was not the Ark, nor even the Commandments, that were being relocated to Yeru-Shala'im, but the god of Mount Sinai himself, soon to be housed, like Ba'al on Mount Tsaphon, on Mount Tsi'on.

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