Baal Sentence Examples

To this Baal the productiveness of the soil was due.

As the female counterpart of the Phoenician Baal (viewed as a sun-god), and on the testimony of late writers (Lucian, Herodian) that she was represented with horns, the place-name AshterothKarnaim in Gilead ("Ashteroth of the horns") has been considered ample proof in favour of the theory.

The name Baal might therefore be used for any deity such as Milk (Milcom) or Shemesh (" sun ") who was the divine owner of the spot.

She is everywhere the great female principle, answering to the Baal of the Canaanites and Phoenicians 2 and to the Dagon of the Philistines.

Sometimes the god received a distinguishing attribute which indicates an association not with any particular place, but with some special characteristic; the most common forms are Ba'al-bamman, the chief deity of Punic north Africa, perhaps " the glowing Ba'al," the god of fertilizing warmth, and Baal-shamem, " Baal of the heavens."

Baal (Tubingen, 1906), the literature to Kings, BooKs OF, and the histories referred to in JEws.

Now the local Baal was the divine owner of the fertile spot where his sanctuary (0 - desk) was marked by the upright stone pillar, the symbol of his presence, on which the blood of the slaughtered victim was smeared.

Accordingly, whenever His presence and power were displayed in places where the Canaanite Baal had been worshipped, they came to be attached to these spots.

In this way Yahweh came to be called the Baal or " lord " of any sacred place where the armies of Israel by their victories attested " his mighty hand and outstretched arm."

For when Yahweh gradually became Israel's local Baal he became worshipped like the old Canaanite deity, and all the sensuous accompaniments of Kedeshoth,' as well as the presence of the asherah or sacred pole, became attached to his cult.

Similarly in the earlier pre-exilian period of Israel's occupation of Canaanite territory the Hebrews were always subject to this tendency to worship the old Baal or `Ashtoreth (the goddess who made the cattle and flocks prolific).3 A few years of drought or of bad seasons would make a Hebrew settler betake himself to the old Canaanite gods.

Even in the days of Hosea the rivalry between Yahweh and the old Canaanite Baal still continued.

Israel) the corn, the new wine and the oil, and have bestowed on her silver and gold in abundance which they have wrought into a Baal image " (Hos.

Israel's faithlessness is shown in idolatry and the prevailing corruption of the high places in which the old Canaanite Baal was worshipped instead of Yahweh.

Baal Zebub of the Philistine Ekron became the Beelzebub who was equivalent to Satan.

A Phoenician dedication to "Baal of Lebanon" found here, and dated also to the 7th century, suggests that Citium may have belonged to Tyre.

The cult of the Baal of Tyre followed Jezebel to the royal city Samaria and even found its way into Jerusalem.

The conflict between Yahweh and Baal and the defeat of the latter are the characteristic notes of the religious history of the period, and they leave their impression upon the records, which are now more abundant.

The worship of Baal of Tyre roused a small circle of zealots, and again the Phoenician marriage was the cause of the evil.

Besides the local Baal there were " the god of heaven" (El) and other deities; human sacrifices as a means of propitiating the divine wrath were not uncommon.

The great difficulty which has been felt by investigators in determining the character and attributes of the god Baal mainly arises from the original.

Baal being originally a title, and not a proper name, the innumerable baals could be distinguished by the addition of the name of a place or of some special attribute.

Each community could speak of its own baal, although a collection of allied communities might share the same cult, and naturally, since the attributes ascribed to the individual baals were very similar, subsequent syncretism was facilitated.

He is the patron of all growth and fertility, and, by the "uncontrolled use of analogy characteristic of early thought," the Baal is the god of the productive element in its widest sense.

On the "Baal of flies" see Beelzebub.

Consequently, the Baal could be identified with some supreme power of nature, e.g.

The particular line of development would vary in different places, but the change from an association of the Baal with earthly objects to heavenly is characteristic of a higher type of belief and appears to be relatively later.

The idea which has long prevailed that Baal was properly a sky-god affords no explanation of the local character of the many baals; on the other hand, on the theory of a higher development where the gods become heavenly or astral beings, the fact that ruder conceptions of nature were still retained (often in the unofficial but more popular forms of cult) is more intelligible.

A specific Baal of the heavens appears to have been known among the Hittites in the time of Rameses II., and considerably later, at the beginning of the 7th century, it was the title of one of the gods of Phoenicia.

In Babylonia, from a very early period, Baal became a definite individual deity, and was identified with the planet Jupiter.

Both Baal and Astarte were venerated in Egypt at Thebes and Memphis in the XIXth Dynasty, and the former, through the influence of the Aramaeans who borrowed the Babylonian spelling Bel, ultimately became known as the Greek Belos who was identified with Zeus.

Of the worship of the Tyrian Baal, who is also called Melkart (king of the city), and is often identified with the Greek Heracles, but sometimes with the Olympian Zeus, we have many accounts in ancient writers, from Herodotus downwards.

