Baal

Ba'al (pronounced: [baʕal]; Hebrew: בעל) (ordinarily spelled Baal in English) is a Northwest Semitic title and honorific meaning "master" or "lord" that is used for various gods who were patrons of cities in the Levant, cognate to Akkadian Bēlu. A Baalist or Baalite means a worshipper of Baal.

"Ba'al" can refer to any god and even to human officials; in some texts it is used as a substitute 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 used commonly. Nevertheless, few if any Biblical uses of "Ba'al" 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 ba'al and regarded by the writers of the Hebrew Bible in that context as a false god.

Deities called Ba'al and Ba'alath

Because more than one god bore the title "Ba'al" and more than one goddess bore the title "Ba'alat" or "Ba``alah," only the context of a text can indicate which Ba'al 'lord' or Ba'alath 'Lady' a particular inscription or text is speaking of.

Though the god Hadad (or Adad) was especially likely to be called Ba'al, Hadad was far from the only god to have that title.

In the Canaanite pantheon, Hadad was the son of El, who had once been the primary god of the Canaanite pantheon.

Ba'al of Tyre

Melqart is the son of El in the Phoenician triad of worship, He was the god of Tyre and was often called the Ba'al of Tyre. 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 Ba'al'.) The cult of this god was prominent in Israel until the reign of Jehu, who put an end to it (2 Kings 10:26):

And they brought out the pillars (massebahs) of the house of the Ba'al and burned them. And they pulled down the pillar (massebah) of the Ba'al and pulled down the house of the Ba'al and turned it into a latrine until this day.

Some scholars claim it is uncertain whether "Ba'al" 'the Lord' refers to Melqart in Kings 10:26, they point out that Hadad was also worshipped in Tyre. However this position negates the real possibility that Hadad and Melqart are one and the same god, only having different names because of different languages and cultures. Hadad being Canaanite and Melqart being Phoenician. Both Hadad and Melqart are professed to be the son of El both carrying the same secondary position in the pantheons of each culture. This fact reveals them to be the same deity with different names due to different languages. A contemporary example of this would be God in English and Dios in Spanish.

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.

In any case, King Ahab, despite supporting the cult of this Ba'al, 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.")

Ba'al of Carthage

The worship of Ba'al Hammon flourished in the Phoenician colony of Carthage. Ba'al Hammon was the supreme god of the Carthaginians. He is generally identified by modern scholars either with the Northwest Semitic god El or with Dagon, 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. 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 relate how the Carthaginians burned their children as offerings to Ba'al Hammon. See Moloch for a discussion of these traditions and conflicting thoughts on the matter. Such a devouring of children fits well with the Greek traditions of Cronus. Religious prostitution as a form of worship also may have been practised, especially when the Carthaginians began to recognize Ba'al as a fertility god.

Scholars tend to see Ba'al Hammon as more or less identical with the god El, who was also generally identified with Cronus and Saturn. However, Yigal 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 Ba'al Hammon was especially associated with the ram and was worshiped also as Ba'al Qarnaim ("Lord of Two Horns") in an open-air sanctuary at Jebel Bu Kornein ("the two-horned hill") across the bay from Carthage.

Ba'al Hammon's female cult partner was Tanit. He was probably not ever identified with Ba'al 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 Ba'al

The Priests of Ba'al 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)

Ba'al as a divine title in Israel and Judah

At first the name Ba'al was used by the Jews for their God without discrimination, but as the struggle between the two religions developed, the name Ba'al was given up in Judaism as a thing of shame, and even names like Jerubba'al were changed to Jerubbosheth: Hebrew bosheth means "shame".

The sense of competition between the priestly forces of Yahweh and of Ba'al in the ninth century is nowhere more directly attested than in 1 Kings 18, where, Elijah the prophet offering a sacrifice to Yahweh, Ba'al's followers did the same. Ba'al 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 Ba‘al simply means 'Lord', 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 word Hashem - 'The Name' - is substituted in everyday speech). The judge Gideon was also called Jeruba'al, a name which seems to mean 'Ba‘al strives', though the Yahwists' explanation in Judges 6:32 is that the theophoric name was given to mock the god Ba‘al, whose shrine Gideon had destroyed, the intention being to imply: "Let Ba‘al 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 Ba‘alîm (the Ba‘als) especially Ba‘al 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 š^əkem 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-š^əkem) enter bêt ’ēl b^ərît 'the House of El Berith', that is, 'the House of God of the Covenant'. Either "Ba‘al" 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 Ba‘al. 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.

Ba'al appears in theophoric names. One also finds Eshba'al (one of Saul's sons) and Be'eliada (a son of David). The last name also appears as Eliada. This might show that at some period Ba‘al 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 Eshba'al and Mephibosheth which is rendered Meriba'al in 1 Chronicles 9:40. 1 Chronicles 12:5 mentions the name Be'aliah (more accurately b^e‘alyâ) meaning "Yahweh is Ba‘al."

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 Ba'al/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.

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