Who was Baal in the Bible?

A title that became a name

Baal is an ordinary word in Hebrew and Phoenician. It means owner, master or lord, and a husband could be called his wife’s baal. So the Bible speaks of many baals: “the Baals” Israel served in the days of the judges (Judges 2:11), the Baal of Peor in Moab (Numbers 25:3), and Baal Zebub, “the god of Ekron,” whom a sick king of Israel sent to consult (2 Kings 1:2). Most often, though, the title belongs to one god above the rest: Hadad, the storm god of Syria and the coast. In a land that lives on rainfall, the god who brings the rain is the god of life.

The storm god of Ugarit

For centuries Baal was known only through his enemies, in the Bible. Then in 1928 a farmer in northern Syria plowed into an ancient tomb at Ras Shamra. It was Ugarit, a city destroyed around 1200 BC, and its excavators found clay tablets telling Baal’s own story. In the Baal Cycle he defeats Yam, the Sea, wins a palace, is swallowed by Mot, Death, and comes back to life, and the rain with him. His title there is “rider of the clouds.” A limestone stele found at Ugarit in 1932, now in the Louvre, shows him striding forward with a club raised over his head.

Israel’s poets knew the language. Psalm 68 calls on the people to praise the one “who rides on the clouds” (Psalm 68:4), and gives the storm god’s title to Yahweh.

Baal in Elijah’s Israel

Baal becomes the Bible’s great rival in the 9th century BC, when King Ahab marries a Phoenician princess.

he took as wife Jezebel the daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians, and went and served Baal and worshiped him. He raised up an altar for Baal in the house of Baal, which he had built in Samaria.

So Elijah’s first act is aimed straight at the rain god: no dew and no rain, he tells Ahab, except at his word. Three dry years later he gathers Israel on Mount Carmel with 450 prophets of Baal and asks the question of the whole story: “How long will you waver between the two sides? If Yahweh is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him” (1 Kings 18:21). Baal’s prophets call from morning to noon. Elijah mocks them: perhaps your god is deep in thought, or on a journey, or asleep. Readers who know the Ugarit tablets hear a sharper joke, since in those myths Baal really does go down to Death and has to come back. Fire falls on Elijah’s soaked altar, then the rain. A generation later King Jehu tears down Baal’s temple in Samaria and makes it a latrine (2 Kings 10:27).

Where Baal still hides

• In names. Gideon was nicknamed Jerub-Baal, “Let Baal contend,” after he pulled down Baal’s altar (Judges 6:32). Saul’s son Eshbaal (1 Chronicles 8:33) appears in Samuel as Ishbosheth (2 Samuel 2:8): bosheth means shame, the word Jeremiah sets beside Baal (Jeremiah 11:13). Carthage, a Phoenician colony, kept the god too. Hannibal’s name means roughly “Baal is gracious.”
• In the devil’s names. Baal Zebub, “lord of flies,” became Beelzebul, “the prince of the demons” (Matthew 12:24), and later Beelzebub. Compare how Lucifer got his name.
• In marriage. Hosea imagines a day when Israel will call God “my husband,” and no longer baali, “my master” (Hosea 2:16). In modern Hebrew, baal is still the everyday word for a husband.