The worship of the Tyrian Baal was carried to all the Phoenician colonies.'

His name occurs as an element in Carthaginian proper names (Hannibal, Hasdrubal, &c.), and a tablet found at Marseilles still survives to inform us of the charges made by the priests of the temple of Baal for offering sacrifices.

For the reading "Baal" in the Amarna tablets (Palestine, about 1400 B.C.) see Knudtzon, Beitr.

Atargatis appears generally as the wife of Hadad (Baal).

The origin of this particular form of worship can scarcely be sought in Egypt; the Apis which was worshipped there was a live bull, and image-worship was common among the Canaanites in connexion with the cult of Baal and Astarte (qq.v.).

Thus a Phoenician colonist might desire to carry abroad the cult of a certain Baal or Astarte who lived in a conical stone or pillar.

Pilgrims visiting Paphos, the original home and temple of Astarte, could of course be in no doubt about which of the heavenly powers inhabited the cone of stone in which she was there held to be immanent; nor was any Semite ever ignorant as to which Baal he stood before.

It was necessarily the Baal or Lord of the region.

It is famous for its temple ruins of the Roman period, before which we have no record of it, certain though it be that Heliopolis is a translation of an earlier native name, in which Baal was an element.

Heliopolis was made a colonia probably by Octavian (coins of 1 st century A.D.), and there must have been a Baal temple there in which Trajan consulted the oracle.

The greater of the two temples was sacred to Jupiter (Baal), identified with the Sun, with whom were associated Venus and Mercury as a-p,u co,uoc Beni.

We find also the common Semitic Il (El) and a Dhu Samai answering to the northern Baal Shamayim.

The traditional pronunciation (MoX6x), which goes back Fas far as the Septuagint version of Kings, probably means that the old form was perverted by giving it the vowels of bosheth " shame," the contemptuous name for Baal.

It is with these sacrifices that the name of "the Molech" is always connected; sometimes "the Baal" (lord) appears as a synonym.

In each case the people thought themselves to be worshipping Yahweh under the title of Molech or Baal; but the prophet refuses to admit that this is so, because the worship itself is an apostasy to heathenism.

We see from I Kings xviii., 2 Kings x., that great Baal temples had two classes of ministers, kohanim and nebhiim, " priests " and " prophets," and as the former bear a name which primarily denotes a soothsayer, so the latter are also a kind of priests who do sacrificial service with a wild ritual of their own.

But we know that there were nebhiim among the Canaanites; the "prophets" of Baal appear in the history of Elijah as men who sought to attract their god by wild orgiastic rites.

They too were, at the beginning of the Assyrian period, not much more different from prophets of Baal than the priests were from priests of Baal.

Formerly the prophets of Yahweh had been all on the same side; their opponents were the prophets of Baal.

Till Amos (with the solitary exception of Micaiah ben Imlah, in i Kings xxii.) prophecy was optimist - even Elijah, if he denounced the destruction of a dynasty and the annihilation of all who had bowed the knee to Baal, never doubted of the future of the nation when only the faithful remained; but the new prophecy is pessimist - it knows that Israel is rotten to the core, and that the whole fabric of society must be dissolved before reconstruction is possible.

In doing battle against the Tyrian Baal he is content with a reformation for which the whole nation can be heartily won, because it makes no radical change in their inherited faith and practices of worship. And in stimulating resistance to Syria he is.

Like Aphrodite and Adonis in Syria, Baal and Astarte at Sidon, and Isis and Osiris in Egypt, the Great Mother and Attis formed a duality which symbolized the relations between Mother Earth and her fruitage.

Tyre also came in for its share of hardship. Elulaeus was followed by Baal, who in 672 consented to join Tirhaka, the Ethiopian king of Egypt, in a rebellion against Assyria.

His monument found at Zenjirli represents the great king holding Baal of Tyre and Tirhaka of Egypt by cords fastened in their lips; 2 there is no evidence, however, that he actually took either of them prisoner.

Nevertheless Baal submitted in the end, along with the princes of Gebal and Arvad, Manasseh of Judah, and the other Canaanite chiefs; in the island of Cyprus the Assyrians carried all before them ii.

The king appointed by Nebuchadrezzar was Baal II.

There was no one particular god called Baal; the word is not a proper name but an appellative, a description of the deity as owner or mistress; and the same is the case with Milk or Melek, 'Adon, 'Amma, which mean king, lord, mother.

Occasionally we know what the name was; the Baal of Tyre was Melqarth (Melkarth), which again means merely " king of the city "; similarly among the Aramaeans the Ba'al of Harran was the moon-god Sin.

Its maintenance of a sanctuary of Baal Zebub is mentioned in 2 Kings i.

