Transcription
With the domination of both Christian and Islamic mythologies, it's hard to imagine a period where the principal rival of God, specifically the god Yahweh, was anything other than the devil and his satanic cadre of demonic Fallen Angels. But if we wind back the centuries, wind back the millennia even, we come to the earliest, in many ways the most dangerous rival to the theological dominance of the Israelite God Yahweh: the rider upon the clouds, the defeater of sea and River, the contender with death itself, the youthful storm warrior Baal.
When Yahweh arrived in Canaan, Baal had long proved, long proved the most enduringly popular God of that region, and had even survived the Bronze Age collapse. And it would be Yahweh's contest with Baal that would shift the theological and mythological history of the entire world, Yahweh eventually rising to become The One and Only God, and Baal demoted to mere demonic minion. But before the theological upstart Yahweh appeared, who was Baal, and how did this most popular ancient Near Eastern deity undergo the process of demonization, now merely listed in necromancer catalogues of infernal spirits? Let's explore the history of Baal, the first and greatest rival of Yahweh.
Make sure to subscribe here to Esoterica for weekly explorations of topics and esoteric history. And if you'd like to support this work of providing evidence-backed free and accessible content like this episode, I'd hope you consider checking out my Patreon or some of the cool merch that we have on the channel. And if you're new to the study of esotericism, I've made a specific study guide just to give you the lay of the land. You can find that down below as well. And if you're interested in actual historical books on topics of the occult or magic and mysticism, alchemy, check out Esoterica Rare Books. You can find all those links in the description and in the pin comment below. But now, let's turn to the rider upon the clouds, the Lord of lightning, and the master of storms. But I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and welcome to Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.
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The history of Baal is like the history of virtually every God: ancient, mysterious origins, migration, transformation, assimilation, theological contestation with other gods, and then often demonization, and then perhaps even extinction. By the mid-3rd century BCE, the precursor deity to Baal, variously known as Hadad, Haddu, Ramanu (literally thunder in Akkadian), or Ishkur in the Sumerian reading, was already functioning as a kind of minor deity of springtime rains. He would be linked with the Hurrians and the Hittites with their storm god Teshub. However, this deity seems to have had a wide range of roles depending on the myth cycle in which this deity showed up. But any rain or storm deity was unlikely to feature prominently in the specifically Mesopotamian myths, given that it was the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that primarily provided for the flourishing of those hydraulic civilizations, well, well when they weren't catastrophically and randomly flooding, which also, by the way, probably informed both their myths and their cultural outlook, their distinctive pessimism compared to the relative optimism of the Egyptian culture with its very predictable flooding of the Nile.
However, as Hadad immigrated West into Canaan, perhaps around the third millennium BCE, there, in the middle of that period, the geographic, even meteorological situation would actually provide for his theological ascendance. The region stretching from what is now Syria in the north, down through Lebanon, and south into Palestine, Israel, the area that we now denote as Canaan, was not a region in which agriculture and irrigation principally relied on rivers, such as for the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians. Rather, yearly agricultural success was highly dependent upon winter rains, which often blew in off from the Mediterranean in the form of sometimes ferocious storms. These storms are absolutely terrifying and absolutely necessary for the agricultural population of that region. Hadad, a relatively minor storm deity in Mesopotamia, had found a perfect geo-theological meteorological fit in Canaan.
And sometime between 1800 and 1500 BCE, it appears that the myths around Hadad were shifting along a certain kind of direction and designation. Hadad seemed to have become Baal Hadad, Lord Storm, too often become simply then Baal, the Lord. The term Baal is typically an honorific, meaning master or owner, and it usually denotes something like political and military power, along with ownership of land, are even mastery of a certain kind of skill. The famous Witch of Endor is literally the ba'alat ha'ov, the Mistress of the Ov. Neds are husband and wife in Hebrew are ba'al and betulah, literally Lord and virgin, though your mileage will definitely vary in those respects. A similar term in Hebrew is Adon, thus the Divine name Adonai, my Lord. The founder of the ecstatic movement, Israel ben Eliezer, was the ba'al shem, literally the master of the good name, an epithet won by his shamanic use of divine names, specifically in healing and exercising people of demons. Thus, the name or title Baal simply denotes power, even domination over land, people, and in this case of the deity Baal, the very forces of nature and the cosmos, even lordship over death.
