Baal

• 1. Introduction

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  Baal is the most common Modern Hebrew word for a husband, and it is also the name of a god whom biblical prophets denounced as false. That double life is the puzzle at the heart of this documentary. The word began as an everyday title in the Northwest Semitic languages spoken across the ancient Levant. Over the centuries it came to be attached to rain, lightning, kingship, sailors and even demons. How does a title used among ordinary people become the name of a storm god, a rival to Yahweh, and eventually a prince of devils? Scholars once linked the name to sun worship and to a scattering of unrelated patron gods, until inscriptions overturned that picture. What did the people of Ugarit, Carthage and Israel each believe about him, and why did his name end up as a symbol of rejection?

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• 2. A Title Before a Name

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  In Ugaritic, Phoenician, Hebrew, Amorite and Aramaic, the root baʿal meant owner. By extension it could mean lord or master, and it was also used for a husband. Related words turn up in Akkadian as Bēlu, in Amharic as bal, and in Arabic as baʿl. The feminine form baʿalah meant a mistress, in the sense of a woman who owns a household, and it survives as a rare word for wife. Like the Sumerian En, the Akkadian bēlu and the Northwest Semitic baʿal served as a title for many gods in the Mesopotamian and Semitic pantheons. Only a definite article, a genitive, an epithet or the surrounding context could show which god was meant. The English spelling arrived by a long route. The Greek of the New Testament and the Septuagint wrote Báal, and the Latin Vulgate carried it forward as Baal. During the Protestant Reformation the word stretched further and came to label idols, icons of the saints, and even the Catholic Church as a whole. Early modern scholars also compared the name with the Celtic god Belenus, but that idea is now widely rejected. Which god the title most often named is the next question.

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• 3. Lord of the Rain

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  A list of deities found at Abu Salabikh shows Baʿal used as a proper name by the third millennium BC. Most modern scholars identify this figure, usually styled The Lord, with Hadad, the storm and fertility god, who also appears as Baʿal Haddu. One proposal says that Hadad's true name grew too holy for anyone but the high priest to speak aloud. The alias Lord then took over, much as Bel stood in for Marduk among the Babylonians and Adonai for Yahweh among the Israelites. A minority view holds that Baʿal was a native Canaanite god whose cult absorbed features of Adad's. Either way, the two were distinct by the 1st millennium BC, with the Aramaeans worshipping Hadad and the Phoenicians and other Canaanites worshipping Baʿal. Ugaritic records show a weather god with power over lightning, wind, rain and fertility. The dry summers of the region were explained as his stay in the underworld. His return in autumn was said to cause the storms that revived the land. That belief suited Canaan, where farming depended on rainfall, unlike Egypt and Mesopotamia, which relied on irrigation from their great rivers. Worry over water for crops and trees raised his importance until he supplanted El as leader of the gods and patron of kingship. Unlike the more aloof El, he was called upon in battle, because people thought he intervened in human affairs. One alternative reading makes him a co-regent, with El as the executive and Baʿal as the sustainer of the cosmos. The Lebanese city of Baalbeck was named after him.

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• 4. Serpents and Death

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  Ugaritic sources usually describe Baʿal as the son of Dagan, yet they also count him among the sons of El. Both he and El were linked with the bull, which stood for strength and fertility. Baʿal nursed a special hatred of snakes, both on their own and as stand-ins for Yammu, the Canaanite god of the sea and rivers. His opponents included the Tannin, the "Twisted Serpent", and Lotan the Fugitive Serpent, who corresponds to the biblical Leviathan. Another was the "Mighty One with Seven Heads". These struggles fill the Baal Cycle, one of the lengthiest surviving epics from the ancient Near East. His clash with Yammu is now generally regarded as the prototype of the vision recorded in the 7th chapter of the Book of Daniel. Because he vanquished the sea, Canaanites and Phoenicians treated him as patron of sailors and sea-going merchants. Because he vanquished Mot, the Canaanite death god, he was called Baʿal Rāpiʾuma. In that guise he led the Rephaim, the ancestral spirits, especially those of ruling dynasties. Before Ugarit was rediscovered, the many titles he carried were taken to belong to separate gods.

