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Japanese Baal was the god of storm and rain, the god the Canaanites trusted to water their fields and make their flocks and harvests grow. His name means “lord” or “owner.” In the Bible he is the god Israel kept turning to, from the plains of Moab in Moses’ day to the court of Ahab and Jezebel.
One verse in Hosea holds the whole sad story. God speaks of his people as a wife who has wandered: “For she did not know that I gave her corn, and wine, and oil, and multiplied her silver and gold, which they prepared for Baal” (Hosea 2:8). The grain was God’s gift. The rain that grew it was God’s rain. And Israel carried the harvest to the altar of another god and said thank you to him. Everything Scripture says about Baal grows from that mistake.
What does the name Baal mean?
In Hebrew and its neighbouring languages, baal was an ordinary word for “owner” or “lord,” and could also mean a husband. It became the title of one particular god, the lord of rain and dew, the two waters a farmer in Canaan could not live without. Because he was worshipped in many towns, the Bible often speaks of “Baalim,” the Baals, in the plural, and of local Baals by name: Baalpeor in Moab (Numbers 25:3), Baalberith, after Gideon died, when Israel “made Baalberith their god” (Judges 8:33), and “Baalzebub the god of Ekron” (2 Kings 1:2).
In Israel’s early days a Baal name did not have to mean idolatry. Saul named a son Eshbaal and his grandson was Meribbaal (1 Chronicles 8:33–34), and Gideon was given the name Jerubbaal. Britannica’s editors note that once the name became bound up with Jezebel’s cult it grew hateful, and writers began to swap it for bosheth, “shame.” So Saul’s son Eshbaal appears in 2 Samuel 2:8 as Ishbosheth.
How do we know what Baal’s worshippers believed?
For centuries the Bible was almost the only witness. Then, from 1929, excavators at Ugarit, the modern Ras Shamra on the coast of Syria, began to uncover clay tablets from the middle of the second millennium before Christ, written by people who prayed to Baal. They give the fullest picture we have of Canaanite religion in its own words. In those stories Baal takes the kingship of the gods from Yamm, the sea, and fights Mot, the god of death. If Baal wins, the land enjoys seven years of plenty; if Mot wins, seven years of drought and famine follow. Baal’s title as the storm god was “He Who Rides on the Clouds.”
The Louvre in Paris keeps a stone stela found at Ugarit that shows him as his worshippers saw him. The museum describes Baal, “the god of storms, who wields a weapon that unleashes thunder and rain,” while the lance he drives into the ground stands for lightning striking the earth. This was the god people trusted with the sky.
Scripture answers with its own picture of who rules the storm. The psalmist sings of the Lord, “who maketh the clouds his chariot: who walketh upon the wings of the wind” (Psalm 104:3). The clouds that Canaan gave to Baal, the psalm gives back to the God who made them.
Why did the Israelites worship Baal?
Baal was the god of the land Israel came to farm. The pull began before they crossed the Jordan. At Shittim, in the plains of Moab, the people were invited to feasts for their neighbours’ gods, “and the people did eat, and bowed down to their gods. And Israel joined himself unto Baalpeor” (Numbers 25:2–3). After Joshua’s generation died, the pattern became a refrain in Judges: “they forsook the Lord, and served Baal and Ashtaroth” (Judges 2:13). Ashtaroth is a plural name for the Canaanite goddesses of the same fertility worship.
Gideon’s story shows how deep it ran. His own father kept an altar of Baal. When Gideon pulled it down by night, the men of the town demanded his death, and his father answered them with a question that should have ended the matter: “if he be a god, let him plead for himself, because one hath cast down his altar” (Judges 6:31).
The worst came under King Ahab, who married Jezebel, daughter of the king of Sidon, and “went and served Baal, and worshipped him. And he reared up an altar for Baal in the house of Baal, which he had built in Samaria” (1 Kings 16:31–32). Baal worship was now the court religion of the northern kingdom. Jezebel’s own story, and her end, is told in who was Jezebel in the Bible.
Why did Elijah challenge Baal on Mount Carmel?