The site of Douche, famous for its worship of Baal (Zeus Dolichenus), adopted by the Seleucids and eventually spread all over the Roman empire, lies at Duluk, two hours N.W.; but nothing is to be seen there except a mound.

He is named in similes as a great warrior, and as such and son of Nut he is identified with the Syrian Baal.

Prelacy was " Baal worship," and the kirk thus turned the strife in the direction of religious ferocity.

Indeed Asiatic influence made itself felt in Egypt before the Hyksos age, and later, and more strongly, during the XVIIIth and following Dynasties, and deities of Syro-Palestinian fame (Resheph, Baal, Anath, the Baalath of Byblos, Kadesh, Astarte) found a hospitable welcome.

He is presumably the Baal who is associated with thunder and lightning, and with the bull, and who was familiar to the Egyptians of the XIXth and XXth Dynasties in the adulations of their divine king.

In Hamath we meet with the Baal of Heaven, Sun and Moon deities, gods of heaven and earth, and others.

There is hardly room to doubt that we have here a tradition of human sacrifice in connexion with the worship of the Phoenician Baal (Zeus Atabyrius) such as prevailed at Rhodes; when misfortune threatened Rhodes the brazen bulls in.

Human sacrifices to Baal were common, and, though in Phoenicia proper there is no proof that the victims were burned alive, the Carthaginians had a brazen image of Baal, from whose downturned hands the children slid into a pit of fire; and the story that Minos had a brazen man who pressed people to his glowing breast points to similar rites in Crete, where the child-devouring Minotaur must certainly be connected with Baal and the favourite sacrifice to him of children.

The name (Yah[weh] " hides" or " treasures "; there is a similar Phoenician compound of Baal) is borne by various individuals, in Jer.

Jacob ben Asher is known as the Baal ha-turim (literally "Master of the Rows") from his chief work, the four Turim or Rows (the title is derived from the four Turim or rows of jewels in the High Priest's breastplate).

Baal, "lord," is the ordinary title or word for a deity, especially a local deity, cf.

No place Zebub, however, is known; and it has been objected that the Baal of some other place would hardly be the god of Ekron.

Usually Zebub is identified with a Hebrew common noun zebub = flies,' occurring twice in the Old Testament, 2 so that Baalzebub " is the Baal to whom flies belong or are holy.

Baal stands in close relation.

Divination by means of flies was known at Babylon."' There are other cases of names compounded of Baal and an element equivalent to a descriptive epithet, e.g.

Baalgad, the Baal of Fortune.4 For the " Fly-god," sometimes interpreted as the "averter of insects," cf.

Numerous images of her have been found, but none of the god Baal.

Baal worship, he should be executed and not my son.

The LORD your god destroyed everyone among you who worshiped the god Baal while you were at Peor.

Baal serves a celebratory feast on Mount Zephon, the " Heights of the North " .

Madame du Rumain performed the ceremonies with all the dignity of an ancient priestess of Baal.

Cult objects found in Dor included clay statuettes of both local and Greek styles pertaining to the Phoenician cults of Baal and Astarte.

Moreover, the definitely ethical character of the religion of Yahweh established by Moses is exhibited in the strict exclusion of all sexual impurity in His worship. Unlike the Canaanite Baal, Yahweh hasnofemale consort, and this remained throughouta distinguishing trait of the original and unadulterated Hebrew religion (see Bathgen, Beitreige, p. 265).

Consequently it was needful to secure his favour, and in order to gain this, gifts were made to him by the local resident population who depended on the produce of the land (see Baal, especially ad init.).

While the extirpation of the cult of Baal was furthered in Israel by Jonadab the Rechabite, it was the " people of the land " who undertook a similar reform in Judah.

Only the babe Jehoash was saved, and he remained hidden in the Temple adjoining the palace itself, The queen, Athaliah, despite the weak state of Judah after the revolt in Philistia and Edom, actually appears to have maintained herself for six years, until the priests slew her in a conspiracy, overthrew the cult of Baal, and crowned the young child.

The BaX,uapaws (near Beirut) apparently presided over dancing; another compound (in Cyprus) seems to represent a Baal of healing.

At Tyre, as among the Hebrews, Baal had his symbolical pillars, one of gold and one of smaragdus, which, transported by phantasy to the farthest west, are still familiar to us as the Pillars of Hercules.

In honour of his wife's god, the king, following the example of Solomon, erected a temple to the Tyrian Baal (see above).

Apart from the religious cult suggested in the name Mount Nebo, there were local cults of the Baal of Peor and the Baal of Meon, and Mesha's allusion to `Ashtar-Chemosh, a compound deity, has been taken to point to a corresponding consort whose existence might naturally be expected upon other grounds (see Astarte).

Israelite historians viewed these events as a great religious revolution inspired by Elijah and initiated by Elisha, as the overthrow of the worship of Baal, and as a retribution for the cruel murder of Naboth the Jezreelite (see Jezebel).