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• 5. Many Local Faces

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  The texts from Ugarit revealed that Baʿal's varied epithets described one deity. The scholar Day compared them to the local manifestations of the Virgin Mary in the Roman Catholic Church. His best-known title was "rider of the clouds", which echoes Zeus as "gatherer of the clouds" and Yahweh as "rider of the heavens". The verb behind it, rkb, has horse-riding and sexual uses alike. Ugaritic inscriptions also call him "Victorious Baʿal" and "the mighty one". They praise him as "the one without equal", with the line "there is none above him". As patron of his city he was Baʿal of Ugarit, and as Baʿal Zaphon he held a palace atop Jebel Aqra, the ancient Mount Ṣapānu. Other titles included Winged Baʿal and Baʿal of the Arrows. Phoenician and Aramaic inscriptions add Baʿal of the Mace, Baʿal of the Lebanon, Baʿal of Sidon, and Baʿal of the Heavens, known as Baʿal Shamem. His worship reached Egypt by the Middle Kingdom and spread across the Mediterranean with Phoenician colonization in the early 1st millennium BC.

  In Carthage, a Tyrian colony, the form called Baʿal Hammon became the supreme god. This status is believed to have developed in the 5th century BC, after the city broke its ties with Tyre following the 480 BC Battle of Himera. Like Hadad, he was a fertility god, but his animal was the ram, and he was pictured with horns. As Baʿal Karnaim, Lord of the Two Horns, he was honored at an open-air sanctuary on Jebel Bu Kornein, or Two-Horn Hill, across the bay from Carthage. His consort was the goddess Tanit. Punic inscriptions say little, so he has been identified as a moon god and also as Dagan, the grain god. The meaning of Hammon is obscure, though the usual guess links it to a word for brazier and a role as a sun god. Roman sources accused the Carthaginians of burning their children in sacrifice to him, and the archaeological record seems to support that charge.

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• 6. Jezebel's Altar

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  The Hebrew Bible uses the word Baʿal about 90 times, always in reference to various gods. His priests are mentioned repeatedly, most prominently in the First Book of Kings. Many scholars believe those passages describe Jezebel's effort in the 9th century BC to bring the worship of Melqart, the Baʿal of Tyre, to the Israelite capital of Samaria. Day argues against this and suggests her Baʿal was more probably Baʿal Shamem, the Lord of the Heavens, a title most often applied to Hadad.

  The confrontation is told in 1 Kings 18, where the prophet Elijah faces Jezebel's priests. Each side prepared a sacrifice for its own god. Baʿal failed to light his followers' offering, while Yahweh's fire consumed Elijah's altar, even though it had been soaked with water. The onlookers then followed Elijah's instructions and killed the priests of Baʿal. Afterward the rain began to fall, which the story presents as proof of Yahweh's mastery over the weather. Other passages describe Baʿal's priests burning incense in prayer and offering sacrifice in special vestments. Elijah would later meet another Baʿal, this time in the household of a king of Israel.

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• 7. Names of Shame

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  Some scholars argue that the early Hebrews used Baʿal and Baʿali, meaning "my Lord", for the god of Israel himself. In this view the title worked like adon and adonai, which remained aliases for Yahweh. Names that may point this way include Jerubaʿal, another name for the judge Gideon, meaning "The Lord Strives". Saul's son Eshbaʿal means "The Lord is Great", and David's son Beeliada means "The Lord Knows". Bealiah combined both gods in one name, "Yahweh is Baʿal". John Day cautions that for names like Eshbaʿal, Meribaʿal and Beeliada, nobody can be sure whether they allude to the Canaanite god, equate Yahweh with him, or have no connection at all.