But long before Yahweh would duel with Baal, this storm deity would come to conquer the theological landscape of the ancient Canaanite world in a myth cycle that we now know as the Baal Cycle. For millennia, really, we only knew of Baal through the writings of his theological rivals, the Israelites, you may have heard of them. However, beginning with the accidental discovery of the Bronze Age capital city of Ugarit in 1928, along with its palace archives, which were fragmentary but intact, we can now come to understand the cult of Baal from the very people who venerated him long before the rivalry with Yahweh. The Baal Cycle itself is preserved on a series of six tablets, copied down by the scribe Ilimiku, under the supervision of the priest Atanu, all serving under the king Nikmaddu. Now, there are three such kings with that name, Nikmaddu. So the text of the Baal Cycle that we, as we have them at least, were copied either in the mid-14th century or the late 13th century BCE, depending on which Nikmaddu that was. Now, for reference, most scholars date David of Jerusalem's military ascendancy to around 1000 BCE.
However, by comparing the language of the myth cycle with the more usual correspondence in the Ugaritic language, it's clear that the myths themselves employ a much more archaic version of the Ugaritic language, something that we shouldn't be surprised about. A much older, by the way, Northern cousin of Hebrew. You can kind of read Ugaritic if you read Biblical Hebrew. And thus, were probably composed centuries before the copies actually produced that we have by Ilimiku. Describe the Baal Cycle is specifically preserved on six tablets, about the size of a modern book, and the fragments of seven others, inscribed on both sides in several columns, denoted simply as belonging to Baal, the denoting the subject of the texts. In fact, the Baal Cycle is just one of the many theological and religious texts of Bronze Age Canaan to have been recovered from Ugarit, making the palace archive our best window into the Canaanite religion of the period more generally. We actually now know something about what the Canaanites believed, as opposed to what the Israelites said the Canaanites believed, perhaps centuries after they had, in some sense, had lost regional hegemony.
Unfortunately, the first sections of the epic are lost to damage to the tablets, but we open to Yam, or the divine personification of the sea, threatening the elderly divine king El, demanding he turn over Baal as tribute to the sea. For those who've read some Babylonian mythology, you'll know just why the threats of sea are so terrifying. Long before the conflict between good and evil became the central metaphysical tension, Order and Chaos were the main theological concern, and cosmological epics like the Babylonian Enuma Elish represent just that conflict as personified by the primordial sea dragon Tiamat and the warrior god Marduk. In that epic, Marduk defeats the watery forces of chaos, fashioning the world from the corpse of Tiamat. Thus, the primordial forces of sea were powerful beings representing chaos and disorder, forces that El, King of the Gods, was happy to appease. In fact, it seems that El's consort Asher, who had later become Yahweh's consort, kind of had it out for Baal, seeing him as a kind of upstart that would deprive her own sons of theological power, and thus she was probably pretty happy to see him sacrifice to Yam.
Baal, in fact, doubles down, rebukes the gods to their face, and rather than being swallowed into the depths, wages open war against the sea and his allies. Yes, the sea in this myth is masculine, such as the Judge River, the sea monster Lotan, it's a precursor to Leviathan, both coming from the same root word, meaning something like coiled up. And the land-based allies of the sea, and together with his sister Anat, the most metal of all the gods, she delights in wading through blood, mutilating her enemies, and literally adorning herself in gore and literal body parts. She's kind of like the Hittite Kali. They both defeat Yam and his allies. In fact, Baal does so with two special clubs, Yagish and Amurru, Chaser and Driver, created by the divine craftsman Kothar-wa-Hasis. We also cut then to a scene where Anat is just on her own doing a kind of complete rampage through the countryside, and doesn't even stop until Baal sends her a message that Yam has been defeated, defeated, and that she should, you know, come visit him while he becomes basically king of the realm. I mean, she's kind of doing her own massacring thing as Anat was want to do.
With the defeat of Yam, El and the divine council basically have to admit that Baal is now running the show. But there's a problem: he doesn't have a palace, and thus he can't rightly be a king. But Baal dispatches Anat to petition, really more threaten, El and Asher to allow him to construct a palace on his mountain, Mount Sapan, modern Jebel Aqra, just north of Ugarit, right there on the border of Syria and Turkey. In fact, the word Sapan just becomes synonymous with the Hebrew word for North. Baal eventually shows up with gifts for Asher, which eventually causes her to give her consent to build the palace. That, and, um, again, Anat is not the kind of person you want to negotiate terribly long with. She even expresses her worry that once the palace is complete, Baal will come to his true power as the new kingly god of the realm, and, uh, she was right. He does.