Because the question had to be settled where Baal claimed to rule: the rain. Elijah’s first words to Ahab were a drought, “there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word” (1 Kings 17:1). The tablets of Ugarit told of seven lean years when Baal was defeated. Now the god of rain could not make it rain.
In the third year, on Carmel, the 450 prophets of Baal called on him from morning until noon, “saying, O Baal, hear us. But there was no voice, nor any that answered.” Elijah mocked them, “Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked.” They cried louder and cut themselves until evening, “that there was neither voice, nor any to answer, nor any that regarded” (1 Kings 18:26–29). Then Elijah prayed, the fire of the Lord fell on his soaked altar, and the people fell on their faces and cried, “The Lord, he is the God” (18:39). Soon a cloud the size of a man’s hand rose from the sea, and “there was a great rain” (18:45). The full story of the prophet is in Elijah in the Bible.
Did Israel sacrifice children to Baal?
Scripture says that some of God’s own people did; its witness is about Israel, not the Canaanites. Jeremiah gives God’s words: “They have built also the high places of Baal, to burn their sons with fire for burnt offerings unto Baal, which I commanded not, nor spake it, neither came it into my mind” (Jeremiah 19:5). The last phrase is God’s own horror. Nothing in him ever wanted this.
Are Baal and Molech the same god?
The Bible names them side by side without making them one. Jeremiah 32:35 speaks of “the high places of Baal, which are in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire unto Molech.” The two cults met in the same valley outside Jerusalem, and Scripture condemns them in the same breath. It does not say they were one god.
Is Beelzebub the same as Baal?
The name comes from one Baal in particular. When King Ahaziah fell and was injured, he sent to ask “Baalzebub the god of Ekron,” a Philistine city, whether he would recover. Elijah met his messengers with a question: “Is it not because there is not a God in Israel, that ye go to enquire of Baalzebub the god of Ekron?” (2 Kings 1:3). That chapter is the only place in the Old Testament where the name appears. By the time of the Gospels the name, as Beelzebub, had come to mean the ruler of demons. The Pharisees said Jesus cast out devils “by Beelzebub the prince of the devils” (Matthew 12:24).
When did Israel stop worshipping Baal?
Not all at once, and Scripture never marks a last day. In the north, King Jehu called every worshipper of Baal in Israel to the house of Baal in Samaria, killed them there and broke down the house, and Scripture sums it up in one line: “Thus Jehu destroyed Baal out of Israel” (2 Kings 10:28). Yet Hosea, who preached in the days of Jeroboam the son of Joash, king of Israel, still had to say, “they sacrificed unto Baalim” (Hosea 11:2), and when Samaria fell, the list of its sins ends, “and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served Baal” (2 Kings 17:16).
Judah had its own house of Baal. The people of the land broke it down and “slew Mattan the priest of Baal before the altars” (2 Kings 11:18). Later King Manasseh “reared up altars for Baal, and made a grove, as did Ahab king of Israel” (2 Kings 21:3). The grove is the King James word for Asherah, a Canaanite goddess, and for the wooden pole set up in her honour. King Josiah then had to carry out of the temple of the Lord “all the vessels that were made for Baal, and for the grove, and for all the host of heaven” and burn them in the fields of the Kidron (2 Kings 23:4). Zephaniah, who prophesied in Josiah’s days, heard God promise to “cut off the remnant of Baal from this place” (Zephaniah 1:4). After the exile the Old Testament has little more to say about him.
Even in the worst years, God kept a people. He told Elijah he had seven thousand “which have not bowed unto Baal” (1 Kings 19:18), and Paul took comfort from those same seven thousand centuries later (Romans 11:4). Baal’s altars are long gone, but the temptation in Hosea 2:8 is with us still: to receive our daily bread from God and give our trust and thanks somewhere else, to our work, our money or our luck. More on that old sin is in what is idolatry.
Hosea does not leave the wife wandering. Before his second chapter ends, God brings her home and changes the very name she calls him. “And it shall be at that day, saith the Lord, that thou shalt call me Ishi; and shalt call me no more Baali” (Hosea 2:16). Baali means “my master.” Ishi means “my husband.” The God who sends the rain will not be served like a master to be bargained with. He wants to be loved as a husband is loved.
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