  Jezebel's program in Samaria made the name anathema, and the Israelites eventually abandoned it. Jerubbaʿal became Jerubbosheth, since the Hebrew bosheth means "shame". Eshbaʿal became Ish-bosheth and Meribaʿal became Mephibosheth. Gideon's name was kept but glossed as a mockery of the Canaanite god, implying that Baʿal strove in vain. The prophet Hosea still reproached Israelites for saying Baʿali. Brad E. Kelle reads the sexual imagery in Hosea 2 as evidence that Israelites were either leaving Yahweh for Baal or blending the two. Brian P. Irwin proposes that in northern traditions Baal was a form of Yahweh rejected as foreign, while in the south he was a god worshipped in Jerusalem. Mark S. Smith thinks Yahweh was more likely inspired by Baal than by El, since both are stormy divine warriors.

  A different case is Baʿal Berith, "Lord of the Covenant", worshipped by Israelites who went astray after Gideon died. His house at Shechem supplied Gideon's son Abimelech with 70 shekels of silver to kill his 70 brothers. Shechem also had a "House of El Berith", so it remains unclear whether the condemned rites honored a new idol or placed Yahweh inside a larger pantheon. Later writers sorted the matter out in their own way: the Chronicler disapproved of both "Baals", while the Deuteronomists applied the plural to any god they disliked.

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• 8. Beelzebub and Beyond

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  In the First chapter of the Second Book of Kings, Baʿal Zebub, "Fly-Lord", is the god of Ekron. King Ahaziah of Israel, injured in a fall, sent to consult his priests about whether he would live. Elijah, angered, predicted a swift death for the king and called down fire on the soldiers sent to punish him. Jewish scholars have read the title as a Hebrew insult, calling Baʿal a pile of dung and his followers vermin. Others see a link to power over causing and curing pestilence, which would suit the king's question. The Septuagint renders the name as Baälzeboúb, while Symmachus the Ebionite wrote Beëlzeboúl, possibly echoing an original B‘l Zbl, Ugaritic for "Prince Baal". The writers of the New Testament identified Beelzebub or Beelzebul with Satan, prince of the demons. John Milton's 1667 epic Paradise Lost has fallen angels, whose heavenly names were "blotted out and ras'd", wandering the earth under new names as false gods. Baalim and Ashtaroth are the collective names it gives to the male and female demons.

  Classical writers called the various forms of Baʿal by the name Belus. Josephus says Jezebel "built a temple to the god of the Tyrians, which they call Belus", a reference to the Baʿal of Tyre. Baʿal Hammon was set apart, equated with the Greek Cronos and the Roman Saturn as the Zabul Saturn. He was probably never equated with Melqart, though older scholarship claimed so.

  The Quran says that Elijah, called Ilyas or Elyas, warned his people against Baal worship, in verse 37:125. Some medieval Islamic scholars placed that scene among the inhabitants of Baalbek. Tabari explained baal as the Arab term for anything that is lord over something. Al-Thaʿlabī described an idol of gold, twenty cubits tall, with four faces. The root baʿl occurs seven times in the Quran, mostly in its sense of husband, as when Sarah, wife of Abraham, speaks of hers.

  The name has kept moving through the present century. On the 30th of January 2026, the United States Department of Justice released a portion of the Epstein files containing the word Baal. Online claims tied it to satanic ritual and to allegations about Jeffrey Epstein, yet the released materials offer no clear evidentiary basis for that link. The appearance is said to fit financial-document field text, and in one widely shared example looks like a scanning error in which "Bank Name" was misread as "Baal. name".

  On the 11th of February 2026, during the Iranian Revolution anniversary celebrations, several effigies of Baal and several obelisks were burned in Iranian cities at 11:33 in the morning. They were made of natural rubber and cardboard. Those who staged the act said, "We, the monotheists of the world, by the help of God, will bring down the worshipers of Baal, the worshipers of Satan, and the arrogant oppressors." A month later, on the 13th of March 2026, Shi'ite Muslims in Baghdad burned an effigy of Baal bearing Israeli symbols at a gathering for the annual Quds Day.

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