This motif of youthful warrior gods usurping elderly kingly deities was a pretty common motif in the ancient Near East. We have Hittite Teshub, Egyptian Khepri, Mesopotamian Ninurta, and the Babylonian god Ninurta eventually replacing El through assimilation. And of course, Zeus defeating Kronos in Greek mythology. And as M.L. West has, I think, pretty decisively shown, Greek mythology leans very heavily on its Semitic neighbors to the east. Indeed, the whole business of divine usurpation may itself reflect actual political tensions as society in the late Bronze Age was basically collapsing around the composers of these myths.
But with begrudging consent given, Baal employs Kothar-wa-Hasis, the MVP of this whole myth, to construct the mountain palace out of blocks made of gold, silver, and lapis lazuli, a stone so rare that had to be imported from far away Afghanistan, along with planks of wood made from, you guessed it, the Cedars of Lebanon. And all of this should sound very familiar to anyone who studied the construction of the Solomonic Yahweh Temple centuries later. Indeed, Solomon's Yahweh Temple is probably based on something like many other temple complexes in that region, such as those for localized manifestations of Baal worship. Solomon's Temple probably fashioned on a Baal temple, and shows that shows you again that in many ways, Yahweh worship is downstream of Baal worship, something that the Yahwists were probably self-conscious of.
Now, there's an outstanding architectural concern here: should Kothar-wa-Hasis add a window to the palace? And at first, Baal is reluctant. But following an epic rager and yet more military campaigns, it seems that Baal is now confident enough to allow for the construction of a window revealing his true power, an epic theophoric to bow to him in honor. Baal is ready for his window. But why is he initially so reluctant to get said window? Because that was precisely through such windows that Mot, or death, stalks his prey. Perhaps we have here the pride that comes before the fall. I mean, you might be a badass storm god, but nothing can escape from the eternal hunger of the gaping maw of death. Death demands tribute of Baal. Baal, being Baal, refuses.
But a price must be paid for Baal's cosmic disruption. Given the defeat of Yam and the serpent Lotan, and sadly, about 40% of this entire section is damaged, but we do know that Baal eventually concedes, perhaps in despair, perhaps in the prideful wish that, um, maybe he can defeat Mot too. But then he goes and has sex with the hefer 77 times for some reason, and the hefer gives birth to Baal's son. This section is obscure. El's is typically, El is typically associated with the bull, and perhaps is to produce some kind of unity of the divine pantheon and thus produce an heir before Baal goes off to to the underworld. Again, in some early and rare depictions of Yahweh, he's also depicted as bull-like, so who knows. 77 times of the hefer, but Baal goes down into the shadow underworld with his retinue of clouds and wind and lightning bolts and rain. He's probably pretty eager to do battle with death, but it's of no avail. Baal dies.
And this is evidenced by the agricultural collapse among the living. The gods mourn him by ritually gashing themselves, a practice actually attested to and forbidden by the Hebrew Bible. Asher tries to put her two sons on the throne, but to no avail. No replacement for the rider upon the clouds. But Baal does have another weapon, the best of all weapons. Yeah, you know who it is, it's his sister Anat. And boy, does she deliver. She slashes death with a sword, winnows him in a sieve, burns him, and then buries him in the ground, grinding him with millstones, and sows him in the fields. It's so wonderfully poetic. She literally replants the world with the corpse of death itself. The death of death somehow revives Baal, who resurrection causes the earth to flourish again. El has a prophetic dream which confirms death is dead, Baal lives. And so he sends Shamash, or Sun, to go search out for Baal.
But after seven years, death rises from his death to challenge Baal again, and locked in stalemate of combat between drought and fertility, Sun separates them, thus inaugurating the cycles of plenty and famine, the very turmoil of the agricultural cycle itself. Now, the final columns of the text are enigmatic, and perhaps represent a kind of détente ushered in by Sun between Baal and death, and Kothar-wa-Hasis using some kind of magic to play a central, but albeit mysterious, role. Thus, in an agricultural society in which the arrival of those winter rains via thunderstorms, powerful storms coming off the Mediterranean, was the difference between plenty and famine, chaos and order, life and death, it's absolutely no wonder that Baal was an enduringly popular god in the region. And no doubt that the Baal Cycle is the single greatest literary and religious epic recovered from the region in general, along with the continued iteration of Baal well into the Iron Age and in various localized forms. And powerful all of this is powerful testimony to the effect that, as the Baal Cycle has it, Baal, our king, is the conqueror. It's the refrain of that cycle that bears his name.
