The God Ba’al Got an Undeservedly Bad Rap
After God, the most mentioned deity in the Bible is the ancient god Ba’al (“Lord”), who appears many times in the Old Testament’s Book of Judges and the Book of Kings. In the first millennium BC, Ba’al was a popular god in the southern Mediterranean and the Levant, and had a widespread following among the region’s Semitic and non Semitic peoples.
Understandably, that popularity was seen as a threat by early monotheistic Jews, who viewed Ba’al as competition. He is mentioned about 90 times in the Bible, just about all of them negative. E.g.; the story of Jezebel, who incited her husband, king Ahab, to abandon the worship of Yahweh for that of Ba’al. For her blasphemy and encouraging the worship of false gods, Jezebel ends up eaten by dogs. Or the story of the prophet Elijah, who enters a contest with the priests of Ba’al to demonstrate whose deity is more powerful. Yahweh wins, and the losing priests of Ba’al are killed on Elijah’s orders. Ba’al also gets a bad rap in the Quran, Islam’s holy book, which also contains the Elijah story.
Ba’al’s name ends up getting distorted into Beelzebub, one of the Devil’s names which has particularly nefarious and black magic associations in occult circles. However, there was nothing particularly ominous about Ba’al. He was not even a chief god, but just one of many from the pantheon of pagan deities. His specialty was rain and storms, and while storms might be unwelcome at times, rain was quite welcome in the arid Middle East, where its arrival is usually greeted with relief and joy, and its absence could lead to famine.
Thus, far from being a sinister god, Ba’al was actually a benevolent deity, whose followers were nothing like the devil worshipers depicted in the Bible. However, Ba’al’s worship died out, and there were no followers to defend him from the bad rap he got in the Bible and the Quran. So today, to the extent that he is remembered at all, Ba’al is remembered in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths as a demonic false god, and a menacing evil from the ancient past.
