Baal

97:3.3The north­ern and more set­tled Ca­naan­ites (the Ba­al­ites) freely bought, sold, and mort­gaged their lands. The word Baal means owner. The Baal cult was founded on two ma­jor doc­trines: First, the val­i­da­tion of prop­erty ex­change, con­tracts, and covenants—the right to buy and sell land. Sec­ond, Baal was sup­posed to send rain—he was a god of fer­til­ity of the soil. Good crops de­pended on the fa­vor of Baal. The cult was largely con­cerned with land, its own­er­ship and fer­til­ity.

97:9.24But this era came to a tragic end when Josiah pre­sumed to go out to in­ter­cept Ne­cho’s mighty army as it moved up the coast from Egypt for the aid of As­syria against Baby­lon. He was wiped out, and Ju­dah went un­der trib­ute to Egypt. The Baal po­lit­i­cal party re­turned to power in Je­ru­sa­lem, and thus be­gan the real Egyp­tian bond­age. Then en­sued a pe­riod in which the Baalim politi­cians con­trolled both the courts and the priest­hood. Baal wor­ship was an eco­nomic and so­cial sys­tem deal­ing with prop­erty rights as well as hav­ing to do with soil fer­til­ity.

97:3.4In gen­eral, the Ba­al­ites owned houses, lands, and slaves. They were the aris­to­cratic land­lords and lived in the cities. Each Baal had a sa­cred place, a priest­hood, and the “holy women,” the rit­ual pros­ti­tutes.

97:1.3Samuel was a rough-and-ready type of man, a prac­ti­cal re­former who could go out in one day with his as­so­ciates and over­throw a score of Baal sites. The prog­ress he made was by sheer force of com­pul­sion; he did lit­tle preach­ing, less teach­ing, but he did act. One day he was mock­ing the priest of Baal; the next, chop­ping in pieces a cap­tive king. He de­vot­edly be­lieved in the one God, and he had a clear con­cept of that one God as cre­ator of heaven and earth: “The pil­lars of the earth are the Lord’s, and he has set the world upon them.”

97:9.21But the north­ern king­dom did not van­ish from his­tory un­til the king of Is­rael con­spired with the king of Egypt and re­fused to pay fur­ther trib­ute to As­syria. Then be­gan the three years’ siege fol­lowed by the to­tal dis­per­sion of the north­ern king­dom. Ephraim (Is­rael) thus van­ished. Ju­dah—the Jews, the “rem­nant of Is­rael”—had be­gun the con­cen­tra­tion of land in the hands of the few, as Isa­iah said, “Adding house to house and field to field.” Pres­ently there was in Je­ru­sa­lem a tem­ple of Baal along­side the tem­ple of Yah­weh. This reign of ter­ror was ended by a mono­the­is­tic re­volt led by the boy king Joash, who cru­saded for Yah­weh for thirty-five years.

126:1.2This hill, a lit­tle more than one hun­dred years pre­vi­ously, had been the “high place of Baal,” and now it was the site of the tomb of Sim­eon, a re­puted holy man of Is­rael. From the sum­mit of this hill of Sim­eon, Je­sus looked out over Naz­a­reth and the sur­round­ing coun­try. He would gaze upon Megiddo and re­call the story of the Egyp­tian army win­ning its first great vic­tory in Asia; and how, later on, an­other such army de­feated the Judean king Josiah. Not far away he could look upon Taanach, where Deb­o­rah and Barak de­feated Sis­era. In the dis­tance he could view the hills of Dothan, where he had been taught Joseph’s breth­ren sold him into Egyp­tian slav­ery. He then would shift his gaze over to Ebal and Ger­izim and re­count to him­self the tra­di­tions of Abra­ham, Ja­cob, and Abim­elech. And thus he re­called and turned over in his mind the his­toric and tra­di­tional events of his fa­ther Joseph’s peo­ple.