And from the mid-millennium BCE through the Bronze Age collapse and into the Iron Age, it seems that Baal proved enduringly popular for again, obvious reasons. These are agricultural societies. But sometime just before 1000 BCE, very late Bronze, probably very early Iron, a deity from far to the south, seeming to originate in the region of what is called Mount Seir and now Southern Jordan, became the tribal god of the polity of a group called the Israelites. This deity, the one that is or Yahweh, would spend centuries contending with, assimilating to, and differentiating itself from Baal before establishing some form of theological hegemony during the Babylonian exile of the Judeans in the 6th century BCE.
Now, I've made a whole episode on the early history of Yahweh that seems to be very interesting to people for whatever reason, and another one on how Yahweh became the singular God for the Israelites. And if you want more information on Yahweh specifically, I'd go check out those videos. You can find links to them below. But given that both Yahweh and Baal were both warrior storm gods, one incumbent to the region and the other, you know, up and coming for the region, conflict was going to be inevitable. This town's not big enough for two storm gods. Yahweh would assimilate aspects of Baal. The archaic version of Psalm 29 has been taken by many scholars to be literally a hymn to Baal, with Yahweh's name just sort of cut and pasted into that poem, especially the language and theology around the storm theophany. And yet, at the same time, Yahwists would, given the fierce narcissism of minor difference at work here, pitch Baal and Yahweh in prophetic combat, most famously in the Elijah cycle at First Kings 18, which has Elijah really doing some excellent shade on the prophets of Baal.
Of course, outside of perhaps a very small group of Yahwist partisans, common people and kings ruling over a religiously diverse people and needing to make alliances across theological lines, were more than happy to include Baal worship right alongside Yahweh worship. If, honestly, they could tell the difference between them, these gods are so similar that I think most Israelites and Canaanites probably couldn't tell the difference. The most infamous instance, of course, of this alliance was between Jezebel, daughter of Ithobaal of Tyre, and Ahab, king of Israel. By the way, her name Jezebel means "Where is Baal?" and it is a direct reference to the search for Baal by Anat and Shamash, the Sun God, after his resurrection following the death of Mot.
Further elements of Baal's contest with the sea or Yam and its dragon Lotan are mirrored in early Israelite Yahwism, with similar contests most notably occurring in the creation story, yep, creation story of Psalm 74 and in Job, where Yahweh defeats giant sea monsters, specifically Leviathan, as a necessary aspect of forging the world from watery chaos to order. Again, a myth cycle common to the ancient Near East. Ironically, this defeat of Leviathan would be later transposed to a world-ending apocalypse in later mutations of the myth. Further, Baal's contest with death or Mot is often just demythologized such that Yahweh has control over both life and death, and in some passages will actually even swallow up death, an ironic vision of Yahweh's power over and against the usual image of, again, the gaping maw of death in Ugaritic myth.
This is part of the on-ramping to something like proto-monotheism. In fact, the Israelite scribes so disdained by all that theophorics employing his name underwent taboo replacement with the Hebrew word for shame, bosheth. Thus, names like Eshbaal become Ishbosheth, Meribaal becomes Meribosheth, even the goddess Asherah becomes Ashet, using the vowel pattern is from the same word for shame, bosheth. The phrase "Prince Baal," Baal-zebul, famously becomes "Baal of the Flies," and even Daniel's "abomination of desolation," a core apocalyptic notion, shequtz meshomem, becomes a pun probably on "Baal of the heavens." So even these theological concepts are in some sense parodic on Baal as a response to him, in some sense.
The destruction of the more powerful and prosperous Israelite northern kingdom would lead to a refugee crisis in the Judean south, a center of a more specifically aniconic form of Yahwistic monolatry, where Baal worship had never gotten a complete threshold. And while Baal, in various forms, would continue to be worshiped, for instance, among the Phoenicians, both at home and abroad, at places like Carthage, assimilated to their deity Melqart, Yahwism would become the central cult of Judea, prior through the destruction of the region by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, setting the stage for something like proto-monotheism to develop primarily over there in the Babylonian exile.
