ba'al

Baal was the great weather god of Canaan and Phoenicia, the power his worshipers credited with the rain, and so with the grain, the wine, and the oil that a farming country lived on. His own personal name was Hadad. "Baal" started out as a title, the everyday word for an owner or a master (בַּעַל), and over centuries the title swallowed the name. Hebrew writers still heard it as a title: they almost always say "the Baal," with the article, much as English says "the Lord."

The poems recovered from the ancient city of Ugarit fill in what his worshipers believed about him. He fights and defeats the Sea, wins a palace on a mountain in the far north, and then dies and comes back to life in a struggle with Death. Israel's own poets were happy to borrow that imagery for their God, who rides on the clouds and reigns from a mountain, even while Israel's prophets attacked the god himself.

In the Bible he is the model rival. The book of Judges keeps circling back to him. Ahab and Jezebel set up his worship with a temple, an altar, and hundreds of prophets. Elijah challenges those prophets on Mount Carmel to see whose god can answer with fire and end a drought. Jehu later slaughters his worshipers and turns his temple into a public latrine. Elijah's taunt that the god may be lost in thought, off on a journey, or asleep is a jab at the very stories his worshipers told, in which Baal really does die and travel to the land of the dead.

The prophets ended by treating the name as filth:

• Jeremiah sets the word for "shame" right next to it, as though that were the god's real name.
• Hosea looks ahead to a day when Israel will not say the name at all.
• Later copyists went through the older books and swapped that same word for "shame" into the names of people who had been named for the god.

The sharpest turn of all plays on the fact that this word also meant "husband": Hosea promises that Israel will one day call the LORD "my husband" and stop calling him "my Baal."

The Bible often speaks of these gods in the plural, and when it does it is usually summing up a whole way of life rather than naming one figure. This is the refrain of Judges, where the people abandon the LORD and serve the Baals. It is what Samuel tells the nation to put away. It is what the writers of Chronicles praise a good king for refusing and blame a bad king for restoring. And it is what Jeremiah and Hosea charge Judah and Israel with chasing after.

What exactly the plural points at is argued over. Three readings are on offer:

• the many village versions of the one storm god, each with his own shrine and his own local name
• foreign gods in general, gathered under the best known of their names
• a sweeping label the biblical writers used to brand every kind of unfaithful worship at once

Most recent work treats these as overlapping rather than competing. Either way the plural does rhetorical work: it makes Israel's unfaithfulness look scattered and cheap, a crowd of little lords set against the one LORD.

The plural often comes paired with the wooden poles and sacred trees of the goddess Asherah (אֲשֵׁרָה). That pairing is itself part of the argument, since the two gods were not a couple in Canaanite worship, and some scholars read the pairing as the biblical writers' way of tarring both at once.

Two men in the family lists of Chronicles are called nothing but Baal, and the name sits on the map as well: a settlement in the dry south of Judah, and the line of hill shrines in Moab from which Balaam looked out over the camp of Israel. In these verses nobody is worshiping anything. The name is simply what a person or a place was called.

Names like these are the most argued over evidence in a long debate about early Israel. Because the word on its own meant "lord," a father could build it into a son's name and mean his own God: one of the men who joined David is called "the LORD is lord" using this very word (בַּעַלְיָה). Later generations were less relaxed about it. Where Chronicles keeps names built on this word, the books of Samuel put the word for "shame" in its place, and the swap only ever runs in that direction, which is why the Chronicles spellings are taken to be the older ones. Two inscriptions recovered in the last decade, one naming a man Eshbaal and one naming a man Jerubbaal, show such names in ordinary use in exactly the period the Bible is describing.

The place names run from plainly religious to probably just geographical. A ridge called the high places of Baal is a shrine name; other spots that carry the word may be saying no more than who owned the land.