Sunday, December 17, 2023

Baal and Ashera, Idols of the Ancient Near East

A colorful battle occurs in 1 Kings 18: 16-45 when Elijah takes on 450 priests of Baal. He challenges them to a test by fiery sacrifice and in a dramatic daylong drama, the sacrifices to Baal are ignored while Elijah's sacrifice to YHWH is answered by fire from heaven. The god Baal shows up throughout the Old Testament but most notoriously in the books of 1 & 2 Kings.  In addition to Baal, a secondary character is Asherah, often worshiped with "Asherah poles". The passage in 1 Kings, above, states that there were 400 prophets of Asherah, "who ate at Jezebel's table" (1 Kings 18: 19.)

The uses of the ancient Hebrew word Ba'al is not clear. In the ancient Near East, in the Northwest Semitic languages, it often meant "lord" or "master". In the first chapter of Esther (see Esther 1: 16-18) it is the word used by the king's court that is translated "husband" -- apparently "husband", "lord" or "master" were, in that culture, synonymous! In the Old Testament writings, the word Ba'al was often used to represent gods that Canaanites worshiped, as part of their pantheon.  This was to distinguish this god or gods from the One God YHWH, as the Elijah episode demonstrates. As the Israelites moved into Canaan during the time of the judges, Ba'al was most likely the main fertility god of the local people. As the Israelites learned the seasonal rhythm of farming, they were introduced to a variety of fertility rites that went with planting and harvesting, rites that surely centered around worship of Ba'al.

Ba'al Zebub (literally "Lord of the flies"), the god of the Philistine city of Ekron, is briefly mentioned in 2 Kings 1: 2. Over time, the Israelites adopted that name for the ruler of the demons and so in the New Testament, when Jesus healed a demon-possessed man (Matthew 12: 22-24), he was accused of doing the healing in cohorts with Ba'al Zebub.

El and Dagon

In some cultures, Ba'al was the son of the god El; "El" is another Semitic word that was a generic word for "god": Elijah's name, "Jah" is "El, simply means "YHWH is God"; the site "Bethel" is "House (Beth) of El". (El probably had the same role in the ancient Near East as Allah has today in Arabic communities -- "Allah" is the Arabic word for "God" and so both Muslims and Arabic Christians use the word that way.) 

If El was the father of Ba'al in one culture, Dagon was the father of El in another culture. In 1 Samuel, early in Saul's reign, we see Dagon as a god of the Philistines. In Joshua 19: 24-31, the region of Asher has a town called Beth Dagon ("house of Dagon".) In Judges 16: 23-30, Samson's last act is to bring down a temple to Dagon. In 1 Samuel 5, the ark is carried into a temple of Dagon, leading to damage tot the temple and the community.

Asherah

A female fertility goddess of the ancient Near East was Asherah. She is worshiped along with Ba'al in Judges 3:7; worship of Asherah often involved sacred trees ("Asherah poles") and are described at various times in 1 & 2 Kings. Ba'al and Asherah were especially associated with the reign of Israel's king Ahab and his wife Jezebel, during the time of Elijaha. One of the many sins of Manasseh, several centuries later, was to put an Asherah pole even in the temple of Jerusalem (2 Kings 21: 7.)

In the agricultural world of the ancient Near East, fertility (fertile lands, fertile animals, fertile wives) was an important characteristic of a land, flock, tribe.  Fertility was obviously associated with females  (human or animal) and their ability to reproduce and so it was natural to assume a fertility idol would be female. Asherah was sometimes portrayed as pregnant with large breasts. In that male dominated world, it was natural to include sex as part of fertility worship and so some altars to Asherah or other fertility goddesses included temple prostitutes. When patriarch Judah had sex with Tamar, he apparently assumed she was a prostitute at such a shrine (see Genesis 38: 21.) In Numbers 25, Israelite men were having sex with Moabite women as part of a fertility cult.

During the times of the divided kingdom, worship of gods and goddesses, other than YHWH, was metaphorically identified with adultery and prostitution. At times the comparison was not just metaphorical; at times worship of fertility goddesses involved literal prostitution.

Resources

Here are a few external links I looked at as I wrote this essay:

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