But Baal himself would not completely disappear. He would enjoy a kind of half-life, but not as a divine god, but as another form of divinity. With the rise of Christianity, he became a demon, specifically in the apocalyptic mode of Judaism, especially in contact with Zoroastrianism. The one God became attended by a host of angelic warriors over and against a force of cosmic evil, variously known as Beelzebul, Satan, transformed from title to person in the form of Satan or the devil, and of course, entities like Beelzebub. Indeed, by the first Gospel at Mark 3, Jesus himself is accused of being possessed by and driving out demons precisely by the power of Beelzebul, there denoted as the prince of the demons. These early mentions would cement Beelzebul or Beelzebub as a powerful demon in the mind of early Christians.
He would further appear in The Testament of Solomon, a key text in Western demonology, as the king of all demons, and in that tale, Solomon binds Beelzebul using his powerful sigil ring to force the legions of demons that serve him in the construction of the Jerusalem Temple, a tale at the very heart of the Western magical tradition. Through The Testament of Solomon and similar literature, especially grimoire literature, Baal would survive in an eldritch manner into the Western occult tradition, primarily as the demon Beelzebul, Beelzebul, Beelzebub, and various mutated forms, often featured early, and therefore pretty high up in the demonic hierarchy. He appears in virtually every single demonic catalog of the Middle Ages and the early modern period, including famous texts like the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, the Liber Officiorum Spirituum, and most infamously in the Goetia of the Lesser Key of Solomon, where his sigil also appears. He is variously described in the literature as a soldier or a king with a horrible voice, with the power to make people invisible, ruling over a retinue of 66 legions of demons. In other texts, he's a kind of horrid mixture of cat, toad, and human, like in the Dictionnaire Infernal, or other diverse shapes. In some cases, he is subject to the Demonic King of the East, Orcus, with his demonic legions varying in size, sometimes they're just six as opposed to 66, his power subject to change, and of course, his counter-angel ranging from text to text.
But by Milton's 1667 epic Paradise Lost, the name Baal, in the plural, becomes Baalim, and it is simply becomes the watchword for the entire horde of all male demons cast down upon the Earth following Satan's rebellion. But Baal simply becomes the name for the grab bag, the pandemonium of demons in the thousands of years since. Mesopotamian Hadad became Canaanite Baal, the heroic rider upon the clouds, the defeater of sea and death, the rains that sustain life. He would contend and ultimately lose theological hegemony to the upstart Yahweh. Recall that he also upstart El, really is the loser in all this. He became demoted to become one of many demons, especially by Christians, and to some extent by Muslims. He would become a stock demon of grimoires, powerful, yeah, but still hideous.
But with the discovery of the Baal Cycle in the 20th century, it's high time, high time that we balance the highly polemical narratives of frankly Yahwistic propaganda that constitute Israelite literature with the very scriptures produced by the very people that historically venerated Baal, not as some false god, detestable foreign god, and much less some dreadful demon, but a deity much admired and worshiped by the ancient peoples of Canaan for very good reason. The subject of truly epic poetry and sublime literature, poetry that was indeed so well regarded that the Israelites appropriated it to Yahweh. If it's good enough for the King James Bible, it's good enough for you. It's high time that we appreciate the mythology of Baal on its own terms, in its own historical context, and for its own sake, restoring a god of old to their rightful place in history, religion, and myth.
The best place to read the Baal Cycle, along with other similar Canaanite literature, is Coogan and Smith's volume, *Stories from Ancient Canaan*. Excellent introduction and affordable. Have I ever said for situating Baal in the wider mythology of the period, especially in the context of the development of Yahwism, *Days of Yahweh and the Gods of Ancient Canaan*, along with *Crosses Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic*, remain the classic and best starting places. Lot of other literature has been written, but those are the places to start. Of course, the Brill edition of the Baal Cycle is the best scholarly study, but it is hyperspecialized, and you know, well, it's Brill. Good luck. Finally, if you want to learn a bit of Ugaritic, the language of the Baal Cycle, there's a really fantastic manual published in 2009 that allows you to dig into some of the text for translation, along with an admittedly sometimes complex grammar, but it's an ancient dead language, so you kind of know what you're signing up for, but it's pretty neat, especially if you have a little Hebrew already, to be able to read the Baal Cycle in the original Ugaritic. But until next time, thank you for watching Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.
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